A new study found that the vast majority of video games with a physical release in the U.S. are out of print, which leaves a significant amount of the medium’s history in danger of being forgotten.
The study, “Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States,” was written by Phil Salvador, the library director of the Video Game History Foundation, with the assistance of a team of student researchers from the University of Washington Information School.
In the study, Salvador’s VGHF research team set to find out how many “classic” video games that received an official release in the U.S. were still available for legal purchase.
Out of over 4,000 titles surveyed, only 13% of the total games are still on the market in one way or another, whether through reissues, digital re-releases, HD remasters, or retro collections. The rest are out of print and unplayable without resorting to software piracy.
“For comparison, this is slightly above the availability of pre-World War II audio recordings,” Salazar writes, “and slightly below the survival rate of American silent films. We’re talking about games from the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s, and they’re in just as bad shape as music and movies from back when Calvin Coolidge was president.”
For the study’s sake, “classic” was defined as any video game released before 2010, for any platform, as per the gaming database maintained at MobyGames. 2010 also happens to mark the point when the video game market began to shift from largely revolving around physical media to digital distribution via virtual storefronts like Steam.
Games were considered to still be in print if they were still available for any modern platform in 2023. Remasters and re-releases counted, but remakes did not. For example, the original 2005 PlayStation 2 game Yakuza is considered out of print by the VGHF, even though a full remake, Yakuza Kiwami, was released in 2016.
The games chosen for the survey were a random list from the MobyGames database, which included every game released in the U.S. between 1948 (i.e. Air Defense Simulation, which may be the first computer game ever made) and 2010, to see how many of them were still available for purchase in some way.
In addition, the VGHF team selected three different game libraries – the Commodore 64, the PlayStation 2, and the Game Boy family of products – and evaluated each according to how many titles in it were still available for purchase or play.
This included going through every game released for any version of the Game Boy hardware, many of which went off the market when Nintendo shut down its digital storefronts for the 3DS and Wii-U in March of this year.
As of April, the VGHF found that out of the entire Game Boy library, which is roughly 2,500 titles released between 1989 and 2008, only 5.87% of them are still in circulation. The rest are only available through used game stores or piracy.
The Commodore 64’s library fared worse, with 4.5% games that are still in print. Despite its comparative popularity, only 12% of the PlayStation 2’s game library is available for legal purchase in 2023.
In general, this means that the most popular games for any given system have remained on the market, but that’s left a lot of gaming history to wither on the vine. There are hundreds of cult classics or historical curiosities in video game history that are at real risk of just being lost, much as with the silent films of the 1930s and ‘40s.
The problems confronting game preservationists can range from technical challenges, where old games can be difficult to get running on new hardware; rights issues, where some games were created by companies that no longer exist or are caught in some legal limbo (i.e. the 2001 FPS No One Lives Forever); or licensing problems, where a game can’t be republished in its original state because of music or art that it can no longer legally use.
“We still see libraries and archives as the most logical path forward,” VGHF co-director Kelsey Lewin told GeekWire via email. “The industry can’t, and shouldn’t have to be, in charge of preservation. It’s not the industry’s job.”
In addition to the VGHF, Lewin is the co-owner of Pink Gorilla, a chain of used video game stores in Seattle, which opened a new location in Capitol Hill earlier this year.
“What we’re hoping for with the results of this study is to help libraries and archives get additional legal tools that will help them preserve video games,” Lewin said. “Video games are complex digital objects that face unique copyright obstacles compared to any other medium. This is particularly true for libraries and archives trying to provide remote access to their game collections, which is not possible under current copyright rules.”
The VGHF is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and teaching of the history of video games. In addition to Salazar and Lewin, its board includes founder and co-director Frank Cifaldi, a games journalist turned historian; Amanda Cifaldi, senior staff engineer at Crunchbase; and head of digital conservation Rich Whitehouse, an engineer who’s worked on games like Soldier of Fortune, X-Men Legends, and Star Wars: Jedi Knight II.
Salazar’s team for the study included UW student researchers Lily Dong, Lane D. Koughan, Haohong Tan, Shuoheng “Jasper” Wang, Wayne Wang, and Allison Paige Zwierlein.
