A lot of people are surprised to discover that I’ve never really been a big player of computer games. This isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate them, but my interest has trended more towards their underlying gameplay algorithms and their graphical realizations.

Still, and all, I was interested to see this World’s Largest Arcade column on Ars Technica. Apparently, there are two contenders for the title of “world’s largest”: Funspot in the town of Laconia, New Hampshire, and Galloping Ghost in the town of Brookfield, Illinois.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. The thing that’s niggling away at (what I laughingly call) my mind at the moment is the news that, as we read on the ComicBook website, the world’s biggest repository of retro video games—Myrient—is shutting down!

It turns out that Myrient is not a traditional company in the usual corporate sense. It’s essentially a large online archive of retro video game ROMs and disk images, created and run by a small preservation community (largely one main operator) rather than a formal business.

We’re talking about a 390-terabyte online database of game files. That’s a lot of terabytes, let me tell you. What happens when Myrient closes its metaphorical doors forever? Will this data be lost forever, or will it be preserved as a cache for future generations to rediscover?

I’m reminded of the classic science fiction story, A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge. At the beginning of this tale, a scientific expedition arrives at a remote, derelict facility that once belonged to a long-extinct alien civilization. The installation contains vast amounts of stored knowledge—essentially a gigantic data archive left behind by earlier, highly advanced beings.

While probing the archive, the explorers begin unlocking increasingly deeper layers of the stored data. They eventually activate something that was deliberately sealed away by the original builders. Instead of merely uncovering information, they awaken an ancient, malevolent superintelligence.

This is a powerful entity that had been imprisoned in the archive because it was too dangerous to exist freely. The entity rapidly takes control of the archive’s systems, hijacks the expedition’s computers, and subverts or kills most of the researchers. And all this takes place in the prologue before we’ve even reached the start of Chapter 1.

Perhaps someone has already mirrored the Myrient archive and tucked the whole thing away somewhere safe. If so, then maybe—years or even decades from now—someone will rediscover it like an ancient data vault left behind by a long-gone civilization.

Happily, instead of unleashing a galaxy-destroying superintelligence, they’ll find something far less threatening and much more charming: Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders… and a few hundred thousand other little fragments of digital history. And should that happen, mayhap they will pause for a moment and smile as those blinking pixels tell them something about us.