Old books are easy to read, old music is easy to listen to, and even old movies and TV shows are easy to watch, if you can even find them. Old video games are another matter. Aside from the problem of them being hard to find in the first place, changes in technology can make them impossible to run. The end of Flash, for example, threatened the existence of thousands of games saved at the last minute.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer ponders the potential loss of video game history. 'I hope that we can band together as an industry and help preserve the history of video games.'

"I think about what the Paley Center did for television. Early on, Paley saw that the television industry was literally throwing away tapes of old TV shows. As an industry, we want to work together to preserve the history of our industry and not lose access to what made us what we are today."

The avid retro gaming hobbyist is attached to old PCs, obscure consoles, and "real" games in boxes complete with manuals, registration cards, and feelies. However, Spencer believes that cloud gaming, which does not require investing in old hardware or mastering emulators, can play a much larger role when considering game preservation more broadly.

In a similar vein, Spencer said that recent releases will benefit from online services such as Xbox Live and Game Pass.

"Seeing more people playing things like 'Prey' and 'Dishonored' and going back to 'Fable,' we can talk about those games and sit back as a creative organization and see what people are interested in. For those of us who are looking, it gives us more data to think about new ideas and new teams that might pick up and move forward with things that might want to do it," he said.

"Game Pass is definitely a great resource. When Bethesda came in, we were able to put so many "old new releases" or "new old releases" into Game Pass, and we were able to go back to the legacy of some of the IPs that we have. thinking about things like Rare Replay was also really It's been interesting.

Microsoft will continue to do that, Spencer added, because the Xbox Game Pass business model makes it feasible. "It doesn't have to be a GAAS (game as a service) version of the game." All it needs to be is "this game is out there and people enjoy it as a service.

The full text of Phil Spencer's Kinda Funny interview follows.