[game_preservation] Disappearance of videogame homepages

[Jason McNeal]

As a former film preservation specialist with the Library of Congress,
my preservation mindset over the past few years has turned toward
video game preservation and one of the reasons I joined this mailing
list. I too have noticed that the Wayback Machine does not save Flash
content, which is unfortunate. My experience with film has shown that
outside sources have been the parties that have saved important
historical artifacts while the companies that produced them could care
less.

That being said, I would hope that a company as old as Nintendo is not
just trashing the content of these websites once their perceived
"lifetime" is over, and is actually backing them up or keeping them on
some kind of server somewhere. I also hope they have some sort of
library or archive in place to keep the materials related to their
output. Unfortunately, I would be more inclined to believe that there
is a serious disregard for keeping website content and code for
preservation purposes.

It would be interesting to contact not only the big companies like
Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, but the smaller developers to find out
what kind of archival measures they have in place (if any).

My two cents...

Jason McNeal
Gainesville, FL



On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Henry Lowood <lowood at stanford.edu> wrote:

> 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

>

> The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

>

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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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