In 1991, @bruces gave a landmark keynote at the Game Developer's Conference in which he lamented game developers' technological amnesia - the fact that old game platforms disappeared and when they did, they took the games that ran on them with them.

1/

Imagine an art form where anything more than a few years old is inaccessible without specialized equipment, and after a decade, most of it disappears forever!

https://smecers2.appspot.com/note/Literatura/STERLINGB/story.html

2/

Since Sterling's talk, preservation efforts have sprung up to ensure that the history of video games isn't lost. One of the most important of these is @TheMade, a museum that preserves both hardware and code.

3/

They even secured a DMCA exemption to let them crack games so they'd remain playable.

https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/us-dmca-grants-copyright-exemption-to-museums-seeking-to-preserve-online-video-games/

4/

As you might expect, the plague has been hard on The MADE. They are mothballing their entire collection - a unique, important, vital history of an otherwise ephemeral medium - and seeking funds to help pay for storage and a new space.

https://themade.org/donate/ 

5/

It's a tough time for everyone, including us, but humanity's capacity to preserve its history during crises is legendary (think of how the Hermitage's curators starved in their museum through the 900 long days and nights of the Siege of Leningrad):

https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/learn/interesting_themes/items/hermitage_war_leningrad/?lng=

6/

Which is why I've contributed to The MADE's preservation fund. If you can spare a little, I hope you will too.

eof/