Videogames at the Library of Congress – An Interview with Dave Gibson
nodontdie.com
nodontdie.com
1.5 years ago, in 2014, they received a copy of an unreleased PSP game, titled Duke Nukem Critical Mass: https://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/08/dukes-lega...
Reading the blog post, it seems they are not competent enough to actually run it, and the best they could do was to open the main executable (BOOT.BIN, the decrypted version) in a hex editor. Some commenters even tried to help them run it, of course without any reply. 1.5 years later, the files are still not available to download, and that disk is basically rotting away somewhere in the "library".
Please, if you are a game developer, and care about game preservation, don't submit your games to that library. Instead, upload them anonymously to a torrent tracker of your choice. The internet will do the rest.
copyright laws suck.
> [The videogame collection is] a collection that's mainly built, as many art collections built here, through the copyright registration process. So, essentially, games that are sent in mainly by the bigger publishers for purposes of copyright and they send in the physical copy of the game usually and as many formats as it exists in for as many platforms as it exists for.
You are correct that it is not a lending library and was not intended to be. The LoC is designed to be a preservation group, closer to a museum than anything else.
Also - you correctly note - about the problems in "preserving" games (or any media) long term is the ability to see or play them. That's one of the problems I was working to solve. And at present, it's still not solved. The only approach we found for media - video, images, audio - was to have a high quality master in a lossless format and then store the original physical media is a safe location free of corrosive materials (like oxygen).
When a better format would come out, you then had the option to convert the high quality master (2nd choice) or to go back to the original preserved media and try to get another master (preferred). Of course, that assumes you preserved the physical media properly...