This is excellent. Of course it is formally correct that not everything can be preserved, but still loads of people undertake this effort, because they feel it's worth it. When I was secretary of a student organisation, I would get these incessant letters from the university library asking me to send them two copies, rather than one, of our magazine for their archives. I personally can't imagine why anyone would want to read what I and others wrote for that rag, but then again, I also found myself lookng 40-year-old editions of the very same magazine for my own use.
Through one of these articles, I saw a link to this Kotaku piece about how a re-release of
No One Lives Forever is being held back by copyright owners. I never played that game myself, but it came out during my early teenage years, and I still sometimes go back to the games I played back then. This was easier around 2-3 years ago, when I still had a functioning XP machine. In any case, it seems to me that sometimes piracy is the most reliable option for preserving and archiving games, even if it's only on one person's HD and shared through torrents. Because apparently the industry itself is either unable or unwilling to curate its own products, gaming journalism is unable or unwilling to call them out on it, except for a few "screams in the wilderness" like this article, and the audience as a whole is simply too amorphous to do it reliably.
in gaming, the philistine attitude as exemplified by the RPG Watch comments seems more pervasive than in other media. It exists everywhere, but I think you would be hard-pressed to find large groups of people who actively support George Lucas's efforts to suppress the original, unaltered versions of his own films. In the film world, people generally recognise films that didn't sell well initially, but are seen as classics anyway, or as "cult" films. Of course, critics and experts take a more proactive role here. In any list of good films, there is some room for blockbusters or films that won loads of Oscars, but when you compare
Filmsite's 100 Greatest Films to the first 100 films in the
IMDB Top 250, the difference is striking.
The English-speaking internet-using movie-viewing audience may collectively have the opinion that 2008's The Dark Knight is the fourth best movie in human history, and that Citizen Kane only comes in at #67 because it's boring and outdated, but even those who think so are consciously or unconsciously reacting to critical material citing Kane as the best film ever. It only takes a quick Google search to find an abundance of sources stating that a film from 1941 is still the best ever made and why this is the case, and then they can easily acquire it and judge for themselves. They may come to the conclusion that it's overrated and that Adam Sandler films are far more entertaining, but it is out there with lots of signs pointing them in the right direction. And then other signs pointing them towards less clichéd titles than Kane, many of them dating back to the pre-WWII period (so outdated!).
In gaming, the main criteria are often still: was it recent, and what's the average score? And the answer to that is always the hype-driven AAA 10/10 GOTY pre-order stuff. In 2006 Oblivion was the bestest game evar, in 2011 Skyrim was MAJESTIC, and all the limitations of Oblivion suddenly became glaringly obvious (they would have been obvious to anyone who'd played RPGs made before 2006, or even only Morrowind). And then they pad out their top-100 list by mentioning a few classic staples. I think felipe mentioned in another article how gamers' idea of gaming history is basically Pong, Space Invaders, Pacman, Mario, Chrono Trigger. Maybe that's the reason why gaming critics are still frantically searching for "The Citizen Kane of games", because their historical frame of reference is a mile wide and an inch deep. Something has to arbitrarily raised to "the best ever", because the alternative, actually engaging with a wide variety of media in comparison to both contemporary and past works, including previously overlooked ones, is too much work.