Limited Run has asked Nintendo to pull Gex Trilogy from the eShop as it doesn’t work on Switch 2

Gex was an important part of that era in video game history, and every game deserves to be preserved.

It definitely hasn’t aged well, but that’s largely because the humor was based on pop culture references. Talking about Jessica Simpson isn’t really cool anymore. But that the time, it was a sort of revolutionary thing to have games reference current pop culture. It made the games feel fresh, especially if you played them right at launch.

Were they great games? No. But from a gaming culture standpoint, they had a surprisingly large impact. Game devs learned what did and didn’t work in regards to the references and gameplay, and that alone makes them culturally important.

Also, games deserve to be preserved even if they didn’t have a massive impact on gaming. Even old Flash games have massive preservation efforts, because every single game was someone’s pet project. Imagine saying the same thing about a bad film. Sure, a modern 4k re-release may not need to exist, but that keeps it in modern formats and makes preservation easier.