Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. Old school video games are in danger of mass extinction. From American public media,

this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

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 new report from the Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network

finds 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.

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

licensing issues if you're making a game based on a Marvel comic. That's a technical issues,

where you can't just automatically put an older game on a new platform. It's a complicated

expensive process that only just now is starting to get a little more manageable. We're feeling

the effects of that now in terms of their availability. In your report, you translate this into

another context that I think really brings it home. What would be a similar scenario if we're

talking about films or movies? What would this look like? Well, our founder, Frank Safaldi, at the

Video Game History Foundation, raised a really good comparison point where he looked at video

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