Game preservation is an ongoing discussion with the gaming community. With technological advancements, update patches, and downloadable content, how can the history of video games be preserved for future generations? What if players want to relive their favorites in a few years but find themselves unable to access the games they loved?
This becomes more of an issue as older systems begin failing with age and emulation remains imperfect. Countless issues make it difficult to keep games preserved in their original states, and many games have already fallen issue to this. From games that have drastically changed from their original releases to games no longer available on modern systems, to games that simply don’t work anymore as hardware has become incompatible, these are all titles that have become difficult to play in their original form.
7 Minecraft
There are many live service games out there that see regular updates, and any number of them could be on this list, but Minecraft is one of the most prominent. Launched in beta in 2009 and getting its full release in 2011, Minecraft has seen tons of updates over the last decade that have significantly changed how the game plays and feels.
As new biomes have been added, or new elements have been added to villages or underwater areas, the fundamental building blocks of the game have literally been altered. With new launchers, a shift from original accounts to Microsoft accounts, and new ways of play, the version of Minecraft available now is very different from the original.
6 Final Fantasy 14
It’s one thing for online games to change over time but Final Fantasy 14 is an especially unique case. This isn’t a case where a player can simply reinstall an old version stored on a fan server somewhere. The version of Final Fantasy 14 available today is an entirely different game. Originally released in 2010, Final Fantasy 14 was poorly received with critics saying it felt unfinished, and the gameplay was clunky. While incremental changes were made to the game, the team ultimately decided to simply burn it all down and start again.
In 2012, the iconic Final Fantasy dragon Bahamut destroyed the world in a blaze of fire, and the players were transported into A Realm Reborn, a new edition of the game that would release formally a year later. It paid off, as the new version would go on to become one of the biggest MMOs on the planet, but anyone wanting to revisit the original game now, even just out of curiosity on how different it was, is stuck.
5 Flappy Bird
Sometimes a game is a victim of its own success. When Flappy Bird launched in 2013, it garnered a small amount of attention in the mobile market. However, nearly a year later it experienced a sudden surge in popularity thanks to YouTuber PewDiePie, who played it on his channel. Within a matter of days, the game became the most downloaded app on the App Store, and creator Dong Nguyen was earning roughly $50,000 per day in ad revenue from the title.
However, the surge in attention proved too much for Nguyen, who found it stressful. He also found himself disturbed by how addicted people were getting to the game and felt guilty about how much of a distraction it was proving to be. In response, he pulled the game from both the App Store and Google Play, and the game was gone for good. Nguyen has since released a revised version of the game, and numerous unofficial clones exist, but the original version is now lost to time.
4 Tetris (Game Boy)
The Game Boy version of Tetris is one of the most iconic games of all time, with its simple yet compelling gameplay and its catchy music that re-purposed a Russian folk song proving to be a major hit for Nintendo back in the early days of the Game Boy. It’s also really difficult to get hold of this original version today.
The problem is, Nintendo doesn’t own the rights to Tetris. Instead, the rights belong to The Tetris Company, a licensor in Nevada partly set up by the original creator, Alexey Pajitnov. Anyone can release a version of Tetris, as long as they have TTC’s permission, but sometimes these license agreements cause issues with older versions.
Nintendo did release their iconic version of Tetris on the 3DS Virtual Console back in 2011, but it was removed in 2014 due to Ubisoft obtaining exclusive rights to the brand. While the releases of Tetris Effect and Tetris 99 show Ubisoft no longer holds this exclusivity, the Game Boy version remains unplayable today short of tracking down the original hardware or using an emulator.
3 Duck Hunt
Nintendo has a history of games built around quirky peripherals, something which has been brought back to mind with the recent release of Nintendo Switch Sports. One of their earliest examples of this was the NES light gun, the Zapper, and the three games built for it. The most famous of these was Duck Hunt, as it was often released as a pack-in game with the system.
There’s an unusual reason for its being impossible to play in its original form today though. For anyone playing on any TV other than an old CRT monitor, the game simply won’t be able to read any inputs. Light guns operate using flashes of light emitted by CRT screens, so any game that uses one simply won’t function properly on modern screens that display images differently.
Nintendo did release a new version of Duck Hunt for the Wii U, which used a crosshair and the Wii Remote, but this had the side effect of making the game much easier than the original. However, it too will become unavailable soon when the Wii U eShop closes down in 2023.
2 Resident Evil 1-3
Console generations create a persistent problem with the availability of games. For systems that aren’t backwards compatible, games require ports or remasters to keep them available for new players. One series that knows all about this is Resident Evil, whose long history has spanned multiple consoles.
Capcom is generally great about keeping the franchise alive, as practically every game in the series is available on modern systems. However, there are three notable exceptions – the first three games, all of which have seemingly been replaced with their respective remakes. While the first Resident Evil remake is quite similar to the original, it does shift a lot of the mansion around and add new gameplay elements that weren’t present in the original. Meanwhile, the remakes of RE2 and 3 are vastly different, swapping the fixed camera angles for an over-the-shoulder camera and reshuffling or removing entire sections of the games they’re based on. Anyone wanting to play the originals has to rely on original hardware or emulation.
The closest any of the original three games get to a modern release is the Director’s Cut of the first game on the new PlayStation Plus service, which sadly replaces the entire soundtrack, leading the tense basement music to change into a collection of dying trombones.
1 Sonic 1-3
The recent release of Sonic Origins has shown another issue with playing older games on modern systems. When Sonic Origins was released, all original re-releases of the games in the collection disappeared from modern storefronts, as Sega encouraged players to pick up Origins instead.
The problem is, due to numerous gameplay changes, the addition of animated cutscenes, and the replacement of Sonic 3’s soundtrack, the Sonic Origins versions of the games are not the original experience. This would be fine, but the removal of the previous releases means that the original experience was actively taken away from players, which is a real blow to preservation.