Are video games disposable?

Being born in the early ’70’s, my first exposure to music was vinyl being played on my parents radiogram. I then remember getting my own personal music player, a reasonably large cassette player when I was around 7 or 8, followed by a Walkman at the age of 11. In 1990 I got my first CD player, eventually moving to a mini-disc player in the mid-90s.
Since discovering MP3s and my first iPod in 2003, things have never been the same. Or have they? Despite the changing media format of the music, I am still able to enjoy Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen on my iPhone just as much as I did on my parents radioogram in the late 70s.

The same is true of movie formats. Over the years I have been able to watch movies on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray or iTunes digital download, but again, I am still able watch a movie via iTunes which I originally saw on VHS in the early 80s.

However, this is not true for video games. This week I had a yearning to play Cannon Fodder that I originally played on an Amiga 500 in the late ’80s, but I couldn’t think of how to do so. My first thought was to install some sort of software emulator, but getting these working can be difficult, and I’m not exactly clear on the legal issues of doing so. Perhaps I could buy an Amiga computer and find a copy of Cannon Fodder on eBay? Forget it.
It seems that there is a vast history of video games that the current generation of gamers are simply denied access to. Yes, some older games are remade, but very few are available today, legally, in their original form.

What if today’s musicians were denied access to the likes of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Elvis or Rolling Stones and instead all they had access to was Westlife and the Cheeky Girls? Why are video gamers forced to live only in the present, could we not also enjoy our past?