When I talk about "video game preservation," this is mostly what I mean. Preserving history doesn't mean buying a copy of every physical game ever made and putting it on a shelf, it means capturing ACTUAL HISTORY and making sure it can be dissected and learned from.
Outside of maybe some obscure computer games, I'm not worried about physical video games being available to people. The collector market has that covered. What I *am* worried about is the other Don Daglows of the world not knowing there's a home for their materials.
If all physical copies of retail cartridge games disappeared today, we'd be in an imperfect but REMARKABLY healthy place for playing them. But what we're losing by the day is the ability to understand the hows and the whys of them existing, the documentation, the context.
I've seen a lot of people over the years think that a "museum" means a big collection of video games, and honestly, I think this is coming from a place of wanting to preserve that person's memories, rather than trying to preserve the unknown and better understand the past.
I am so utterly convinced that physical games are safe that @GameHistoryOrg, with a few rare exceptions, doesn't even collect them. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, we exclusively focus on material that contextualizes.
