Rare Replay is a good collection of classic games from a notable developer. I'm not going to sit on my high horse and say that other collections like Atari 50 wouldn't have been released without it, but at the very least, it showed an interest in future releases in its vein.

Why good and not fantastic? Simply put, Rare Replay is a superb piece of preservation for some games—but not all. All of the games are on the disc, even the ones that need to be downloaded. But the ones that need to be downloaded require an online connection to be activated, lest the user pirate a digital copy of a game that they acquired from an official, Microsoft-endorsed physical one.

Right now, this is a fantastic deal. Twenty years from now, I don't know if those activation servers will still be up. Should that happen, the worst emulation in any three of the Midway Arcade Treasures games will have more value than a game you have installed but will never be allowed to play.

The hostile takeover from owning the games you play to owning glorified rentals is going to have severe consequences for preservation in the long haul. In fact, you can already start to see some of those consequences in action. Piracy is not a good solution; it requires a lot of the right pieces to be in place in order to function, and if any of them get scattered, it's entirely possible that the hard work of an entire team over long stretches of time will be lost to time.

Rare Replay will still be mostly playable when, or if, that happens, but it will never be a complete package.