^^^^
Similar to why a recording of classic films are important. They serve as cultural touchpoints connecting individual experiences from a time and place long past. We retell stories from written literature for centuries and those are relatively difficult to preserve historically where video games are just a matter of storing a ROM on some file system
Many reasons. There is probably not a straight forward answer if you never tried to answer (its my first time) this question. But I’ll give it a go.
Most importantly and in the long run (and I’m talking about hundreds of years) future generations can study old games, to learn how the past was working. For the short term (I"m speaking about now for next decades) its partly about nostalgia so you can play the games, if companies fail to preserve them. Also preservation allows us to play and see the games in their initial state in example. Game developers also can study old games, which is important to make new ones. Reading books how the golden era was this and that is one thing, then playing those games and seeing how it works is another. Even if its not 100% authentic recreation, its still helps.
Why do you preserve old books, films, music, art? Why do we preserve old technical devices we found, old bones of animals or even humans? Compared to those, its much more complicated to preserve videogames, not only the bits and bytes as they are available, but also to have them playable. Videogames is part of our society and preserving them is preserving part of our humanity.
Ross Scott (of Freeman’s Mind & Game Dungeon fame) makes a compelling argument for game preservation here: https://youtu.be/tUAX0gnZ3Nw?t=2548
Video games are part of our culture and reflect our society the same way as movies, books, and other media. And, like with old books, preserving and studying old games allows us to understand the environment and time in which they were created, as well as the concepts and ideas that they drew upon, or that newer games drew from them.
Games are art, and art is valuable for how it enriches.
Not all art is good art, and there are plenty of games that no one is trying to preserve.
Capitalism is currently also killing off lots of non-video game art that it can’t profit off of. Tons of old shows, movies, books, and music are out of print, and being held and often lost by the IP holders.
If we allow art to become solely a vehicle for generating profit, we are going to lose out on so much beauty, talent, culture, and history.
