A short time ago, the excellent and hard-working people at The Video Game History Foundation ran a report which showed that almost 90% of video games released before 2010 were no longer obtainable legally.

The Foundation has been fighting to force an exemption in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that would allow libraries to make digital copies of games available to the general public in much the same way that traditional libraries distribute books.

The ESA and its allies have also argued that such a system would damage the market for classic and retro games, which rather misses the point that thousands of video games are currently out of print, with no legal means of obtaining them – short of hunting own original copies (many of which are at risk of being lost forever thanks to the volatile nature of the media they were published on).

Such a viewpoint ignores the fact that libraries loan commercially available books for free, and this doesn’t harm the publishing industry – in fact, you could argue that it does the exact opposite, as people who read books tend to recommend them to their friends, generating more potential sales.

Once again, it falls to emulation and “illegal” ROM sites to preserve video game history; the industry itself clearly isn’t interested. "The game industry’s absolutist position forces researchers to explore extra-legal methods to access the vast majority of out-of-print video games that are otherwise unavailable,” says the VGHF.