[TheOtherHobbes]

Gamer nostalgia is a niche within a niche. The modern hardcore gamer market has tens of millions of customers - maybe hundreds if you include trivial but addictive phone games.

The nostalgists who want to get Jetpack Willy running again so they can relive a misspent youth number tens of thousands at most.

And in fact there are few/no DRM issues for these vintage games and emulations, because they're distributed as binaries.

If I really want to play Marble Madness on an Amiga emu, I can, even though the original code was never open sourced.

[the_af]

The emulators themselves frequently employ some "grey area" techniques in order to reverse engineer or otherwise replicate the systems these games ran on.

The emulator community your beloved games run on is rife with dodgy things. You know, how to get certain firmware, how they cracked this or that protection, and of course the ROMs themselves.

Gamer nostalgia is a niche within a niche? I totally disagree. It feels like a niche until you feel it yourself. Most gamers haven't aged enough yet.

PS "the modern hardcore gamer market": I care little about that short-sighted institution. I want to preserve the cultural digital heritage of mankind, and videogames are a vital part of it. And because they are games, they are meant to be played, so a blog post with some screenshots won't do. If you disagree -- we are not on the same page, and it's not worth continuing this conversation.

[ddingus]

I really question the size of the niche. We've got Recreations of all the classic machines going on right now, people buying arcade cabinets, and even casual gamers into Retro. Their organizations now into digital archaeology going back through trying to tell the stories communicate the impact on culture and a lot of other things.

A lot of people thought gaming is shallow, but it's really not. It has packed a major league punch on culture, tech itself given its age.

My take is we're going to have the early Roots stories oh, because things are open enough and simple enough but we can get them, and we're going to get them wall a lot of the people are still alive. But after that it's going to be a mess.

[crtasm]

You don't need to be a hardcore fan of anything to want to revisit experiences from your youth and there's a lot more people playing games now than when Jetpack Willy released in the 80s, certainly not a niche market.

Think of the situation with today's games 40 years in the future rather than 40 year old games today.

[simonmic]

Jet Set Willy, you philistines!