The Swedish Embracer Group, who’s lately been gobbling up developer studios and IPs like people eat popcorn at the movie theater, is building an archive “for every game ever made,” according to this YouTube video and this page on their website:
Imagine a place where all physical video games, consoles and accessories are gathered at the same place. And think about how much that could mean for games’ culture and enabling video games research. This journey has just been started and we are at an early stage. But already now, we have a large collection to take care of at the Embracer Games Archive’s premises in Karlstad, Sweden. A team of experts has been recruited and will start building the foundation for the archive.
Frankly, I don’t see the point. A “secret vault” with the “long-term ambition” to exhibit parts of the archive “locally and through satellite exhibitions at other locations” so people can—what—look at boxes?
I’m not saying collecting colorful boxes is a bad thing. I like colorful boxes! But any preservation effort whose primary goal isn’t to restore and archive these games’ source codes, clean up their fucked-up license entanglement train wrecks, and make them playable in open-source emulators that are not shot down by predatory copyright policies upheld and lobbied for by the games industry and their assorted associations, that’s neither true preservation nor progress.
Imagine all the paintings in the Louvre were not behind glass but inside boxes, and all you could see were descriptions written on these boxes on what these paintings are about and who created them when.