I'm doing it on GOG. And paying a 3€ service fee to have NES games running on my 3DS? Seem fair to me.

If everything else would fail, you could still play then on old systems. I still got my old Win98 rig for playing games like e.g. Silver (one of the games I bought about 10 years ago and only started playing last year).

Yeah, €3-4 as a "convenience fee" is not an unfair rate, just as long as you see it as a rental and not a purchase. Where I'd draw the line is having some publisher dictate to me that I can no longer play my old game at all, old hardware or not, and that I'll have to buy it again if I want to play.

Probably every single game I own, because I'm so slow to finish any of them. I play one for a while and really get into it (Guild Wars at the moment), then I get tired of it and move on to something else, and then go back when the mood hits again.

The only games I don't play more than once are the ones that end up being way too short because I actually finish them relatively quickly (like Call of Duty and Modern Warfare games). They're fun while they last, but there's not a lot of depth or options, so one run is enough (I strictly play offline).

Let's see, only about 15% of the games I've bought from GOG were ones that I've previously owned. Oh, there are a good bunch of others available that I've played but I have little interest in these days. That right there is already a good indication of how few games there are that I'd actually be willing to replay, and those tend to be primarily strategy/simulation games that are more open-ended or have random scenario generators.

Most other games that have stories to tell and/or are just plain linear are usually a one-shot deal for me, unless I have reeeeeally fond memories of a particular game and I feel like replaying it which is very rare in my case (Crusader, ho!). As some others have mentioned it's like reading books, in which case I hardly ever go back to a one once I'm done with it.

Right now I'm playing through Fallout for the first time (after a few false starts) because of all that Wasteland talk lately - I've only bought it a couple of years ago. It is quite a fun game, and I know there are often different ways to approach certain situations (i.e. I chose to obliterate the military base rambo-style rather than being sneaky), but I'm quite doubtful that I'll actually come back to the game once I'm done with it. Also, seeing how I always like to be the 'good guy' I practically never replay these choice type of games as the bad apple.

So yeah, the less clear-cut story is involved in a game the more I'm likely to replay a game down the line, which clearly shows in some of my all-time favorites: MoO2, HoMM 3, UT, Sim City 2000, Worms, Alpha Centauri...

And your ol' PC still works? Well, it probably won't work in next 10 years.

And you can't install old system on new machines, because they don't have drivers for old OS.

It's a dead end, sooner or later we'll hit that point.

If I'd live on in 20 years, I'd possibly still play the city builder games and maybe the Tony Hawk games. :-)

But these days games are pretty much finish-and-move-on because there are so many...

I don't think I'll ever go back to today's games once I get my holodeck.

WINE does an excellent job of emulating Windows 98 under Linux, plenty of people are working on getting Windows 95 working under DOSBox. We have Bochs, which emulates a full PC.

There are plenty of options but little desire to refine it at the moment as the number of Windows games that refuse to run on native platforms is minimal. As we move towards 64-bit ubiquity, some kind of emulation layer for 16-bit executables or a Windows 3.1 layer in DOSBox is not unthinkable.

People are already emulating older versions of D3D using WINE on modern versions of Windows.

Thanks for the info, jamyskis. So maybe not everything is lost. I was thinking what I would do with my old games in next years. My beloved Age of empries or Europa Universalis 2 for example. I was rather pesimistic, but from what I hear from you, it's not all dark. There's hope! :P

Obviously, we can live without any games at all. But then, that makes for a dull conversation. Frankly, there's probably somewhere like 50 games, that if I could only have 10 or 15 in that whole list, I'd be happy for a good long while. It helps that since I'm going to college right now, I don't have the hardware for decent PC gaming or the time for much gaming, and coming from a two sibling house meant I had to leave all but one home console back home. I've got a DS, PSP, 3DS, and the console I took was our old NES, of which 15 months after moving into this place, I finally got a TV to use it with last night.

As far as what I still play, tons. I'd play more if the equipment worked better and there was less static when trying to use older systems on the 50 inch. I've got NES games that I pull out from time to time, gameboy games that I pull out. Most of my favorite RPG games are on PS1 and PS2, and I still play N64 and xbox when in the mood. Out of maybe 400 games around the house, there's probably about 4 dozen that I haven't touched in the last six years (not including games I never played, either due to lack of interest [except my brother] or games that would never run [Specifically, some xbox titles that I couldn't get to work]. And some of those that I haven't touched are due to the fact that 360 isn't fully backwards compatible. I also don't care for sports games), so yeah, I still do like to plug in an old console and go back to pixels and rough polygons.

Windows licensing is really going to fuck with playing old games in the future.

Like I would care about microsoft license in that case!

I probably won't be replaying many, if any, of the single player games I've already beaten.

Mainly because I'll still be going through my current (and ever growing) backlog of games.

I've had some games in my backlog for over a decade now as well (Ultima 1-8 collection, for one thing.)

Maybe you wouldn't care, but GOG definitely would. They will be screwed if future operating systems become incompatible with older Windows games and there's no legal emulator like DOSBox available.