Who writes gaming history?

Start with the number, because it decides everything after it.

Eighty-seven percent of classic video games are out of print. That is the finding of a 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation, the Software Preservation Network and the University of Washington Information School, based on a random sample of 1,500 US games released before 2010.

Only 13 percent of the medium's own history is commercially available.

Worse than silent film

That figure needs a yardstick, and the study supplies a brutal one.

Silent films burned. Nitrate stock is chemically unstable, studios reused reels for the silver, and archives caught fire. That medium had a century and a physical excuse.

Games from the 2000s are one percentage point worse preserved than films from the 1920s, with no fire, no chemistry and no distance in time. They are simply not kept, because keeping them earns nobody anything.

Now look at who found that out

The study drew its sample from MobyGames.

Sit with that. The most rigorous academic account of what the games industry has lost had to use, as its index of what ever existed, a database started in 1999 by two fans because no company kept one.

That is the whole thesis of this piece in one footnote. The record of this medium is fan-built. Not as a supplement to the official record. As the record.

The historians

So who actually writes it? Not publishers, whose archives are legal departments. Not, for the most part, universities. It is a handful of people with editing software.

And the podcasts, mostly Retronauts, Noclip and the Video Game History Hour, which is run by the Foundation that did the study.

Note the shape of that table. Summoning Salt has more subscribers than most games magazines ever had readers, and he documents a subject, speedrunning, that no publisher has ever considered part of its own history.

The man with the videotapes

The single best illustration is Noclip, run by Danny O'Dwyer.

Noclip came into possession of hundreds of videotapes containing over a decade of games media: trailers, behind-the-scenes footage, B-roll, news reports. Material produced by the industry, discarded by the industry, and now being digitised by a YouTube channel and uploaded to the Internet Archive.

An independent documentary maker is doing the archival work for an industry that made 205 billion dollars this year.

Meanwhile The Strong National Museum of Play holds 70,000 video game objects and runs three dedicated digital preservation labs. It is excellent and it is a museum in Rochester, New York, which tells you how much of this depends on a small number of specific institutions and people.

What gets recorded, and what does not

Here is the part that matters for what we are building.

Recorded well: company history. Founding dates, funding rounds, acquisitions, revenue, layoffs. We have written several of those pieces ourselves, and the material is abundant because companies file documents and journalists cover money.

Recorded partially: the artefacts. What the games were, thanks to MobyGames, the Strong, the Internet Archive and the emulation community, in defiance of 87 percent being out of print.

Recorded almost not at all: what happened to the people playing.

Roblox alone absorbed 31 billion hours in a single quarter, which is three and a half million human years. Across the medium, the total is not measurable. And of all that lived experience, what survives is a handful of speedrun videos, some forum threads, and whatever a few YouTubers happened to be interested in.

Not because it is unimportant. Because nobody collects it, and there has never been a place to put it.

The obvious thing nobody does

Old games have save files. Turn-based games in particular, Civilization above all, do not store a score. They store a history: a world, a sequence of decisions, a hundred hours of somebody's attention in a form a machine can read.

That is not high-score data. That is a diary written by a person who did not know they were writing one.

Nobody collects those either. There is no reason beyond nobody having asked, and the file formats are documented well enough that the emulation community has been reading them for twenty years.

Gaming history from the player's side does not exist yet. Not as a gap in a field, as an absent field.

What follows from this

Three things we take from it.

Companies are not the enemy here, they are just the wrong archivist. No firm is obliged to keep a record of things that stopped earning. Expecting them to is a category error, and the 87 percent is the predictable result rather than a scandal.

The people doing the work have audiences in the millions and no institutional support. Five YouTubers hold more of this medium's memory than its trade bodies do. That is fragile in exactly the way one person's side project is always fragile.

The unwritten half is the player's half, and it is the larger one by an enormous margin. Every hour anybody has spent inside a game is unrecorded unless they personally wrote something down.

We are building a leaderboard, which is the shallowest possible version of that record: one number per run. The interesting version is the one underneath it.

Sources

• Video Game History Foundation, Software Preservation Network and University of Washington Information School GAME Research Group, game availability study published 2023: 87 percent of a random sample of 1,500 US games released before 2010 are out of print; sample drawn from the MobyGames database
• Comparison figures from the same study: 13 percent classic game availability against a 14 percent survival rate for American silent films and 10 percent or less for pre-war audio recordings; reported by Axios, GeekWire, Kotaku, NME and the AV Club
• Subscriber and view counts for Summoning Salt, Ahoy, LGR, Gaming Historian and Noah Caldwell-Gervais as reported in 2026
• Noclip Game History Archive: hundreds of videotapes of games media digitised to YouTube and the Internet Archive
• The Strong National Museum of Play: 70,000 video game objects and three digital preservation labs
• Podcasts: Retronauts, Noclip and the Video Game History Hour

Retrieved 5 August 2026.