Infinity Blade for PC
As I was browsing Reddit the other day, as I’m wont to do from time to time, I came across a post about something of great interest to me that I knew nothing about. The post discussed the release of a PC port of Infinity Blade II. For the uninitiated, the Infinity Blade series of games was released for iOS devices starting in 2010. The three games in the series were among the most graphically impressive to be released for iOS devices at the time and were extremely popular. Unfortunately, due to difficulties adapting the games to the newer hardware Apple was releasing, and Epic Games losing their license to publish games on the App Store, developer Chair delisted them from the App Store rather than abandon the titles. The unfortunate consequence of this decision, and the reason I bring it up here, is that these glorious games have become “lost media” since they can no longer be downloaded from the App Store, not even onto hardware that once supported the games. If you purchased these games and didn’t have them already installed on a device, they were simply gone.
Lost media in the video game world is far from a new issue, given the ephemeral nature of digital marketplaces. While we believed for decades that physical media, whether cartridges, floppy disks, or CD/DVD/GD-ROM/etc, meant we permanently owned the games we purchased, as time marches on, we are finding that this is not necessarily the case. No matter what we do to store our bits and bytes, entropy always finds a way. Whether it’s corrosion of IC boards, failure and leakage of backup batteries, bit rot slowly destroying magnetic media, or degradation of optical discs (yes, even Blu-ray discs eventually), physical media is not the permanent paradise we were promised.
My Abandonware Site
Some of the earliest efforts to preserve these pieces of gaming history fell to websites like My Abandonware, which host digital archives of sometimes fragile, hard-to-source software packages. Of course, this has always ended up in a legal grey area. Technically, these games, even though they are no longer actively being sold on the market, are often still owned by some company somewhere. These sites, in an attempt to remain legally compliant, will often capitulate to companies that request/demand that their games be removed from the archives.
Fortunately, the game preservationists over at Good Old Games have stepped in to try to offer a fully legal way to experience some of these classic titles. Working with IP owners, they have built an extensive library of classic computer games that are fully playable on modern hardware, often using emulation layers such as DOSBox. Given that this is a digital marketplace, you may be worried that games could disappear, as with Capcom’s digital release of Marvel vs. Capcom or Ubisoft’s The Crew, but fortunately, that isn’t the case here. While games are sometimes removed from sale, such as the classic rally racer Colin McRae 2005 (often due to rights issues), these games are never removed from the libraries of those who purchased them. And, even if you are unwilling to believe that, GOG allows you to download the full install binaries for any games that you own in your library, allowing you to keep a personal archive of your purchases, 100% legal and free of any reliance on the GOG ecosystem. This system is a huge win for game preservation.
But what about games that were never released on physical media?
This is not necessarily as new a problem as you might think. In the ’90s, both Sega and Nintendo dipped their toes into digital software distribution, much of it exclusive to their digital-only platforms. Nintendo’s platform, known as the Satellaview, was a satellite service that attached to the Super Famicom. Users were able to access a library of games that eventually totaled 114 titles. Some were original games or original sequels to cartridge releases, while others were remakes of older Famicom and Super Famicom titles. In addition, some games, known as Soundlink games, had to be played “live” on a set schedule because they used live voice acting. While most standard digital-only titles have been preserved in the memory of various Satellaview systems, some content, such as the live audio from the Soundlink titles, is likely to be permanently lost.
The Sega Channel
Sega launched the Sega Channel in 1994. Using a special adapter that plugged into the Genesis’ cartridge slot, users would connect to the coaxial cable from their cable service provider, with either TCI or Time Warner Cable being the only two providers supporting the service in the US. Since the service used the existing cable infrastructure rather than an online service like the Stellaview, online gaming was not supported. The available games were broadcast on a loop. Once the user requested a title, the system would wait for the broadcast to loop to the selected game, then capture the data. The game would be saved to the adapter’s internal RAM, which was wiped when the system was powered off. Since the adapter used volatile RAM to store the games, preservation had been a challenge. Fortunately, in 2025, the Video Game History Foundation released over 140 ROMs from the Sega Channel, including exclusive games and demos that had never been released on physical media. These archives were obtained from the former Sega Channel VP of Programming, Michael Shorrock, and from a fan who had collected backup tapes of Sega Channel broadcasts.
Digital marketplaces are a current issue and will remain one going forward.
As consoles entered the 7th generation, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all opened digital marketplaces for their devices. This is where console users really began to see the potential negative consequences of software’s digital-only distribution. Each of the online shops experienced a number of titles being delisted. Fortunately, if you had purchased the game, it remained in your library, and you could redownload it later. But quite often, these titles never reappeared on subsequent systems or other platforms, especially Nintendo titles. Without a physical release, these games became relics of the aging accounts that originally purchased them. It wasn’t unusual to see listings on places like eBay for systems and, sometimes, marketplace accounts that included some of the more popular delisted titles.
Wii Shop
The next ticking time bomb for these legacy systems is the ability to access digital purchases in the future. Right now, if you have an old account with purchases on the PS3, PSP, Xbox 360, Wii, Wii U, DSi, or 3DS, you can (with varying levels of difficulty) migrate these accounts to other physical systems. It’s not unusual for people to sell their systems when they go unused or when they decide to upgrade to the next-generation console. If you later decide to purchase these older consoles again, you can currently redownload your purchases, allowing you to access your legacy libraries. But, at some point, it will not make financial sense to support downloads for legacy consoles. Once those points of access are shut down, hundreds of titles will exist only on the non-volatile memory and hard drives of specific systems. And emulation will remain the sole way to experience some of these titles going forward, assuming the media has been rescued from one of these orphaned systems.
Of course, digital marketplace death is not exclusive to consoles. Mobile devices have long dealt with delisted software. Often, these titles remain in users’ purchase histories, but several high-profile titles from the past were not only delisted but also removed from users’ accounts. This meant that if the user deleted the app from their devices, they would have no opportunity to redownload it. Android users had it a bit easier. If they could find someone hosting an older APK of the app they could no longer access, they had a chance to reinstall it on their device. But iOS users, with Apple’s walled-garden architecture, found it much more difficult to access these digital assets that had disappeared.
And that’s not to mention the PC gamers who have lost purchases on storefronts like Steam, the Epic Store, and EA and Ubisoft’s own storefronts. These aren’t 99-cent app purchases, either. We’re talking AAA, full-priced titles that are no longer accessible to the users who paid good money for them. This doesn’t even begin to touch the other doom hammer, online gaming services. While many games rely on no online services, others have limited integration, and still others are fully reliant on internet-based services for game matching, content delivery, and multiplayer gameplay. When companies decide to shut down those servers, some games will lose functionality, while others will become completely unplayable.
Evercade EXP-R
So, what can we do? The most obvious option is to support companies that offer physical options for their games, specifically those that do not rely on an online service to play on the device. While Nintendo’s “key cards” have drawn some controversy for not including the game on the physical card, many games released for the Switch and Switch 2 are stored entirely on their cards. Another player that has entered the physical media space is Blaze Entertainment, with its Evercade line of retro systems. They have no digital marketplace. Every game they release is a physical cartridge featuring licenses from many popular companies, as well as indie retro-inspired titles. While they have had to stop producing older carts due to expiring licenses, it is the pinnacle of “you bought it, you own it”.
You can also support organizations like Good Old Games and the Video Game History Foundation, which are working to preserve and make these once-lost and abandoned titles available. When it comes down to it, the corporations aren’t going to preserve the long, unique history of video games. It is going to be up to us, the gamers, to keep it alive.
The post Musing of a Retro Gamer: Lost Media and Game Preservation appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.
