This is such important work, but large gaming companies now seem to want games to stop working so people will move to the next thing. That’s one of the hidden business interests on tying everything to online services.

I do hope we can still manage to maintain compatibility using emulators, virtual machines and compatibility layers. Digital media is so trivial to copy and store that letting it be lost can only happen due to complete neglect.

I appreciate that many older games are still available on Steam either “maintained” as in the article or “remastered”. Someday soon I will buy Total Annihilation…again…on Steam this time.

But I do not understand why games are seen as disposable, temporary media. Sure the latest titles are flashy but there are plenty of fucking awesome older games that are still fun to play. And as physical media disappears it becomes much more important for the gaming industry to stop pulling the ladder up behind themselves. History matters. Old <> bad.

There should be an equivalent to the classic rock stations for video games. I greatly appreciate the efforts of the MAME, archive.org and Mr. Lee to keep the classics alive.

But…why? It’s so much simpler and often better to just emulate the original software and hardware than to port entire games.

He’s not preserving them - that’s done by simply archiving the file. He’s making them playable on modern software. That’s something different entirely, still very cool though.

I believe Ethan is also responsible for Wine’s Xaudio support. If you play certain Bethesda games on Linux, there’s a good chance you’re using his work.