How much is history worth? In May, the video game world got an answer of sorts: $14,000.

That was the winning bid for a prototype of a cancelled game developed for the original Famicom — the Japanese name for the Nintendo Entertainment System from the 1980s, with its pixelated graphics. Indy: The Magical Kid was based on a series of Japanese choose-your-own-adventure books. The game had some early previews in magazines but was ultimately scrapped, making its reemergence on the auction block — a notable event for a community of preservationists working to save video game history.

But there was a problem. That community, led in part by Nintendo preservation group Forest of Illusion, hoped to win the game with $7,000 they had raised together — yet that winning bid came unexpectedly from a private collector who has no intention of preserving Indy for posterity.

Forest of Illusion co-founder togemet2, who asked not to use his real name because the process of preserving games is sometimes a legal gray area due to copyrights and other issues, tells OneZero that the loss came suddenly. (Archivists and historians are not necessarily looking to sell or even distribute versions of games they’ve saved online, but creating an unauthorized reproduction often technically violates copyright law.)

“This is culture. If we lose the pieces that brought us here, then we’re doomed to repeat our mistakes.”

“Unfortunately, we were outbid in the last few minutes of the auction,” togemet2 says. According to togemet2, the buyer said in an anonymous message sent to a Japanese fan site that “he had bought it to stop reproductions getting out, and that he would protect it as a Japanese treasure.” Togemet2 added that if this is, indeed, the case, the likelihood of the game being lost forever is high.

The preservationist movement is about documenting the past and keeping the video game art form alive for future generations. Gaming historians constantly need to find new ways to preserve the history of games, adapting the medium as they go. In a way, it’s far more difficult than preserving books or artwork. Older games might require a painstaking digitization process to convert the information stored on a cartridge to files readable by a modern computer; newer games on platforms like Steam may not have physical versions at all.

“We’ve finally figured it out that video games aren’t just passive entertainment projects,” says Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Video Game History Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to cataloging and digitizing games. “This is culture. If we lose the pieces that brought us here, then we’re doomed to repeat our mistakes. If we lack an understanding of how we got here and why, then we’re missing out.”

Jon-Paul Dyson, director of The Strong Nation Museum of Play’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games in Rochester, New York, explains that this archival work is a way to track the fundamental act of play. He believes that studying and preserving the way humans play is an important path to understanding the development of a culture.

“Play is something that’s universal and continues throughout our life cycle,” Dyson says. “The result is that play pervades almost every aspect of our lives. Video games are, in some sense, the most recent form of play.”

Of course, unlike with a painting, say, video games archives demand the preservation of a full and interactive experience — generally, pressing buttons to initiate certain actions on a screen, which the game then reacts to. It’s not always a matter of locking away an old cartridge with a Super Nintendo and a TV, either. We may think of electronic data as permanent, but certain forms of physical media “literally rot,” Cifaldi explains, as the materials and chemicals used to write the data deteriorate, which will wipe out chunks of information stored on the discs. Archiving these sorts of files, by copying data into easily readable and playable formats, is essential in keeping these titles around.

The process is different depending on what they’re hoping to save. There are devices and systems that can digitally back up games for you. “Typically, we’re taking data from one format to another,” Cifaldi says. “A typical easy process would not surprise you. This is a DVD that has data on it. I’m going to put it in a DVD drive on a computer, and I’m going to make an image of that disc so it’s on a hard drive instead of that disc.”