Sega's OutRun Arcade Online was removed from PSN on October 13, 2010 and Xbox Live Arcade in December 2011 after a licensing agreement with Ferrari expired.

Frank Cifaldi is a self-professed video game archivist and historian. He runs Lost Levels, a website dedicated to unreleased video games. But he also has a special interest in digital games that made it to market but are no longer available to buy. He works for the studio that made War of the Worlds, one of the disappeared titles on Xbox Live. "It's a big problem already, and I suspect it's going to be even bigger 20 years from now when historians find themselves unable to experience significant works like World of Warcraft," he tells me. "We're always going to be able to approximate the experience of viewing Birth of a Nation the way it was originally intended, but we don't have a solution for how to recreate games that require not only hundreds of active players, but the proprietary servers that may no longer exist."Some might argue that the deleted games hold little significance: primarily comprised of dated sports games and barely concealed adver-games. But for Cifaldi it's not just an issue of not being able to preserve games that are considered culturally significant today. "The maddening part about preserving video game history is that we just don't know what's going to be important 50 years from now," he says. "Art - especially risky, forward-thinking art like games - has a way of going unnoticed when it's contemporary and discovered years later. For all we know we're still in the silent movie age of what interactive media is evolves into. If we're not hanging on to every scrap of our history now, we're going to inevitably lose things that could benefit society in the future."Henry Lowood is curator for history of science & technology collections and film & media collections in the Stanford University Libraries, where he works to preserve and archive video games. He is optimistic about the work being done to save our games. "In terms of the technical means for preserving software, cultural repositories such as museums, libraries and archives are making great progress." Stanford University Libraries acquired its first major historical collection of software more than 15 years ago. "Since that time, we have been working on a variety of problems related to software preservation such as cataloging, data migration and access," he says. "We have developed a digital repository capable of storing and preserving software and many other forms of digital information and artifacts."But there are many problems unique to preserving contemporary digital video games in libraries such as Stanford's. Online activations, authentications and online gameplay modes that require active servers in order to work make storing working copies of games almost impossible in some cases. Then, of course, there's the problem of obtaining code for video games that only exist in digital form. "When access to digital-only software is cut-off the likelihood that particular software title will be lost permanently increases," says Lowood. His work at Stanford involves attempting to convince publishers and rights-holders to discuss possible ways of archiving their games. Unfortunately, while a few publishers willing to engage in conversations about how to preserve games, Lowood states: "Many are not".

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ng-video-games

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