The Internet Is Not Forever: Challenges and Sustainability in Video Game Archiving and Preservation

Video games are an increasingly significant cultural touchstone in people’s everyday lives. However, preserving and archiving video games faces unique challenges, including intellectual property law, technology degradation, and the broader question of what it means to preserve a video game. In an exploratory study investigating sustainable game preservation practices, we spoke to 15 amateur game preservationists and hobbyists about their informal work with code, gaming consoles, and servers for online play. We found a lack of access to particular games during childhood or young adulthood led participants to seek out these games in other formats—such as emulated games they could play on other mediums (e.g., playing Nintendo games on your personal computer). Their nostalgia and the communities they found searching for these experiences inspired them to undertake archival work. Participants leveraged distributed knowledge across their communities to keep video games accessible for anyone interested in playing them. Considering these findings in the context of modern archival practices, we discuss what it means to archive a game, especially when that game is dependent on interactive, communal experiences, and what is potentially lost in current archival practices in contrast to informal, accidental archival work.