[nicolethenerd]

> A computer will never live as long as The Trial. … What if Amerika was only written for 32-bit Power PC?

This line kind of got me, and made me think about the transience of my own work. I build educational software, and I entered this field because I was inspired by the educational games I played as a kid. Most of those games, developed for a specific operating system, can still be run today on a VM or an emulator of an older Windows machine. But the apps I work on are web applications - we're constantly racing to update and maintain them in a sea of ever-changing devices and standards. The odds of somebody being able to run my work, even a just few years from now, and have it work without issue is unfortunately kind of small (the introduction of iOS 8 already wreaked havoc on some of our layouts). And that makes me kind of sad.

[wtetzner]

I've been thinking about this problem lately as well. I think one solution might be to build your games for a well specified abstract machine. Then, you can just build an implementation of that machine for the web, and run the games on that.

The inspiration for the idea was SCUMM, and how we're able to play SCUMM games now with SCUMMVM.