[glimshe]

We'll have extensive documentation and understanding of pre-2000s games one century from now due to their simplicity and modularity. The same can't be same of more recent games protected by DRM and with "always online" requirements (which often implies server-side logic)...

[mrandish]

As someone deeply into pre-2000 retro arcade games, video consoles and vintage home computers, I agree. Future digital historians will be left with trying to reconstruct what online-centric experiences post-2000-ish were like from whatever YouTube, Twitch and social media videos and stills survive into the future.

Once the server-side source components are lost to time, at best we'll be able to view linear recordings of what the combined system did for this one user that one time. Perhaps I'm jaded by the lens of my present-day perspective but, the only small comfort I find in this, is that so many of today's recent online experiences are largely derivative of each other.

By analogy to film archiving, if (for example) the original master print of the 13th (out of 20) MCU Phase 1 film were lost to time, I feel it'd be less tragic than the fact we don't have a full-length print of Fritz Lang's 1927 classic Metropolis, arguably the first ever feature-length science fiction film. At least we have the vast majority of pre-2000-ish arcade, computer and console video gaming digitally preserved as complete interactive emulations. That era was the creative crucible where much of video gaming first evolved.

[iforgotpassword]

Same for software and operating systems. You can perfectly emulate a sophisticated OS/2 network with database server and whatnot, but how are you gonna have a museum 30 years down the line that shows you that oddball smartphone OS called Windows Phone? Even if you can run it on something, without all the online services it talked to to make the metro tiles look pretty and apps like weather, translator, the app store and maps work at all, will it even make sense to demonstrate it?