The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion

I have a passion for a very small niche within this - Preserving user-created levels for the game Quake III Arena.

When I was a kid we got our first PC just as Quake (1) released. We didn't have a modem to get online, but magazine cover disks sometimes included custom user maps and mods. I'd run around them offline, wondering in awe at these empty spaces and amazed at being able to explore a 3d space that someone somewhere else in the world had conjured from their own imagination and effort. In time I figured out the tools and techniques, and even released some of my own content to add to the mix. That sense of wonder has stuck with me for over twenty years, and while I very much enjoy playing the games, it's not just about that - Accessing and exploring the spaces themselves is fascinating and hold inherent value to me.

I recently came back to spending more time with the games, and see a great deal of that custom content dropping offline never to be seen again as the sites that used to host them wind down and dry up. A lot of it has likely already been lost. I'm digging through every available source I can to try and dig out as much content as possible, but of course it'll never be 'complete' in the same way that a ROM collection for a classic console might be.

Then, quite aside from finding and saving, there's the question of how to make it accessible (and interesting) to anyone else. I'd like to think it's of interest to more than just me, but maybe it isn't? Perhaps daves_awesome_map_v5.pk3 and the thousands of others I have stashed don't really have an audience beyond that one weirdo that saved them =)

On the offchance you're reading this and have any old Quake 3 custom content stashed away in your closet, please get in touch!

I joined a group of vintage computing enthusiasts recently, dedicated to a specific platform. During a recent online meetup, I watched as one of the members attempted to archive newly discovered cassette tape copies of previously unavailable commercial software applications from the late '70s. These may well be the only copies in existence - at least as far as we know now they are.

During the meeting, there was a hairy moment where the tape broke and got tangled up and likely ruined. This happened because of an old splice, but fortunately was at the end of the tape just as everything got successfully archived (at least one copy of it anyway).

It was a cool moment to observe, and I now have copies of these applications in my possession.

I really appreciate the work this subculture does. I was a big fan of Soul Reaver back in the late 90s, and it was famous for having about 1/5th of the game removed before release. Twenty years later, I finally got to see what it would have looked like, just because someone stashed a few prototypes away.

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, especially of unfinished games that were never released, like Sierra's Babylon 5 space combat sim, Dead Phoenix on the GameCube, etc.

There's a section in the bonus material for the Blade Runner final cut where someone mentions that the only reason they have the unused footage is that someone intentionally ignored instructions to destroy a palette of film back in the 80s. The film world finally caught on about archiving that material. Hopefully the game industry will sooner or later as well.

I wonder how all of this will work with the current games, in the age of steam digital publishing, reliance on cloud servers, and purposefully bloated games to hundreds of gigabytes so that they are harder to pirate. This also makes it harder to archive them.

On first read of the title I thought it was about TES: Oblivion, from which I thought I was sorta one of the weird collectors.

I have a coin from the empire, I think it came with a box set / special edition.

It could be from Morrowind, though.

Here's the same thing on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/icywolfy/5478409397

70 year old video games?

I'd like to one day play Firefall again.

Sadly it's an MMO, so I doubt that'll ever happen.

Edit: Not the half-assed updated version that caused most people to abandon it.

This is a topic dear to my heart. I also think it is important to preserve prototype and prerelease versions of games from all possible sources - they can give an insight into a game's development that can only be matched by the actual developers speaking on the process. Such versions of games are at far more risk of being lost to time - how many prototype cartridges or discs are holed up in publisher/developer vaults, and how many of those do they actually pull out and test from time to time to make sure their archive isn't rotting away? Very few seem to do this, or if they do they're not open about it. Retail-released games usually have several extant specimen to be able to preserve. With prototypes the total number of copies of any specific build may be single-digit.

This also includes builds of games used for public display at events like E3. A personal example - I am part of a decently-sized community centered around the Harmonix-developed Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. For years, we've known that a handful of illegitimate copies of the Guitar Hero II E3 2006 build have existed. However, the two people we've talked to that actually possessed such copies either no longer have them, or the disc does not work. We also know that the official copy of this disc exists within the walls of Activision. One of our community members was in a position to be able to ask them if they could potentially have the disc. The response? "Sorry, we must hold onto it or destroy it." What chance do we have to preserve many of these games, if destruction is even an option?

Speaking of that. If anyone reading this had access to the Malaysian video game black market in early to mid 2006, and you bought a chipped PS2 bundle with two third-party guitars and two discs labeled "A" and "B", please get in contact with me (my email is in my profile here). We believe the "B" disc to be the GH2 E3 build, and we'd like to double check whether the "A" disc is retail GH1 or not. Or, if you got any weird copy of GH2 on the black market, anywhere. We're also looking for a pressed copy of the GH1 demo, which would have the game ID SLUS-29177. We do know it exists, we narrowly missed an eBay auction for one last year (and in fact, that auction is the only reason we even have a picture of that disc).

Fortunately, we also know that Harmonix is really diligent at archiving their games. I have seen a photo of their GH2 binder with burns of daily builds, and I also have it on good authority from a former employee that they also have an extremely thorough digital archive. But, still, none of these are accessible for datamining and analysis, which is vital to truly preserving these games.