Retro Game Corps sold me on an Anbernic handheld and I’ve been on the emulation kick ever since.
For those that can’t obtain through the usual channels, see the top comment here.

Same with my CDs from the mid 90s. We heard about them degrading but it seems like if you’re not an idiot with how they’re stored, they hold just fine.

I mean , if you think long term , pretty much EVERYTHING has a shelf life.

But that is the crux of the article. It is possible to store and distribute any game. The problem is the industry is largely uninterested in doing so outside of a relative handful of mostly higher profile titles. Which means that unless you are willing to go the piracy route you are left hunting hunting the…

The ESA also says the industry is doing plenty to keep classic games in release, pointing to this thriving reissue market.

It’s called the internet. Where game collections are constantly uploaded and shared.

So you’re saying we should burn all books older than a few decades, or...?

Everything you need to do to do research is on archive.org. Look again at this study - it’s not that the games are *completely* unavailable - they are unavailable *for sale*. You fell for the shell game they were doing with the way the study was written.

At a time when corporations are making their back-catalogs inaccessible and removing/restricting access to old games, piracy becomes a form of media conservation.

Come on! It’s not like the GOP would fall for misinformation from a foreign spy.

The whole freedom of speech thing has really taken a awful turn now that dishonest folks hide behind it to blanketly lie.

what is the cultural value of an individual being able to play a video game from 1985 in their home?

They can have my ham when they can pry it out of my cold, dead, greasy fingers.

It would be absolutely necessary to have your base of operations in a state where if you need to abort the launch, it’s legal to do so.

Exactly. That’s called fraud or negligence, depending on the outcome.

Freedom of speech does not include the right to knowingly lie for your own benefit at the expense of other people.

Thank you for the explanation. Also, seems like a good reporter writing this story would have explained that in the article.

Sure, but the argument they’re making is that libraries and preservation societies should be allowed to let people play these games via methods like emulation but the ESA has pushed hard to disallow that:

And judging from the fact that of my literally hundreds of physical games, some dating back to the mid-1970s, and a good 95% of them play with no problem, that shelf life can last quite a while.

Not long enough...  let’s make it minute for every swindled dollar.