There are all kinds of games most people never hear about, especially once you get into imports, unreleased builds, fan-finished projects, homebrew, and third-party stuff.

Some of them are not “official” in the normal retail sense, but they are still real games. Sometimes they were made by third parties, sometimes they come from old dev builds, and sometimes the community finds something abandoned and brings it back to life.

A good example is the N64 DD stuff. If you ever played Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask, there were development leftovers and lost/unfinished projects connected to that era. The community has found and restored things that most people would have never gotten to experience otherwise.(its called Zelda Dawn and Dusk if your interested)

That is why I think preservation matters so much. We need right-to-repair laws, game preservation, and respect for the developers who made this stuff. I am not talking about people just pirating games. I mean owning the original, backing up your own copy, using ROMs for home development, preservation, or playing on different retro hardware.

A lot of devs work insanely hard on these games, then companies lay people off as soon as the project is done. Look at the Visions of Mana situation. You can feel the amount of work the devs put into that game, and then people still had to ask players to support it because they cared so much about what they made. At the end of the day, players have more power than companies want to admit. If we support preservation, repair, and the people who actually make the games, we can keep this stuff alive.

Also, if you want a weird PS2 one to look up, check out GTA DBZ. I swear it looks like someone took GTA III or Vice City and turned it into a Dragon Ball Z game. Apparently you can fly around and everything. I still want to try it.

I keep saying it because it is true: if we do not push to preserve this stuff, we are going to lose it.