I have some very old CDs, mostly retro video games. Is there a way to pull the games and data off the CDs for preservation?

Yes, this is what a CD drive is for. If you have CD-ROMs, you can image them for a perfect copy, or you can copy their files out like you would with any other drive.

You can probably find an old computer with a CD drive for free to do it with.

Or spend $10 for a USB CD/DVD Writer/Reader
- Or $110 if you're a moron like me, going for a state-of-the-art LG drive that does the same exact job and nothing more
Thanks! I think my pc has a CD drive, I'll see about imaging the files.

I'm not sure if it's still around, but Alcohol 120% used to be great for bit for bit copying to iso

That's a name I haven't heard in a very long time.
- I am taken back into time by 20+ years. I remember hearing from my friends that it's the best lightweight imaging tool
It is still around actually! I looked into it a month or two ago when I was having some similar thoughts as OP. I found it quite cool they'll let you download a windows 9x compatible version too for people using the images on a retro machine.
I've done the DVDs I care about, and ensuring I've got FLACs of all my CDs is probably next.
I'm deciding if it's actually worth doing my PS1 games given I've already got a (not entirely legitimate) full 1g1r library on my media server, my rarest game is probably silent hill and that's definitely already in there.
I'll look into it, thanks!
- Please don't. It's ancient.
I forgot about that! Good times.

Ripping it to an ISO file is basically the "industry standard". Something else I used to see when sailing the high seas back in the day is bin/cue pairs, but iso was by far the most prevalent. I have long since forgotten how this is done on windows, but on Linux it's basically dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/home/studmuffin2000/somecd.iso

Depends on the CD. If it’s just a data CD, iso is the way to go. If it’s a mixed mode CD with data plus audio, bin/cue will preserve the audio tracks but iso may not. Also, mixed Joliet/HFS CDs can lose one of the formats if imaged with an iso imager.
The big thing is that you want to image the entire CD and not just the most recent track on the CD.
- That makes sense - I never looked into why bin/cue was sometimes used. Would that mean that bin/cue is better for multitrack and mixed mode CDs?
- how do you figure out if it's a plain data CD or there's something extra on it too?

Before you spend effort on this, check archive.org and see if the software has already been archived.

Archive.org has tutorials on how to upload as well. I'm too lazy to go find them right now though.

you can mostly just create ISO files from the discs.

some original discs, especially games, may have a copy protection scheme (safedisc, securom, etc) that makes them unplayable without being run with the original media, though. there was some software back then that worked pretty well at 'making backups' of those discs. also note that some drives (the hardware itself) were better than others at running that software to make them. i haven't kept up with that stuff in a very long time, so i don't have a clue what exists today.

yeah that's what in afraid of, if it's copywrite or DRM protected.
- The tools to get around early CD DRM copy protection is still available on GameCopyWorld's website. I'd provide more detail but unfortunately you asked this on the .world instance. Hit up db0 piracy community if you wanna go that route.

Be carful when cleaning the dust off. The tiniest scratch could corrupt data.

Good point. I'm not sure how old these are either, if the data is already corrupted or if they have disc rot or anything

ImgBurn

If you let us know what operating system you’re using, we can make some recommendations for some apps to use for archiving your CD collection.

As was mentioned in another comment, you can rip the CDs into images (.iso files) which you can store and mount anytime!

My PC is on Pop!_OS, I'm pretty sure it has a CD drive with it too.
- How are you with working in the command line? If so, just use:
  dd if=/dev/cdrom of=backup.iso

Just write it down.