Poetic.Injustice
Member
Back in 2010, a blogger on the video game website RF Generation, frustrated with a series of purchases in which the games had suffered a degree of disc rot before reaching him, wrote a PSA to the game-collector community, calling on them to keep an eye out regarding the problem.
The blogger, who goes under the pseudonym slackur or Jesse Mysterious, then described a harrowing tale for a serious collector: After reading up on the disc rot problem, he went through his game collection, much of it in mint condition, and found white specs on many of the discsa major tell sign of disc rot, or the eventual decay of optical media.
Ill let him take it from here:
Even though it is only one little dot, it represents damage that cannot be repaired. No scratch removal process can restore the data that is now lost. The game is forever damaged, and likely to get worse over the years.
Now, many sources online will claim that disc rot is a limited-scope problem, concerning only a few years worth of discs from certain manufacturers, (and CD-Rs) and that it is not wide-spread.
But when I learned about this problem, I checked my several hundred discs between Sega CD, Turbo CD, Saturn, and even Dreamcast games and found DOZENS had this problem. Several expensive games I owned were mintexcept when held to the light I could see one or more little white dots that proved my game had damage. Some of these I went back to play after not touching for years and found they now would occasionally lock up or not play at all. I had a few FACTORY SEALED games that I opened and found the same thing.
It has been a nerve-shattering nightmare for a collector like me.
Michele Youket, a preservation specialist at the Library of Congress, often deals with similar situations in her role. She says that this kind of silent destruction, which shows up in three different formsthe bronzing of discs, small pin-hole specs located on the discs, or edge-rotbecame an important one for the national library when the organization started archiving music on CD formats, with the formats weaknesses soon becoming apparent.
http://tedium.co/2017/02/02/disc-rot-phenomenon/
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...nt_killer_curbing_video_game_preservation.php
A lot more at the link.