A lot of us want to share our favourite video games with our children (or nephews and nieces in my case), to the point that some people are thinking a

Let’s make games open source, so future generations can enjoy them – Jairaj Devadiga

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2024-06-23 00:30:04

A lot of us want to share our favourite video games with our children (or nephews and nieces in my case), to the point that some people are thinking about bequeathing their collections via wills. Companies are even competing on this basis. When Valve said that your children cannot inherit your Steam library, GOG said that they would honour customers’ wills as long as they had court orders to back it up.

But apart from legal barriers, there are also technical hurdles to passing games on to future generations, which are far more challenging. Consider the fact that very old Windows games are already unplayable on newer versions of the operating system. This trend will only accelerate as PC hardware evolves from x86 to ARM, RISC-V and beyond.

It is even worse with consoles, which get discontinued and games that are exclusive to those platforms become unplayable. For instance, you cannot play PS2 games on a PS5, or GameBoy games on a Switch.

Last year, the Video Game History Foundation, along with the Software Preservation Network, conducted a study revealing that 87% of old games are at risk of being lost forever. Because the games and the consoles required to run them are increasingly hard to come by, the researchers often had to travel long distances to libraries that had copies; something that will become impossible over time as old consoles stop working.