I love old games, whether on the tabletop, consoles or computer.

Sometimes it's a game that I never got around to playing but read about in a magazine or on a website (remember when we had websites? They were great, you could go to them and talk to people). 

Often it is to experience the history of the medium. I love digging into an old tabletop game and seeing where it fits in the history of miniatures gaming. 

I think in a hobby as hype driven as games, it is easy for the past to disappear. Sometimes that past is well documented but this only happens when it is something that is famous enough to become the default. There is tons of documentation about the creation of Warhammer 40.000 or Dungeons and Dragons. Much less about games that were competitors at the time like Runequest or Warzone. And when you get even slightly into the weeds, there is nothing. Do you know a single thing about the history behind the creation of the Ghostbusters RPG? Crossfire? Spacefarers? 

I was watching a video last night discussing that Youtube used to provide their own tv shows. I guess this was one of those things that just completely escaped my attention. The video mentioned a particular show, Origin, so out of curiosity, I went to look it up and found out that it no longer exists. It was only ever available on Youtube but they have completely deleted it. The channel still exists but all the videos are gone (A friend suggested probably for tax purposes). 

And a lot of tabletop games of course will go the same way. Dog eared old print copies of course will circulate but they are subject to attrition every year as a few more copies are thrown out or damaged. I don't know how many copies of Melanda were ever printed but I can't imagine it was all that many. 

Digital copies are, as we are now learning, subject to the same. Games like Beamstrike had to be rescued by a fan when the original websites vanished. Red Poppy White Feather survives only because of the Internet Archive. 

On a personal level, the first edition of the Fast and Dirty rules may be lost. There are no doubt a couple of copies out there on old hard drives, some of which sit in a landfill somewhere. At some point they will all be lost or functionally inaccessible.

One of the things that separates an interest from crass consumerism I think is a sense of its own history. Maybe that's made up, but it makes sense to me. Miniatures gaming is not box sets and kickstarters. It's something people made and were a part of. I think it's important to retain a hold of that.