Week 1: What counts as lost?

Defining the course's object of study, and the boundary between a lost game and one that's merely old

22 February 2027

The course’s working definition, stated precisely because everything else depends on it: a lost or abandoned game is one that was commercially released and can no longer be normally obtained or played through its original distribution channel or intended platform. A game that’s merely old, obscure, or still commercially available doesn’t qualify just because it’s unfashionable — plenty of decades-old games are one click away on a storefront right now, and none of those are this course’s business.

The course centres on games from the 1990s–2010s, across PC, console, and browser/Flash — not because nothing was lost before or after that window, but because that’s where recoverable evidence, surviving communities, and workable emulation overlap. Online and server-dependent games come up as a preservation problem worth understanding, but they are not something you’ll be asked to recover: without a surviving server, there is usually no artifact left to excavate.

Outline#

• the definition, and why each clause is doing work
• three quick cases: lost, merely old, and a genuine edge case
• server-dependent games as a discussion point, not a studio target
• what the semester actually asks you to produce