Video Games have been a common place media in the modern house hold for a generation. Ever since the take off of the Atari 2600 in 1977 the medium has grown and evolved at an astounding rate over the past four decades. But all this rapid progress brings a problem. Many games from over this time have been completely lost with no copy of them able to be played. Silent Hill, a game from the late 90s’s source code was largely lost by it’s developer’s Konami, as such it’s remaster a few years ago needed to be built off of unfinished code, as will any future port of the game. And in recent times, the game Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a game that came out THIS decade, was take n off of all store shelves. And with being a digital download only game, there are no used copies, meaning the copies that were already sold to people are the only instances of the game left in the world. One day those computers could break, lose their data, or the owners could just not care anymore, and that game could be lost.

But it’s not just video games, T.V. shows, music, movies, all these forms of media, in our digital age, have a danger of being forgotten by the wayside. There are countless shows out there that are on no streaming services and have no physical release in DVD or Blu-ray format to speak of, the only place they still exist being on pirate websites for fans to download, and those are always in danger of being shut down.

The bottom line is, if we don’t preserve the media we know and love, it will eventually be buried and forgotten under the mountain of shiny new pieces of media we are bombarded with each day. That is where the GMA comes in:

(GMA (Guild of Media Archivists) working poster)

The GMA will be a US based, hopefully eventually international, organization dedicated to finding and preserving media from Video Games to shows, to music. It will function as a non-profit driven by it’s user base through social media. It’s preservation tactics will rely on the very thing that is helping us lose most of this media, the digital internet! Users who have the hard drive space to dedicate to preservation will be given back-ups of media, so no one piece of media is ever isolated to one server. Ideally the media would be sectioned off into categories and each category would have sub divisions for each group of users, and every piece of media would have at least three separate users with it saved to their preservation hard drives.

It will also, provided peliminary endevors prove successful, approach companies with old media not being used for any profit if they would be willing to relinquish copies of the work for preservation.