The following guest post from journalist and computer historian Josh Renaud is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Whether it’s Pac-Man or Pikachu, Link or Lara Croft, Master Chief or Mario, we love playing video games.

But what about preserving them?

Data shows we spend big money on video games: more than $200 billion globally. By some reports, gaming is now bigger than the global film industry and the North American sports industry combined. 

Despite all this growth, data also shows the industry has done a poor job stewarding its heritage and history. In fact, a recent study shows classic games are in critical danger of being lost.

Only 13 percent of all classic games released between 1960 and 2009 are currently commercially available.

Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States (2023).

Only 13 percent of all classic games released between 1960 and 2009 are currently commercially available, according to the “Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States,” published in 2023 by Phil Salvador for the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network.

Worse, this percentage drops below three percent for games released before 1985, “the foundational era of video games,” the study found.

The study considered a random sample of 1,500 games from the MobyGames database, as well as the entire catalog of the Nintendo Game Boy—4,000 games altogether.

The commercial unavailability of so many classic games leaves few viable options for playing them today. People can attempt to track down and buy increasingly-rare vintage games and hardware, visit a few specialty institutions, or resort to piracy, the study noted. Terrible options all around. 

But what about cases where a game was never archived in the first place?

That was a situation I ran into when I wanted to find copies of “Mom and Me” and “Murray and Me,” two graphical chatbots created in 1985 by Yaakov Kirschen, the Israeli artist best known for the “Dry Bones” cartoon in the Jerusalem Post. Kirschen died on April 14, 2025, at the age of 87.

These “artificial personalities” were among the earliest entertainment software released for the Atari ST computer, and they got splashy write-ups in newspapers including the London Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. Even three-time Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman wrote a profile in the New York Times.

Despite that publicity, and the advantage of getting in on the ground floor of a brand new computer platform, probably fewer than 2,000 copies were sold. Apparently I was one of the very few who had copies, which I received from my uncle Jim when he handed down his old Atari 520ST computer to my family in the early 1990s. I remember being amused as my brothers and I conversed with “Mom” and “Murray” back then.

When nostalgia hit me decades later, I began searching online for disk images of these old programs. But there weren’t any, except for one obscure German translation of “Murray” in monochrome.

It was a startling realization: not all software has been preserved in an archive.

I wrote about this predicament in 2014 on my blog, Break Into Chat, which put me in touch with Kevin Ng, who also had some copies. We each made digital images of our old floppy disks, preserving several original versions of “Mom” and “Murray.” But the monochrome version of “Mom” remains lost.

In the years since then, I have continued researching Kirschen’s other lost software, ranging from multiple Jewish and secular educational games for the Apple II computer, to his “artificial creativity” autonomous music composing technology for the Commodore Amiga and the IBM PC. Like “Mom” and “Murray,” none of it sold well, nor was it preserved despite good publicity.

With the help of three fellow retrocomputing enthusiasts in St. Louis, I recovered many of Kirschen’s games and programs from floppy disks Kirschen sent to me. Keith Hacke imaged most of the Apple II and the IBM PC disks, while I imaged the Commodore Amiga disks using hardware loaned by Dan Hevey and Scott Duensing.

I published the disk images with summarized histories on Break Into Chat. Then I uploaded them to the Internet Archive, making them playable in web browsers—but more importantly, preserving them for posterity.

I’m proud to have played a part in bringing this dead software back to life, and restoring a part of Kirschen’s legacy. I think this work is worth rediscovering today. 

Take “Nosh Kosh” from 1983, for example. Essentially a Jewish take on Pac-Man, this is an action game designed to teach children about kashrut, Jewish dietary law. It was one of three games modeled on existing arcade classics made by Kirschen together with Gesher Educational Affiliates in Israel.

In “Nosh Kosh,” the player moves a kippah-wearing character named Chunky around the screen, trying to eat all the food items while avoiding three non-kosher bad guys: Peter Pig, Larry Lobster, and Freddy Frogslegs. There are three kinds of food—ice cream, meat, and carrots—but the player must wait a bit between eating the meat and ice cream, otherwise Chunky will yell “Oy!” and lose a life. 

Or consider Kirschen and Gesher’s more ambitious “The Georgia Variations,” a choice-based narrative game about Jewish history, identity, and migration, introduced the same year as “Nosh Kosh.”

In this game, the player takes on the role of Boris Goldberg, a Jewish boy in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century who must make decisions about school, work, marriage, and even what to do in the face of persecution and pogroms. The player’s decisions affect the storyline, but in the end, all the threads eventually lead to the same ending: Goldberg immigrates to Atlanta, Georgia. 

Niche educational games like these were far less popular than mainstream action and adventure games. The hobbyists and amateur archivists who preserved software of that time often skipped this genre entirely. And today, these sorts of games may not hold much interest for the general public. 

So why bother preserving them? 

The prolific Apple II preservationist “4am” gave a great answer in Paleotronic magazine:

“This was how we taught math and science and grammar and history to an entire generation of children. That seems like something worth saving.”

That’s certainly true of Kirschen’s work. In the Apple II games he made with Gesher, we see Jewish educators’ early steps learning to use a new medium to reach kids. And Kirschen’s later work with “artificial personalities” and “artificial creativity” foreshadows the promise and pitfalls of today’s AI craze.

I’m glad to have played a part in bringing this software back to life so others can have the opportunity to play it and study it.

About the author

Josh Renaud is a journalist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He publishes computer history research on his website, Break Into Chat. He is interested in recovering lost or obscure software, and telling the stories of the people who made and used it. In 2024 he received a Geffen and Lewyn Family Southern Jewish Research Fellowship  from Emory University to study papers related to Gesher’s educational computer games.