Archiving games

This is just a quick note to flag two good recent posts on important but extremely difficult problem of archiving computer games.  Gita Jackson at Boing-Boing in The vast, unplayable history of video games describes the importance to scholars of archiving games. Kyle Orland at Ars Technica in The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever covers the technical reasons why it is so difficult in considerable detail, including quotes from many of the key players in the space.

My colleagues at the Stanford Libraries are actively working to archive games. Back in 2013, on the Library of Congress' The Signal digital preservation blog Trevor Owens interviewed Stanford's Henry Lowood, who curates our games collection.