Video games are a very interesting medium to me, when it comes to preservation. With movies, TV, Books, and Music, it is very easy and convenient to experience older content. CDs, DVDs, Bluerays, etc are very easy to play on almost any hardware (if you've invested heavily in Laser Disk, I have some bad news for you, though). Meanwhile any game ever made is largely trapped on the console it was designed for. If I want to show someone Casablanca, I can easily show them; but if I want to show them Ocarina of Time, I would need to have a 30 year old console if you believe Nintendo. This, to me, is absurd since A) Nintendo doesn't make any money even if I do buy the N64 cart, and B) I would need to buy and maintain every console that has a game with any cultural relevance for the foreseeable future.
Emulation is a very useful tool for game preservation. I've heard Nintendo is actually very good internally at game preservation and has original source code from every game they've ever made; but that doesn't do a lot of good when older generation games are left in the Nintendo vault. I wouldn't have a problem with Nintendo being so staunchly anti-emulation if they actually made their older games available, but if you ever want to play games like Chibi-Robo you either need to be OK shelling out ~180 USD for the game and ~80USD for the GameCube, or emulate it