Almost a decade ago, Henry Lowood at Stanford University started an initiative to preserve video games from slowly sliding into oblivion. I am free to assume that everyone visiting this site or any other site about the “retro” aspect of computer gaming will agree to this being a great idea. No need for justification there. The “Why?” page of this site offers a great explanation of the reasons for keeping those old acoustic sensations alive (that’s what this page is about, after all), the same reasons of course apply for the games as a whole.
Mr. Lowood even managed to get The Library of Congress to take hosting a canon of games into consideration. Ten games hosted by the guardian of the spiritual heritage of the United States.
Wait a second, only 10 games? Well, that’s what a canon is about, isn’t it? It has to rule out stuff according to specific criteria. There are already candidates: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), the Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).

Yes, the list is of course open to be discussed and modified by the worldwide community of gamers. No, i wont lament about last game mentioned being on such a list. It’s a great soccer game, i have played it myself, it has a cult following, but its presence on the list is at least as arguable as all the other games up there.
Remember, it’s only 10 games.
Of course you can pull off the old trick of simply expanding the canon to, let’s say, 100 games. That might save the binaries of “Sir & Nomo’s Top 10 Games Ever” from decay, but it’s more likely that the fellowship of Amiga gamers would heave “Lemmings”, “Zak McKracken” and the like on the list, expelling some of these great Amiga classics.
Expanding the list even further, to 1000 games, still wouldn’t satisfy everyone, there’s probably an almost-forgotten-but-great game on a never-made-it-to-mainstream system that would have to be left out.
To all those of you who dare to think of the number 10000, (for some reason it just has to be a decimal power of one, right?), i would simply propose to keep all of them. I’m serious, it has worked till now.
All commercial Amiga games can nicely fit on a common modern medium like a DVD. Sure, if you’re a lone individual you would need a lot of 3-dimensional Euclidean space for storing all the original disks, to make the whole thing legal.
The hardware of these systems can be emulated in modern Universal Turing Machines without problems.
Of course, the difficulty of both emulating the hardware and storing the data of games increases if we move towards the more recent past. But then, there’s a future ahead of us, isn’t it? Plus, there is no necessity for storing all available software for an ancient system on a single copy of a modern removable storage medium.
How many of you believe that in 10 years from now it will be possible to smoothly emulate, let’s say, a PS3 on a mainstream pc (or your intelligent fridge, in case if there will be no more desktop computers) and store all games that were ever made for it on a single, commonly used portable data carrier? I am myself only skeptical about the storage stuff.
In any event, while the worldwide networked community has done an incredible amount of work, dumping all those roms of old Arcade machines, coding all the emulators, it’s about time that things got a litte more standardized. Computer games need to be treated like the cultural artifacts that they are.
Of course, there’s already a number of projects with the objective of preserving digitally stored data.
An example would be Nestor, sponsored by the German Ministry of Education and Science, a project dedicated to providing long-term storage and long-term availability of digital resources. The project is still in its beginnings, and its highly unlikely that one of their focuses will be the long-term storage of games. I believe that the same assumption is valid for any similar current or future projects with the goal to preserve human knowledge in general. Well, there might actually be certain digitally stored data somewhere that rivals games in importance.
I hope that the gaming community, at least those people among them with a sense of nostalgia, will eventually come up with a project of their own, something akin to a non-profit organization, whose goal, with the blessing of the industry (that would be the trickiest part), would be to preserve entertainment software.
No one is asking for freely downloadable software from such a database, Microsoft and other publishers are still making money by offering old classics as pay-per-downloads for their current consoles, but the effort itself of getting the data off the old media should undoubtedly be legal.
If The Library of Congress is willing to store all of it, i’m fine with it. But a top-ten list should always be no more than a stimulant for cultural debates of any kind. We may be religious about computers, but that doesn’t mean we need a canon.

-discman