Games need to be preserved
It’s hard to care about Nintendo’s bottom line when the stakes are the entire industry's historical record though—which brings us to the heart of the issue, game preservation.
It’s ironic that a digital industry is so terrible at preserving its history. Digital is forever, right? It’s just 1s and 0s, immutable code, ageless. Archiving film or ancient documents or whatever, the problems are physical—celluloid rotting or catching fire, paper succumbing to moisture or falling apart under harsh lights.
But games? The problem is nobody cared. Or not that nobody cared, but that so few companies cared, and that they continue to not care. The situation’s gotten slightly better in the last decade or so, with remasters and remakes like Crash Bandicoot and Baldur’s Gate II and Homeworld and System Shock reviving classics for a modern audience.
Remasters cost money though, and are (understandably) meant to make money. Thus we get the one-percent—the games so notorious or so beloved they’ll sell a second, a third, or even a fourth time. They're important games, don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic that Shadow of the Colossus can still resonate with people in 2018 the way it did in 2005. I never would’ve guessed.
It's still a self-selecting history though—like buying one of those “Greatest Hits of the ‘80s” CDs and thinking it’s representative of the era. Left to publishers, we will only get Mario and Skyrim and BioShock and so on.
There’s so much more though—thousands of games, spanning eight console generations and multiple PC platforms, and Nintendo’s actions have endangered all of it. Sure, Nintendo is happy to sell you your fifth copy of Super Mario World or whatever, but what about Shadowrun for the SNES? Tell me where I can buy a legal copy of that. Or how about Secret of Evermore?
Emulation saved these games for decades, and nobody’s stepped up with an alternative. Not Nintendo, not anyone. If emulation persists, it’s because of a failure on the part of the actual rights-holders, not the audience. Movie and music piracy dropped after the advent of Netflix and Spotify. The convenience of GOG.com wooed countless PC pirates, including myself, from downloading what we used to call “abandonware."
But GOG.com still covers a mere sliver, and only PC games for the most part. You won't find old NES or SNES games there—not to mention platforms Nintendo doesn’t control. The company that currently calls itself Atari is happy to put out collections of certain top-tier games, but again it’s the core one percent of “classics” people remember. And what about games for the Vectrex? The TurboGrafx? No corporation is saving those. No corporation is bothering with reissues.