Ah, the late '90s! The time just before the break of the new millennium was the golden age of video games, at least for nostalgic microchip heads such as myself. This era represents a sweet spot in which computers were powerful enough to represent 3D environments, display decent graphics, and play high-quality soundtracks. Still, the video game industry had not evolved yet into the greedy machine it eventually became, inventing aggressive monetization schemes and coming up with in-game purchases, loot boxes, or intrusive digital rights management (DRM) mechanisms. Back then, the usual way of obtaining a video game for your PC or game console was to (gasp!) walk up to a store and purchase a physical copy. A PC game would take the form of a CD (or many, for large titles) which contained all the required data to install the software and play. No Internet connection was required.

I am the sort of person who keeps old stuff around forever and does not toss it into the trash bin so long as it is in working order. Therefore, I have a meaningful collection of PC games in a vault (Figure 1). While reorganizing my storage space, it occurred to me that many of these games aren't easily playable on modern computers – the ones I can realistically obtain – despite being in an excellent state of preservation. This thought immediately set me on a quest to find out how to enjoy these gems from the golden age and how to preserve them for the future (for more on why, see the "Why Make the Effort" box).

The Problems

There are two tasks to complete when you decide to archive a video game for posterity. The first is saving each title in question in a format that is easy to replicate (for backup purposes) and also easy to run the game from. The second is preserving or simulating a system capable of running the game in question, because you often can't install a game from 1995 on a modern operating system (OS) directly.

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