These are the classic video games you can no longer play (Spoiler: It's most of them)

 

ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:

A new study by the Video Game History Foundation finds that only 13% of all classic video games are available to buy. That means many games that people grew up with can't be played outside of piracy. As NPR's Vincent Acovino reports, that is a problem not only for gamers but also for researchers.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Lovable, unpredictable, programmable - it's The Sims.

VINCENT ACOVINO, BYLINE: When The Sims came out back in the year 2000, it changed the gaming landscape. This was a game made for everybody. It looked and it played like real life, if only real life was a lot more fun. In fact, it was so influential that even NPR was talking about it. Here's Dan Morris in 2000, then executive editor of PC Gamer magazine.

DAN MORRIS: The novelty of seeing a very real environment on their computer screen of all places, where they're used to seeing Space Invaders, and saying, wow, this is a house. I know what to do with a house. You know, it's sort of the part of us that always liked, you know, playing with dollhouses.

ACOVINO: But Phil Salvador of the Video Game History Foundation says the original Sims is one of many games no longer available on any modern video game system.

PHIL SALVADOR: If you wanted to study it or research it, you would essentially have to find a used copy on eBay and hope that you could get that Windows 95 game running on your modern computer.

ACOVINO: A new study authored by Salvador finds 87% of classic games are out of print and therefore critically endangered. But why does that matter? I asked Salvador. After all, other Sims sequels are still popular and available.

SALVADOR: That's like saying, well, you know, why do we need the original "Psycho" if we can get Gus Van Sant's remake of "Psycho"? Video games are cultural history in the same way that film is cultural history or books or movies.

ACOVINO: And that history, says Salvador, can tell you lots about a video game and the time and place it existed in.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: We are five years away from entering the 21st century, but are you ready for the future?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Introducing...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Sega Saturn.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Hit it.

ACOVINO: In the early '90s, Sega was a video game giant. But when they released their Sega Saturn video game console in the U.S. in 1995, it flopped. Fans like David Lee, who co-founded the blog Sega Saturn, Shiro!, are still keeping its memory alive.

DAVID LEE: I really just loved the mystique of it, and I love how it kind of has this troubled and complex story.

ACOVINO: He says games like Clockwork Knight, a platformer with a colorful and chaotic visual style, feel uniquely '90s Sega.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Clockwork Knight: Pepperouchau no Daibouken.

LEE: It's just got a look to it, a visual charm to it that's just very much of the time.

SALVADOR: I worry about what the long-term future of video games are going to be if we have to sort of rely entirely on the fan community for this kind of documentation.

ACOVINO: That's Phil Salvador again. He says libraries need the power to make these games more accessible to researchers. But Kendra Albert at the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic says that current copyright law makes that difficult, and video game companies want to keep it that way.

KENDRA ALBERT: The rationale that the lobbying groups often come forward with is that this will harm the market for existing video games.

ACOVINO: Albert says even official remasters of old games can be at odds with the goals of preservation because they can modernize or change old content.

ALBERT: Updates can remove the parts of the thing that were relevant to the work that you're doing. There's actually no substitute for access to the original historical works.

ACOVINO: That's why Albert and advocacy organizations will ask the Library of Congress to exempt video games from some of these copyright laws. The appeals process starts in the fall, but similar appeals have been denied in the past. Vincent Acovino, NPR News.