That takes time and effort, and has legal implications that the archive might not want to deal with.

it's a video game archive. Virtually no video game due to the young age of the medium is in the public domain, so both creating digital backups, let alone making them available is a pretty good way to find yourself in a court with the rightsholders.

You may not have experienced gaming in the 1980s and 1990s. Games back then were more than just a stream of bits. They had physical maps (sometimes on cloth, not paper). They had actual manuals (and many of them were art in itself). Disks were in strange, unusual colors, later CDs had shapes, or hidden audio tracks. I vividly remember a copy-protection scheme of black, slightly shiny ink on black paper to prevent photocopying (to read one of the 400 random codes, you had to tilt the page just right.

That needs to be preserved. Just making a digital copy isn't enough.

The issue here is that a picture of a book is not a book, a copy of a game is the same game. Barring people with excellent and well-adjusted monitors looking at uncompressed images, the pics we see are (potentially excellent, but still) approximations of the original.

With software the notion of an original is meaningless though.