What is and isn't worth preserving is not something that can be known at the time of preserving. The point of preservation is so things can be accessed later if and when they're needed. Even shitty games like Avengers may be relevant in many ways in the future, even if just to reference as 'a shitty game'.

I disagree. I think games are definitely worth preserving, even if they aren't that fun. Regardless, this game has historical significance and should at the very least be playable after it's delisted.

I recently saw this video about the British Library. They collect everything that's published in the UK (books, magazines, papers, leaflets, flyers, ...). One of the librarians makes a pretty good case about the use of collecting and preserving everything. Even (or especially) the things you don't think are worth preserving.

"Good" is not the metric for preserving things. "Important" is. Marvel's Avengers is important to preserve because this failure is a major historical milestone.

Like, imagine if somehow every copy of ET for the Atari 2600 vanished. Would anything fun be lost? Of course not. But would we lose some critical context in an important historical event? Yes. Very much so.

Fortunately, Atari games aren't the kind of ephemeral media where we have to worry about that like cloud-service games or pre-code cellulite films.