The ultimate example of this, I think, is the Sega Dreamcast.
Nintendo, especially back then, made very durable hardware that can take a beating. Sega does not. The Sega Saturn’s cartridge slot will crumble to dust if you so much as blink within a 10 mile radius of it.
The Dreamcast was known to have wonky controller ports, but more importantly, more than a third of all Dreamcasts have defective disc drive mechanisms. Essentially, all optical lasers are rated for how many times the laser can be turned on. Sony was actively worried that Crash Bandicoot, with its CD-streaming technology, would actually break the Playstation because conservative estimates lowballed how many times the laser could be used.
That’s because lasers generate heat, even miniscule amounts, so every time you read a disc, you are damaging your hardware. Fortunately for Sony, the rate of damage was only something like 0.000002%.
That’s not true of the Dreamcast. By the time Sega announced they were getting out of the console market (around three years), a rapidly growing number of Dreamcasts were already showing signs of degradation.
The Dreamcast, unlike most optical-media consoles, uses proprietary hardware. This means your Dreamcast discs cannot be read by anything other than a Dreamcast. (Now, I know there are drives for the PC that can read Dreamcast-format GD-ROMs, but they are extremely rare; you’d have better luck winning the lottery than getting one)
What this ultimately means is there are a finite number of Sega Dreamcasts in the world and every day that number gets smaller. These consoles were not built to last 20 years. They apparently weren’t even built to last five years.
The following is a very incomplete list of Dreamcast games that have never been ported to any other platform and are thusly permanently shackled to Sega’s decay:
Climax Graphics bizarrely unique horror games, “Blue Stinger” and “Illbleed.” Capcom’s top-down shooter mash-up “Cannon Spike.” SNK’s visually striking rhythm game, “Cool Cool Toon.” One of Kenji Eno’s final games before he died, “D2.” Sega’s own “Daytona USA 2001,” which combined content from all versions of Daytona USA up to that point. The visually enhanced version of “Soul Reaver” produced by Eidos. And so on.
A lot of these games may never come back. The only way you’ll ever play them is to download an ISO and load them up in an emulator.
What about “Segagaga”? It’s a roleplaying game made by Sega that’s ABOUT parodying the death of the Dreamcast. It was never even released in English. If the translation patch is ever finished, literally the only way you’ll ever get to experience this silly slice of history is to pirate it. You can’t buy the disc, copy it to your PC, and apply the patch that way. That’s as close to impossible as it gets. Because of the way this hardware works (or in some cases, doesn’t work), you will have to pirate this game to play it.
You cannot tell me destroying sites like Emuparadise is “fine” in that kind of light.
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