It's important to me not as a consumer, but as an enthusiast of video games that methods are developed to get the games from all decades playable. Eventually most cartridges will be lost or destroyed, most discs will be scratched to hell or broken, most consoles will stop reading games properly, or will break somehow..
It may take twenty or thirty years but eventually it could be the case that some games are just completely lost to the sands of time. I'm pretty sure it's already happened for some early ones.
We really need to work on proper archival of this stuff. It's obviously harder to do than with traditional media because you need to actually 'run' the thing rather than just record it, but that's why I'm so appreciative of emulation efforts by people like byuu with bsnes (or higan, I guess) and the like. That solution is obviously going to become nearly unmanageable once we start getting into the more complex systems, unfortunately.
