New Study Compares Classic Games to Silent Movies, Says Just 13 Percent Are Commercially Available

Spy shooter No One Lives Forever was critically-acclaimed when it released back in 2000, earning multiple awards nods and a sequel. We called it one of the best shooters of the year in our original review. If you want to play it in 2023, though, you’ll have to turn to one of the handful of digital archives available on the internet, because neither No One Lives Forever nor its sequel are commercially available on Steam nor anyone else.

No One Lives Forever is one example of a market where just 13 percent of games made before 2010 are commercially available, a new study conducted by the Video Game History Foundation revealed. For every remastered update of Metroid Prime, thousands of games are difficult or even possible to obtain legitimately, including games on popular platforms like the Game Boy.

Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it

“Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it,” the Video Game History Foundation’s Kelsey Lewin wrote in a blog explaining the study. “And what if no library, not even the Library of Congress, could do any better — they could keep and digitize that VHS of Titanic, but you’d have to go all the way there to watch it.”

Like silent movies

That’s roughly the situation the video game industry finds itself in, says the new study, which compares the commercial availability of classic video games to the survival rate of silent movies (14 percent) and pre-World War II audio recordings (10 percent or less).

The new study, which the Video Game History Foundation describes as the first of its kind, examined more than 4000 video games released in the United States before 2010, with a special focus on the Commodore 64, Game Boy, and the PlayStation 2. The Commodore 64, which was first introduced in 1982, is described as an “abandoned ecoystem with the lowest level of commercial interest,” while the Game Boy is described as “neglected” and the PlayStation 2 is called “active.”

It found that the overall availability of historical games is “dire,” with many held back by technical challenges, rights issues, and other problems. Goldeneye 007, which was finally re-released on Xbox and Switch earlier this year, has six separate rights holders, including director competitors Nintendo and Xbox. No One Lives Forever has three rights holders, and according to the study, none of them are entirely sure who owns what. It can also be prohibitively expensive to port games to new consoles, with Limited Run Games CEO Josh Fairhurst estimating that just one port can cost up to $350,000.

The result of all these challenges is that only the most popular retro games are re-released to modern platforms, with the rest being available at vintage gaming shops, emulation or digital archives. The struggle to obtain classic video games legitimately is mirrored in other mediums as streamers like Max and Disney Plus cull hundreds of shows in return for tax benefits.

Modern services such as Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, and Nintendo Switch Online offer access to vintage games in return for a norminal fee, as do retro collections like Digital Eclipse’s popular Cowabunga Collection. However, many more games remain tied to outdated hardware, and demand from collectors has driven up prices.

‘We’re hopeful that this study will incite change’

The Video Game History Foundation was founded by Frank Cifaldi in 2017 and is among the organizations leading the charge on game preservation as a culturally significant artform. It commissioned the study in part to advocate for making games available in libraries and other official archives, which the Enterainment Software Association has lobbied against through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, describing attempts to preverse games as “hacking” among other things.

The Video Game History Foundation notes that the next DMCA rulemaking proceeding is in 2014.

“We’re hopeful that this study will incite change,” Lewin wrote, “and that video game preservation will become stronger — before we lose more.”

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.