Commercial availability specifically. Thanks to archivers and the such, there are usually options to play most things. While I personally don't care about commercially buying most of these classics, I do find it odd how little ip owners seem to want to make some of these older titles available

Thankfully, most companies kinda turn a blind eye to piracy of their back catalog. It's really mostly Nintendo that gets all bent out of shape about it, and, honestly, they bring it on themselves for essentially vaulting many of their classics(like most of their GameCube games, for example). It really doesn't help they they slow drip the releases so that only the same old few games are available at launch(I don't want to play Clu Clu Land or Urban Champion, Nintendo... and I'm someone who likes those black box NES games more than most). Hopefully Nintendo Online solved that issue, but I doubt it.

Anyway, it's not like anyone is going to miss, say, Major Minor's Majestic March for Wii. I would like to encourage companies to release more of their stuff, but realistically, it's out there for anyone savvy enough to get it. We need to fix this stupid broken copyright system.

Their definition of "classic" is rather contrived in my opinion. "Classic" means both old and influential. They ditched the influential part. From their in-depth article:

It’s hard to define exactly what a “classic game” is, but for the sake of this study, we looked at all games released before 2010, which is roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off.

Our random list of 1,500 games was taken from MobyGames, a huge community-run database of video games.

I can’t feel sorry for the slow disappearance of some Wii Shovelware from 15 years ago. Time is ruthless to all mediocre media.

more than possibly any other industry, gaming companies don't really see their video games as "art."

nintendo doesn't want you to buy their old games because they want you to buy their new ones. that's all they give a shit about.

Legitimately, right?

Or are 87% of classic games not able to be found even as ROMs through piracy? 🤔

I mean, there's a lot of other media that is the same... Like books unavailable to be purchased, but out there at a library or as a PDF online somewhere.

Man, we'd really be screwed without piracy and emulators. This number only counts legal availability.

I've always thought we should have some sort of standard emulator format for games. I get that cutting edge graphics are always going to be too much to run through a virtual machine, but a lot of indie titles in particular could do it without problem.

We might need a few generations of emulators but it would still let us preserve games by just porting the VM instead of every game.

So one comparison they make is "What if Titanic was only available on VHS and you had to go buy it off eBay!" I feel like it's a very silly way to compare video games and movies. Like what? That's fine. There are thousands of movies that are only available in their given home release format. Video games are already digitized for the most part but it's like asking "What if you could only play a really specific pinball machine by buying the pinball machine?"

I'm all for preserving games. As a game developer, that's my work and I do want it to live on forever. That said it's insane to expect any developer or publisher to fund a failed game's port to newer hardware or still sell it for older hardware. It's simply not worth the hassle. Make it profitable, give grants for selling older titles. If this is something gamehistory.org wants to see, offer the money to make it happen. Otherwise be happy with old formats and ROM dumps.

Cloanto, the company that owns the rights to the Commodore Amiga line, have a legal emulator that they sell called Amiga Forever. It's about half the price of one modern AAA game, and when you download it, it comes with about fifty games of varying notability, and there's many times more you can just install and play. And it's all legal.

I would love this to be the industry norm, imagine being able to download a NES! It's annoying that if we want future generations to be able to experience games of the past (whether to learn from them, or just for pleasure) we need to teach our children about piracy.