Video games are more prone than other media to obsolescence. With each new generation of hardware and software, scores of titles are made unplayable. Music has suffered similarly, of course: vinyl morphed into cassette into CD into digital audio. But music, like films and books, is easily transferred to new formats. Video games, which rely not only on audiovisual reproduction but also on a computer’s ability to understand and execute their coded rules and instructions, require more profound reconstruction. Without a strong commercial incentive to maintain their back catalogues, many publishers allow games to drift into extinction. When companies such as Nintendo do put old titles back on the market, the re-releases are limited to a handful of well-known classics, placed in the company’s digital store for unceremonious download. This is a medium in which the past is not only a foreign country but also, often, an unreachable one. Since there is no Criterion Collection of video games, no Penguin Classics, the work of preservation has fallen mostly to amateurs and academics. In 1998, for example, Stanford University acquired the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing, which includes almost forty years’ worth of titles for various video-game consoles. In 2008, Britain’s National Media Museum, in partnership with Nottingham Trent University, established the National Videogame Archive, which aims to “preserve, analyse and display the products of the global videogame industry by placing games in their historical, social, political and cultural contexts.” But these collections are inaccessible to most players. The Internet Archive, by contrast, makes games readily available—and, crucially, playable—online. (The MS-DOS games run on an emulator that allows a Web browser to mimic the original operating system.*) Still, their social, political, and cultural context remains hidden.