"Last Chance to Save Your Digital Games on Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS Stores"

Nintendo is closing the digital storefronts for the Wii U and 3DS consoles on March 27, leaving classic games like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies or Pokémon X & Y no longer widely purchasable on the aging hardware. Fans are concerned about how to preserve this ephemeral but beloved medium as official access gets more limited. Video games require special hardware to play and don't exist in the physical world, making archiving difficult. Emulation and hardware-based solutions like FPGAs have provided safer solutions, but there are legal issues with creating and distributing ROMs. The future of game preservation is in considering more than just the literal games themselves, as all games have additional context that could be lost if not preserved and told.