Continued effort to preserve classic games has been made the Internet Archive. The games are currently listed as software and include about 2,500 games from the Colecovision, to various Atari systems, and to the Sony PlayStation. The games include Super Mario Bros, Oregon Trail, Double Dragon, Golden Axe, and Crash Bandicoot to name a few.
Archive.org is possibly the most invaluable library of digital media to date. It currently houses over 300 million web pages, 20 million books, millions of audio files, images, and video files as well as over 200,000 software-including games. The site does so through the Wayback Machine, another internet archive specific to webpages, and Archive-It-a subscription web service made to preserve content.
Sadly not every company can preserve every game. A game like Trials of Mana, which was originally only released in Japan, was only officially released in the west as part of a collection since a remake was already in development. Sega has put out various collections over the years but their poorly received 3D Sonic titles were at one point, set to be delisted. Nintendo’s efforts to preserve their games unfortunately peaked with the Wii, and now its online services are done. In its place are the middling Wii U virtual console and online services for Switch that include a select amount of NES and SNES titles.
The “classics” go beyond Nintendo and Sega as well and the answer to “What should we try to preserve?” is “Everything”.
