LogInIt's no easy business.
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Preservation of old games is an important initiative, but it's hard to actually push it against IP owners and even the Copyright Office, which refuse to cooperate. And even if the owners might potentially agree, sometimes it's an issue to just find them.
GOG has its own preservation program, and it knows all about these and many other problems. During The Game Business Show, senior bizdev manager Marcin Paczynski admitted that reviving old games is "harder than we thought it would be."
There are odd stories enough to fill a book, and one of them is of a person in the UK who had inherited rights to several games without even knowing it, but was "nowhere to be found."
"He kind of fell off the grid, so we hired a guy in the UK that was supposed to find him. That was the type of person who was really, really living without any cell phone, without any online presence, just chilling. He didn't even know that he owned the rights because this was just a package with his inheritance … we have a lot of stories like that."
Another case involved a Vietnam veteran who became a game developer and then an owner of a multimillion-dollar oil company. There was also someone whose physical proof of IP ownership was gone in a fire.
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg: when you finally get the approvals, there is a huge effort to make these games work on modern setups. The Video Game History Foundation says that 87% of all games released before 2010 are "virtually inaccessible," so we are far from playing ancient gems on PCs for now.
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