Oh, but there are "surviving" games, as they are still popular, and remixed, and emulated, and things like that. You have a Doom, a Tetris, Pacmans, Marios, even you have new editions of the series of the Monkey Island. That is one way to see surviving, still present, played, and with enough exposure in the media to still have a decent enough player base. And then you have curiosity items that may be in big bags of old games that are tried, discarded, but they are essentially forgotten.
That is one way to die, like a random book written 100 years ago that never became a classic and even if you can find a copy, it doesn't count as existing anymore for the current culture. A game that had enough players and cultural mindset, but that because the maker, the servers it used to run or whatever don't let them be played anymore can spawn copies and lookalikes with different names and get some player base, it is a different kind of death.
That is one way to die, like a random book written 100 years ago that never became a classic and even if you can find a copy, it doesn't count as existing anymore for the current culture. A game that had enough players and cultural mindset, but that because the maker, the servers it used to run or whatever don't let them be played anymore can spawn copies and lookalikes with different names and get some player base, it is a different kind of death.