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Hi.
So, first, big shout-out to this lovely takedown of a tweet that shows all the ways in which the new "PC" version of Chrono Trigger, a beloved and famous video game, is in fact a very bad transfer of the mobile version instead of the original.
BUT! I'm about to go in a LOT more directions with this, so if you are in some way enraged, curious or weirdly concerned about this whole Chrono Trigger thing, please allow me to pull back the curtain right now on all the related items. No! Pay attention! CHRONO TRIGGER
So, there's game preservation, which is a tiny bit of the greater idea of "software preservation" which is a component of "computing and technology history" and there's players all up and down the entire map about every little bit of these ideas. EVERYBODY's got stuff going on.
Because Games are BIG BUSINESS and because a lot of the companies in this space are REALLY VICIOUS THINGS their relationship to the older products (see: 5+ years ago) varies wildly, from refusal to admit they existed to odd, slavish logo-pushing intended to sell branded trinkets. 
There has always been this meshugenah mess regarding whether an older game is an ARTIFACT of HISTORY, or if it's a SALEABLE PRODUCT merely waiting for a scant bit of PROGRAMMER ATTENTION to make it blossom, fully formed, into another million-dollar seller.
BEAR IN MIND, this problem exists with ALL artifacts. People pay money to see stolen Egyptian items. Museums charge crazy money for posters of paintings they have, or for books about the things. IT IS ILLEGAL TO TAKE PHOTOS OF THE EIFFEL TOWER AT NIGHT. snopes.com/photographs-of…
It's just particularly egregious with software because unlike, say, bringing back a nightclub, restoring/remaking a car model, or painting a brand new Sistine Chapel, it's RELATIVELY easy to duplicate software or, as we're seeing now, slam together an "update" to an old game.
So, there's organizations like the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) and the BSA (Business), whose job is to tirelessly ensure companies can do whatever they want, how they want, against any vision of the future and past they want. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertain…
As we're discovering in other realms, that's what advocacy groups DO; they're SUPPOSED to be the extreme get-in-your-face voice that claims the whole of reality should run along their vision of it, and they throw a lot of weight and mud to portray it that way.
But here's another fact: The vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast
vast
VAST majority of software is never going to be brought back, possibly never found unless someone takes the time to find it, and it has zero commercial value and maybe even not a ton of obvious historical value, and it's all out there too.
That's why I'm going after such hot properties as this motherboard driver CD-ROM archive.org/details/Syntax… or this 17-year-old craptastic OEM CD archive.org/details/DellIn… or this set of drivers, BBS list and games for OS/2. archive.org/details/os2war… - because otherwise IT IS GONE.
Games are, of course, amazing. People love a good game, and for the tiny, TINY sliver of games that have persisted past a decade as defining classics, and I put this number in the hundreds at most, there are hundreds of thousands of software works that are going to fade.
The CHRONO TRIGGER example is one where it's obvious, straight up obvious, that nobody paid any attention to what was being done, and if there were careful hands at work, it would have been in the vendor contracts and the branded items sold alongside it.
I am delighted to see so much backlash out there, and that's great that people care. But be aware that a lot of organizations that could be helping with all this are kneecapped by places like the ESA driving the conversation towards "piracy!" and "no academic usage".
Which is a big ol' farty lie, by the way. I sat in a room of software preservationists (virtually) and there are people who are dedicating thousands of hours to saving software, all range of it, in service to untold and unborn audiences.
But what are your action items, right? Otherwise it's just me ranting into twitter.
FIRST, when a suck-ass remake comes out, make noise about it not just sucking, but writing clearly and cleanly that you KNOW it's possible to do good work and historical effort to make an old game new again. Don't just NOT BUY, EXPLAIN why you don't buy. Eventually they listen.
SECOND, please support places like @GameHistoryOrg and @museumofplay and @LivingComputers and @ComputerHistory and @CSM_Berlin and ESPECIALLY @TheMADEsf and SO MANY MORE - FIND them, they're often on tight budgets and trying to keep the stuff around in the face of oblivion.
Here's a good article to make you mad - The MADE SF, which is trying to make older games and environment function, getting showered with a pack of alarmist rhetoric from the ESA as they apply for a copyright exemption. arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/02… - Again, it's an advocacy group.
Advocacy groups are SUPPOSED to imply that giving one single inch in the discussion represents a dangerous failure leading to a black hole of doom. It doesn't mean they get to drive the whole bus off the ravine.
Get in there. Stop letting the discussion be derailed into piracy. Be a person who cares about the old stuff and want to see it live again, however best done, and that it's a virtue, not a crime, to put the time in to get old software runable again.
