[mhink]

Honestly... I don't think there's much difference between games and other forms of media in terms of longevity in the public consciousness. "Singin' in the Rain" was released in 1952 and might very well still at least ring a bell today, but what about "Monkey Business" or "Viva Zapata!", released the same year? Those films even had some pretty big names (Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando). Even nowadays, there are still plenty of "shovelware" movies out there.

That being said, I think the real difference comes down to the fact that games are (by necessity) relatively tightly coupled to the hardware required to run them. Movie projector systems, while complex, are still much "dumber" than a computer. I think it's safe to say that if you have a film print from, say, the 60s, there would probably be a range of projector models from the preceding decade that could play it.

By contrast, if you have a copy of a PC game from, say, 1996, you're going to have to pay a lot more attention to its specific hardware requirements in order to build a system that's capable of running it. That raises the skill floor to run it in the first place. Honestly, I think this is one reason console retrogaming is so popular: to play a game, you only have to get a hold of a working console. The problem these days is that consoles are becoming more PC-like, so they're kinda backing into the same problems as PCs.