ABSTRACT
This chapter begins from the position that game fan preservationists deserve recognition for their efforts in ensuring that historic games and documentation have survived. Retro-game communities grasped the threats to digital games' longevity before the fragility of digital media was widely appreciated. The chapter identifies the privileging of the 'original experience' as one such point of difference, noting that whilst this notion is important to some game fans and collectors. It also presents problems for critical game historians, preservationists and others involved in curating and presenting game history, now and into the future. The chapter argues that the newly emergent subfield of the history of games, and indeed, that of born digital cultural heritage more generally, needs to move beyond the paradigm of 'original experience' to ask different questions. Nostalgia has been the dominant mode of remembering early games for at least a decade, but this tendency goes beyond what is now quite a widespread longing for retro-games.
