Vanishing Culture: Recovering Lost Software
Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2025 10:30 am
The following guest post from journalist and computer historian Josh Renaud is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Mom and Me (Atari ST, 1985) (color) by Yaakov Kirschen, preserved and playable at the Internet Archive.
Whether it’s Pac-Man or Pikachu, Link or Lara Croft, Master Chief or Mario, we love playing video games.
But what about preserving them?
Data shows we spend big money on photo restoration service games: more than $200 billion globally. By some reports, gaming is now bigger than the global film industry and the North American sports industry combined.
Despite all this growth, data also shows the industry has done a poor job stewarding its heritage and history. In fact, a recent study shows classic games are in critical danger of being lost.
Only 13 percent of all classic games released between 1960 and 2009 are currently commercially available.
Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States (2023).
Only 13 percent of all classic games released between 1960 and 2009 are currently commercially available, according to the “Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States,” published in 2023 by Phil Salvador for the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network.
Worse, this percentage drops below three percent for games released before 1985, “the foundational era of video games,” the study found.
The study considered a random sample of 1,500 games from the MobyGames database, as well as the entire catalog of the Nintendo Game Boy—4,000 games altogether.
The commercial unavailability of so many classic games leaves few viable options for playing them today. People can attempt to track down and buy increasingly-rare vintage games and hardware, visit a few specialty institutions, or resort to piracy, the study noted. Terrible options all around.
But what about cases where a game was never archived in the first place?
Journalist and computer historian, Josh Renaud.
That was a situation I ran into when I wanted to find copies of “Mom and Me” and “Murray and Me,” two graphical chatbots created in 1985 by Yaakov Kirschen, the Israeli artist best known for the “Dry Bones” cartoon in the Jerusalem Post. Kirschen died on April 14, 2025, at the age of 87.
These “artificial personalities” were among the earliest entertainment software released for the Atari ST computer, and they got splashy write-ups in newspapers including the London Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. Even three-time Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman wrote a profile in the New York Times.
Despite that publicity, and the advantage of getting in on the ground floor of a brand new computer platform, probably fewer than 2,000 copies were sold. Apparently I was one of the very few who had copies, which I received from my uncle Jim when he handed down his old Atari 520ST computer to my family in the early 1990s. I remember being amused as my brothers and I conversed with “Mom” and “Murray” back then.
Mom and Me (Atari ST, 1985) (color) by Yaakov Kirschen, preserved and playable at the Internet Archive.
Whether it’s Pac-Man or Pikachu, Link or Lara Croft, Master Chief or Mario, we love playing video games.
But what about preserving them?
Data shows we spend big money on photo restoration service games: more than $200 billion globally. By some reports, gaming is now bigger than the global film industry and the North American sports industry combined.
Despite all this growth, data also shows the industry has done a poor job stewarding its heritage and history. In fact, a recent study shows classic games are in critical danger of being lost.
Only 13 percent of all classic games released between 1960 and 2009 are currently commercially available.
Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States (2023).
Only 13 percent of all classic games released between 1960 and 2009 are currently commercially available, according to the “Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States,” published in 2023 by Phil Salvador for the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network.
Worse, this percentage drops below three percent for games released before 1985, “the foundational era of video games,” the study found.
The study considered a random sample of 1,500 games from the MobyGames database, as well as the entire catalog of the Nintendo Game Boy—4,000 games altogether.
The commercial unavailability of so many classic games leaves few viable options for playing them today. People can attempt to track down and buy increasingly-rare vintage games and hardware, visit a few specialty institutions, or resort to piracy, the study noted. Terrible options all around.
But what about cases where a game was never archived in the first place?
Journalist and computer historian, Josh Renaud.
That was a situation I ran into when I wanted to find copies of “Mom and Me” and “Murray and Me,” two graphical chatbots created in 1985 by Yaakov Kirschen, the Israeli artist best known for the “Dry Bones” cartoon in the Jerusalem Post. Kirschen died on April 14, 2025, at the age of 87.
These “artificial personalities” were among the earliest entertainment software released for the Atari ST computer, and they got splashy write-ups in newspapers including the London Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. Even three-time Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman wrote a profile in the New York Times.
Despite that publicity, and the advantage of getting in on the ground floor of a brand new computer platform, probably fewer than 2,000 copies were sold. Apparently I was one of the very few who had copies, which I received from my uncle Jim when he handed down his old Atari 520ST computer to my family in the early 1990s. I remember being amused as my brothers and I conversed with “Mom” and “Murray” back then.