Last week’s news that almost two and a half thousand MS-DOS computer games have been added to the Internet Archive, a free online library of books, music, movies, and software, was met with widespread delight. Over the years, the archive has rescued historical gems and curios that, unless one happened to own the original hardware on which to run them, were often impossible to play. The latest release holds many treasures of the eighties and nineties, including Wolfenstein 3D, which was programmed by a young John Carmack, now the pioneer of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset; Fahrenheit 451, a floppy-disk adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel; Emmanuelle, a mildly pornographic game centered around the seduction of a married Frenchwoman in Brazil, based on a character created by the novelist Marayat Rollet-Andriane; and, of course, The Oregon Trail, that nineteenth-century settler-themed epic of oxen and cholera and unfordable rivers. (There are also less worthwhile artifacts, like Dragon’s Lair, a travesty of Disney-fied style over substance.)

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. Few contemporary explorers of the archive will recognize, for instance, that Wanted: Monty Mole is a riff on the U.K. coal miners’ strike of 1984—you play a courageous mole who breaks the picket lines in defiance of his union leader, a character modelled on the real-world National Union of Mineworkers president, Arthur Scargill. Nor are today’s gamers likely to sense the Cold War paranoia that suffuses Atari’s Missile Command, which reputedly caused its designer, David Theurer, to wake at night in panic sweats.

This lack of contextualization, in conjunction with the apparent reluctance of most video-game publishers to promote their own heritage, has led to the ghettoization of older games. We refer to “retro games” and “retro gaming,” but such terminology is almost never applied to books or films, which are, at most, “vintage” or “classic.” Does the Beatles’ “Revolver” fall into the category of “retro music”? Are we “retro-reading” every time we pick up “King Lear,” “Moby Dick,” or “Lolita”? The “retro” label siloes the medium’s past, perpetuating the idea that old games are necessarily inferior to new ones. But the label also sells. The list of contemporary games that fetishize the chunky pixel-art style of the eighties and early nineties is long. Meanwhile, a company called Barcade has opened venues in New York, Jersey City, and Philadelphia where it is possible to enjoy a craft beer and an old arcade game simultaneously, a business model that relies both on the scarcity of the games themselves and on the sense of nostalgia that they engender among patrons. (Arguably, Barcade’s owners are preservationists, albeit ones who make the games work for their keep).

New isn’t always worse, of course, nor were the old games universally better. A sequel may smooth the kinks and squash the bugs of its forebears. But older games should not be mere curiosities, a monolithic mass from the past; they should be considered as discrete creations of varying worth and interest, just like the games that are made and released now. In some cases, the foibles and limitations of a game’s hardware influenced its design, as well as its aesthetic, in interesting ways. Super Mario World, for example, remains a masterpiece, even a quarter century after its release, precisely because of its designers’ ingenious maneuvering within tight technological boundaries.

But the question of whether a game is worth preserving at all may be irrelevant for the time being. The ease with which these works can disappear has inspired a frantic rush in some quarters to preserve everything. As James Newman, a senior lecturer at Bath Spa University, in England, writes in his book “Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence,” “We risk ending up in a ‘digital dark age’ because so much material that defines our current era is immaterial and ephemeral.” This is the motivation for many video-game preservationists: save everything before it’s lost, and let the future decide what matters in the long run. Everything should be remembered, they argue, in case something important is forgotten. Several decades on, we may consider The Oregon Trail’s shuffling oxen more significant than the barely interactive cartoon that is Dragon’s Lair, but players to come may disagree. Still, as we celebrate the Internet Archive’s preservation work, we ought to begin sorting the wheat from the chaff: the past, like the present, is heavy with it.

*Correction: An earlier version of this post misattributed the creation of the MS-DOS emulator to the software curator Jason Scott. In fact, Scott oversaw the online implementation of the emulator by volunteers.