[game_preservation] Disappearance of videogame homepages

[Henry Lowood]

If anybody hears about a site closing or about to close, please let me 
know.  Our project has an archive-it subscription that we can use to 
crawl them before they go down.   It's based on Heritrix, but it is 
doing better with flash and some of the other presentation 
technologies.   Dynamic content (php, etc.) is still a problem, I think.

Henry

On 2/13/2011 1:17 PM, Andrew Armstrong wrote:

> Something related was the BBC closing lots of old sites due to 

> "maintenance costs"; someone managed to get them all and seed it in a 

> torrent. http://178.63.252.42/

>

> A sad day is having people have to do this however; NOA likely won't 

> put these online or give them to the internet archive to have a copy 

> :( Might be worth contacting them but for them it is cost saving.

>

> Andrew

>

> On 13/02/2011 20:47, Devin Monnens wrote:

>> Recently, I discovered that some of Nintendo's old game homepages 

>> have been removed. As some of you may know, I help run the Metroid 

>> Database, and so my knowledge is a little focused in this regard. 

>> However, the fact of the matter is a large number of NOA's websites 

>> for their older games (pre-Wii and DS) have been removed, but I don't 

>> know which ones and how many. As far as Metroid is concerned, this 

>> means that the websites for Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2, Metroid 

>> Zero Mission, and Metroid Fusion have been removed, along with some 

>> notable interactive flash content. I have also heard that NCL's 25th 

>> Anniversary site for Super Mario Bros. has also been removed. I 

>> haven't received an explanation on this from Nintendo yet, but this 

>> highlights yet another problem with game preservation that I would 

>> like to throw on the table:

>>

>> Preservation of game-based websites.

>>

>> This was already an issue a couple years ago as regards fansites when 

>> IGN dropped support of Planet Hosted sites (of which the MDb was a 

>> casualty). However, this is the first major instance I have seen with 

>> regards to official game homepages.

>>

>> The problem is compounded by the fact that The Internet Archive's 

>> Wayback Machine can't load some of these pages due to their flash 

>> content. As a result, these pages have for all intents and purposes 

>> been lost, and even if Nintendo archived them, they would be 

>> inaccessible.

>>

>> I am not sure what sorts of solutions to this exist, but at any rate, 

>> it makes preserving games much harder. While the MDb can't really be 

>> defined as an archive, has anyone else run into similar problems with 

>> regard to their preservation efforts?

>> -- 

>> Devin Monnens

>> www.deserthat.com <http://www.deserthat.com>

>>

>> The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

>>

>>

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>

>

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-- 
Henry Lowood
Curator for History of Science&  Technology Collections;
   Film&  Media Collections
HRG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
Stanford University Libraries, Stanford CA 94305-6004
650-723-4602; lowood at stanford.edu; http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood

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