The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
Or are a huge percent of old computer games never archived and ever preserved?
InquilineKea
The Computer & Video Game Archive is housed at the University of Michigan's Art, Architecture and Engineering Library.
The archive "collects materials relating to games for the purpose of academic inquiry, including but not limited to:"
- programming and technology
- artistic and literary expression
- social and cultural impact
- instruction and education
They have over 2,500 titles listed in their public catalog, and visitors "can use and play a wide variety of games from the 1970s to the present".
There is also the National Reference Software Library (NSRL) at the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST). It is aimed at research into software as well as the law enforcement community. The NSRL is made up of three components: 1. A large collection of software packages. 2. A database containing detailed information, or metadata, about the files that make up those software packages. 3. A public dataset, the NSRL Reference Data Set (RDS) which contains a subset of the metadata held in the database for each file in the collection. The RDS is published and updated every three months.
Probably not as fun as the Computer & Video Game Archive, but useful in other ways.
University of Calgary has one too -- http://www.calgary20.ca/education/218-new-games-section-at-u-of-c-library.
UT-Austin's Video Game Archive is another resource: http://www.cah.utexas.edu/projects/videogamearchive/index.php
Another resource to look at is the UIUC Gaming Initiative's Archive page: http://www.library.illinois.edu/gaming/gamearchives.html
UC Santa Cruz also has a large collection of video games (over 600) and consoles (over 40). There is also a video game lab. For more info, check out their website:
http://library.ucsc.edu/video-games
If you're interested in games in the library, you might also be interested in this recent Journal of Higher Ed article on games in the library:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/games-in-the-library/37667
The article mentions preservation issues (with preserving virtual worlds, for instance) and also mentions the Games in Libraries podcast:
http://www.gamesinlibraries.org/
Stanford also has a rather impressive video game collection. http://speaking.stanford.edu/Back_Issues/SOC71/library/Game_Studies_Resources.html
There is also the International Center for the History of Electronic Games http://www.icheg.org/
If you are interested in more of the general theory and basic research that is going on with video game preservation I would suggest reviewing the work done as part of preserving virtual worlds http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/
An interesting outcome of much of this work is that, in part because of all the rights issues involved, many of the best examples of videogame preservation are happening through fan run rom and emulator sites. For exmaple, Home of the Underdogs http://www.hotud.org/ or Virtual Apple 2 http://www.virtualapple.org/
I believe the Computer History Museum in Mountain View is creating such a collection: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/
The National Videogame Archive (UK) is collecting videogames, with details here.
A new collaborative initiative (that I'm involved in) is beginning to build a collection of websites about gaming culture and experience. This is a partnership between the British Library, the UK Web Archive and the National Videogame Archive. This is operating on the basis that the experience and impact of gaming (as captured by gamers and others) is more important to preserve than the games themselves, and is likely to be more informative for future users of the archive (for example, see "(Not) Playing Games: Player-Produced Walkthroughs as Archival Documents of Digital Gameplay", James Newman).
A number of European national libraries are obligated to collect videogames under digital legal deposit regulations, including (I believe) Germany and Denmark.
The Computerspielemuseum in Berlin has a substantial videogame collection.
Despite growing efforts to preserve computer games, the preservation of other software seems to be somewhat lacking. Other than the NSRL, support seems to be stronger for sustaining current software as a business process (eg. SSI, TIMBUS Project) rather than archiving obsolete software.
A number of sites exist to capture information on old games and files where possible. Home of the UnderDogs being a notable one.
Their nature makes them a little less reliable than libraries, but underdogs has been existence on 'community funds' for several years.
As does the Library of Congress: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/2012/04/22/gIQABtcoaT_story.html