In what is largely a passionate tirade directed at the careless mishandling of classic titles when re-released on modern platforms, the A.V. Club spares some room toward the end to rail against the complete failure of certain treasured games to be made available at all:
Game preservation’s worst-kept secret is that piracy has done the best job of keeping classic games available and relevant. Since the mid-’90s, the Internet’s vast and varied emulation scene has made the history of video games available to anyone willing to skirt the law. And unfortunately, playing some of the best games ever made requires a disregard for copyright. Take Maniac Mansion. An icon of the LucasArts studio’s golden age, it’s one of the most important adventure games ever made, and it’s still entertaining today. If you want to play in 2014, though, you’ll need to download it illegally and run it through an emulator, since it hasn’t been in print for close to 20 years.
Disney, which now owns the rights to the LucasArts library, may never acknowledge the studio’s legacy, but that would just maintain the status quo. Most of the developer’s best titles have never been made available to any digital marketplace. If you’re just learning about LucasArts and want to play games like Sam & Max Hit The Road, Day Of The Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango, you’re on your own. Disney would rather hot-glue lightsabers to the hands of Mickey and Donald dolls than offer players the chance to buy games that Disney executives might not even realize they own.
I feel like he may be painting with too broad of a brush by indicting hot glue in this, but his point stands firm.
Source: The A.V. Club
clone2727
And by "download it illegally", surely he means "buy on eBay".
Probably, but what if he means "treat the publisher with the same respect they show customers"?
Someone at LucasArts at least tried to do some good after Wii was released, I was surprised to see pretty much all of Lucasarts' SNES games become available in the Virtual Console catalogue, shame that the prices in Nintendo's Virtual Console are a bit insane.
People would buy tons more of the virtual console games if the prices were like 2 euros/dollars for NES/Master System games, 3 euros/dollars for SNES/Mega Drive games etc.