I’ve playedthrough Loom, a classic Lucas Arts adventure game, and it was fantastic to experience a 30 year old work of interactive software, that is easily playable today and has aged so gracefully. I guess, that level of accessibility is possible because of DOS, the operating system this game was designed for originally, being free to use and easy to emulate.
Modern mobile apps and games, on the contrary, vanish so quickly. Many many games even from a couple of years ago don’t work any more. On mobile, software has become ephemeral: the transition from 32 to 64 bit, the ever-changing system APIs, the rule that requires apps to make at least one update every two years if they don’t want to be delisted from the app store, etc.
That’s very disappointing for future us. A whole generation of software could be completely lost. Loom proofs that good software design is timeless and should be preserved.