I can think of maybe 2 or 3 games total with a meaningful gimmick that needed specific hardware or control schemes to really "work". Losing it diminishes the ga

I can think of maybe 2 or 3 games total with a meaningful gimmick that needed specific hardware or control schemes to really "work". Losing it diminishes the game but doesn't completely invalidate it, so it's sad but it's not really the case for the thousands of other games I've played. Better to have the original game archived as an LP, perhaps even an LP that tries to capture the essence of the gimmick for people who can't experience it. I think we're entering a space now where this is a concern for more games though - an LP or emulated gameplay for experimental VR games or games with custom controllers may not live up to the experience at all, which is unfortunate, but not really avoidable. The most easily understood example is 999, a game for the Nintendo DS that utilized the two-screens quirk of the system for narrative purposes. It was later ported to mobile and those versions had to drop the twist since there was no way to express it on other platforms. (To briefly summarize, the two screens represented separate timelines and the DS's constraint of only allowing touch input on one screen meant that whatever you saw on that screen was the only thing you could actively participate in)