Every new hardware generation moves the goalposts anew, potentially condemning more titles to obscurity. With software, you don't just need the game, you need the hardware and the operating system required for it to work. Hollywood doesn't let hit films from 15 years ago fall out of circulation, so why are games from the same era so quickly forgotten? The solution, in those cases, is always fairly simple though - provided one copy of the film still exists, it can be saved. Vast swathes of Hollywood history are lost every time home entertainment formats move forwards, as hundreds of titles fail to make the transition and get left behind. It's a problem that's also unique to gaming, given the simple fact that game code interacts with its platform in far more complex ways than video, audio or text do. This is the problem that gaming will always face when it comes to keeping its history - even from only a few years ago - alive and accessible.
Some of the choices were downright bizarre, and based as much on which publishers made their catalogues available, and which games could be reliably emulated without issue. The PlayStation Store previously carried a range of PSOne and PS2 Classics during the last generation of hardware, but while many great games were included, many more never saw the light of day. That would be the dream, but the reality is likely to be rather more muted. Surely the floodgates must soon open, releasing hundreds of beloved classics back into the PlayStation ecosystem? Sony's stealth announcement that it can emulate PS2 games on the PlayStation 4, as revealed by the bundle of retro Star Wars games included with the Battlefront-branded console, has quite rightly resulted in a lot of excitement and anticipation.
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