One simple solution is for developers and studios to improve and normalize archiving as part of their process, so the burden doesn’t lie with the Internet Archive or even the VGHF as the final resting place for an entire industry’s history. 'I’m worried about that developer who made a game that didn’t come out that has one copy of the source code left burned on a rotting CD-R in his garage,' Cifaldi said. Unlike a book, preserving games requires dealing with very different elements: Outdated software and deteriorating hardware. Collectors and fan communities play a critical role in the process of preserving old games and hardware (especially walled-garden consoles), but the bigger picture of getting most game studios to consider historiography is still an uphill challenge. And when it comes to archiving, the games industry still lacks a standard set of best practices, which makes the Internet Archive a consolidated authority in the field. Most game companies show little interest in preservation outside remasters and ROM collections. You can play emulations of the 1988 Neuromancer game, Qbert, a popular fan mod of Westwood’s Dune 2, and Tongue of the Fatman, one of the weirdest, rarest fighting games ever made. The IA has remarkable artefacts from the personal computing age, including rare games like the Apple II’s Muppetville and the 1998 Japanese game Labyrinthe, which some retro enthusiasts believed didn’t even exist. Some have compared the lawsuit to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and they’re not entirely wrong.

Mac emulator archive.org