Old school video games are in danger of mass extinction.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Karino. Reno.

For the most part, it's not too hard to get access to

for the most part, it's not too hard to get access to movies from the last decade or even the last century.

But if you want to experience a video game from before, say, the ancient history of 2010.

Good luck.

A report from the Video Game History Foundation

and the Software Preservation Network finds that 87%

of those older games are what they call critically endangered.

Meaning they're not commercially available to the public unless someone's got dozens of

different old systems or wants to travel to an archive in person and play it there.

Which means the roots of this hugely influential artistic and cultural medium are in danger of being lost.

Says Phil Salvador, he's the library director for the video game History Foundation.

Video games for a long time had been treated as being sort of toy. Foundation. early film, how films would just kind of get thrown out once they were used.

The video game industry never really had this notion of, you know,

we're going to resell these games 20 years later.

So there's a combination of long-term rights issues that just kind of weren't hammered out back then,

licensing issues if you're making like, you know, let's say a game based on a Marvel comic,

you know, that's kind of a thing you have to hammer out long term,

but also a lot of technical issues where you know you can't just automatically put an older game on a new platform.

It's kind of a complicated expensive process that only just now is starting to get a little more manageable and

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