How to Help / Get Involved.

Learn the Landscape

Preservation touches copyright law, hardware failure, digital rights, and archival science. Before you can contribute effectively, it helps to understand the terrain. Start with who is doing the work, what the law currently allows, and where the active fights are happening. The organizations doing preservation work range from large nonprofits with legal teams to small community-run projects operating on volunteer hours alone. The legal landscape determines what is permitted and what remains a gray area. The technical side covers how games are actually saved, transferred, and made accessible to future generations. Build from wherever your interest leads and expand from there.

Preserve Physical Media

Physical game media has a lifespan, and it is shorter than most people assume. Cartridge batteries die, disc surfaces break down through a process called disc rot, and the hardware needed to run older games becomes harder to find and maintain with every passing year. If you own games, consoles, manuals, or box art, proper storage is itself an act of preservation. Keep materials away from humidity and heat, document what you have, and note condition and regional variants. If you are a serious collector sitting on rare or significant items, consider whether they would be better served in an institutional archive where researchers can access and study them long-term. Organizations like the Video Game History Foundation and the National Video Game Museum accept material donations and can advise on what they are looking for.

Understand Digital Preservation and the Law

Copying a game, bypassing its copy protection, or running it through an emulator exists in complicated legal territory. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act places strict limits on what is permitted, though the Library of Congress grants specific exemptions every three years that allow certain preservation activities. Understanding where those lines are matters both for protecting yourself and for advocating intelligently for the policy changes the field still needs. The law has not kept pace with the reality of digital preservation, and that gap is where a lot of the most important advocacy work is currently focused.

Document the Cultural Record

Writing about your experiences, contributing to community wikis, recording gameplay footage of undocumented titles, and translating materials from other regions all contribute to the historical record in ways no institution can replicate at scale. Development histories, regional release differences, hardware quirks, and the cultural context surrounding a game's release are exactly the kind of detail that gets lost when the people who lived through it move on without writing any of it down. None of this requires technical expertise. It requires attention and the willingness to put it somewhere others can find it.

Donate to Preservation Organizations

Several organizations depend on public support to fund their work, and the gap between what they can accomplish and what needs doing is significant. The Video Game History Foundation conducts research, recovers lost games, lobbies for policy reform, and maintains a growing archive. The Internet Archive hosts thousands of playable titles and has fought legal battles to keep them available. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment focuses on source code and online game preservation. Even modest financial support has a direct impact on what these organizations can take on, and many accept one-time donations as well as recurring contributions.

Follow and Support the Legal Fight

Some of the most important preservation work is happening in courtrooms and legislative chambers. The Copyright Office's triennial exemption process determines what preservationists are legally allowed to do, and those proceedings affect everyone in the field. Stop Killing Games demonstrated that public pressure moves policy, gathering over a million signatures and earning a hearing before the European Parliament. When petitions are open, sign them. When comment periods are active, submit one. When exemption requests are filed, share them. These actions have measurable effects on outcomes, and the field needs people who understand the stakes well enough to show up when it counts.

Engage With the Academic and Research Community

Preservation is increasingly a subject of serious academic inquiry, studied by archivists, legal scholars, game historians, and information scientists. If you are a researcher, librarian, or student, there is an active and growing body of literature to contribute to and build on. Citing preservation concerns in relevant academic work, publishing findings, and bringing preservation into curricula helps legitimize the field and builds the evidence base that policymakers and courts rely on when making decisions that affect what can legally be saved and shared.

Talk About It

Preservation suffers partly because most people do not know the problem exists. The games they grew up with feel permanent. They do not know the storefront could close tomorrow or that the cartridge in the attic has a failing battery. Talking about preservation in the spaces you already occupy, whether that is an online community, a classroom, or a group chat, raises visibility and builds the public awareness that institutional and legislative change depends on. The more people who understand what is at stake, the harder it becomes for the issue to stay invisible. You do not need a platform or a following. You just need to bring it up.