As indicated, this last section was meant to be read with a grain of salt. It's fair to debate the sensorical context of such a game and to assign varying degre

As indicated, this last section was meant to be read with a grain of salt. It's fair to debate the sensorical context of such a game and to assign varying degrees of importance to this, depending on individual perspective. But I'd also argue that a point like this may be made. E.g., early LCD games are generally not valued highly, while their bigger VFD cousins, which are probably not more complex, tend to be welcomed as charming devices, accordingly enjoying much better chances of preservation. Super Mario Brothers on a cheap NES-on-chip with a tiny built-in display (and several hundreds of games at the tip of your finger to switch to anytime, as well) makes it certainly harder to understand, why this could have been the fascination of an entire generation of kids. Now we could argue that, for example, Alexandre Dumas' novels were for the most originally published as a series of episodes, which doesn't affect us, who know them only as books. However, it does matter to understand what this meant for some of the text strategy in those novels. And, since we still understand what this kind of publication is, we have indeed a chance to understand what this means. On the other hand, if a medium is entirely gone, it may be real hard to reconstruct this kind of context and it's meaning. (E.g., speaking of the C64, if you never have seen RF output on a customary consumer color cRT TV set, it may be hard to understand why Commodore switched from the rather elegant font of the PET to those blocky characters. Was it just for fancy? Right, it must have been so, since the 1980s loved bold fonts, weren't they?) Surely, these are minor details, but they may built up to an extent, were it becomes hard to understand the worth of abstract code. In some cases, like Spacewar!, the threshold may be lower, in other cases it may be more robust, but I wouldn't dare to bet future history on this. I think, we still may require constant awareness and constant involvement in adapting resources like emulators. ("Who cares, it will probably still run in 20 layers of emulation" may be not enough.) But then, it may be just me with my interest into those kinds of media types. However, for a beginning, we should come up with a format of ROM or media images, which includes the original instructions/documentation in a standard format. This may actually help quite a bit. (Compare the notion of ET on the VCS as the "worst game of all times", which only came to being in the 2000s, quite a while after the fact, and was based mostly on the fact that the game was now played without the instructions that would have been included with every cartridge. As I recall it, the most disappointing game on the system was the rushed Atari Pac-Man.)