These are the classic video games you can no longer play (Spoiler: It's most of them)

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..." game made for everybody, a game that looked and played like real life, if only real life was a lot more fun.

It was such a big deal that even mainstream news outlets like us were talking about it. Dan Morris, former executive editor of PC Gamer Magazine, told NPR that part of its appeal was its familiarity and relatability. "It's sort of the part of us that always liked, you know, playing with dollhouses," he said. In a medium where players were usually confronted with science fiction and fantasy, it was the mundanity of The Sims' world that proved refreshing.

But while The Sims spawned many sequels, you can't officially buy the original, and even if you have it, it's not designed to run on modern systems. That fate, sadly, isn't an anomaly — most classic video games can't be played on today's hardware. A new study from The Video Game History Foundation finds that only 13% of titles produced before 2010 are available on modern platforms.
Games made before 1985 fare even worse, with only 3% still being sold. Salvador calls that period the "silent film" era of video games, when designers established the medium's basic grammar. "There's a very real danger," says study author Phil Salvador, "that in a few decades these games will be unavailable and unplayable to a wide audience." That concern took on new urgency this year, when Nintendo shuttered its 3DS and Wii eShops, taking whole generations of games off the market.

But why does it matter that we can't, for example, play the original Sims when its commercially successful sequels are easily purchasable? "That's like saying, well, you know, why do we need the original Psycho if we can get Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho?" argues Salvador. "Video games are cultural history in the same way that film is cultural history or books or movies."

That history can tell you a lot about a video game, and the time and place it was born into.


YouTube
In the early 1990's, Sega was a video game giant. But when they released their Sega Saturn video game console in America in 1995, it flopped. Many of the games on that system are now out of print. But fans are keeping its memory alive.

David Lee writes about the system and its games on the blog SegaSaturnShiro, which he co-founded. "I just really love the mystique of it," he explains. "I love how it kind of has this troubled and complex story." Games like Clockwork Knight, he says, have a colorful and chaotic visual style that felt uniquely 90's Sega. "It's just got a look to it, a visual charm to it, that's just very much of the time," he explains.


YouTube
Fan communities have played a major role preserving video games, but official institutions are lagging behind. Phil Salvador argues that libraries also need the power to make these games and their histories more accessible to researchers. "I worry about the long-term future of video games [is] going to be if we have to sort of rely entirely on the fan community for this kind of documentation."

Kendra Albert at the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic says that current copyright law makes that difficult, and video game companies want to keep it that way. "The rationale that the lobbying groups often come forward with is that this will harm the market for existing games," Albert says."...