This has gotten me thinking about legal deposit requirements, such as those that have existed for centuries in certain countries where published works must have a copy submitted to a national library for conservation purposes. Does anyone know if there are initiatives like this for video games? How are they going?
Emulation is kind of in a legal grey area, and relies on the free labour of volunteers. Who’s to say that in 50-100 years’ time there will still be people able and/or willing to maintain the emulators? You could also argue that emulation is an imperfect reproduction of the actual gaming experience - emulators can both cause bugs or make the game actually run better than it did when it was released.