In an article in Library Journal discussing controversial video games such as the recently released Grand Theft Auto V, the Stanford Libraries’ curator of the history of science, technology, film and media, Henry Lowood, was interviewed at length about the complexity of long-term preservation of video games and their iterations: "Digital games, as software, are a form of multimedia, and almost every other [digital] media you can imagine is embedded in games—there are movies, music, there's text here and there, animation.

There are all kinds of layers to the software, relating to other kinds of software. It's a very complex multimedia object. So, one argument can be made for tackling digital game preservation is—to put it bluntly—if you can solve that problem, you can probably solve any other digital preservation problem. It's that complex."

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/11/digital-content/saving-games/