[game_preservation] Preservation Whitepaper Brainstorm Progress

Andrew Armstrong andrew at aarmstrong.org
Fri Oct 10 08:25:59 EDT 2008


Regarding the whitepaper, we need some concrete examples of videogame
loses we've already had. I know there are some collectors on here, so
this should be easy; a list of videogames which were produced, but are
now lost (all copies gone, masters deleted, whatever), and unreleased
games which were lost and will never be recovered (betas, alphas, whatever).

Doesn't have to be a long one, I'm all for brevity.

However, I'm sure there is a ton, especially from pre-CD days, and from
companies which have become defunct (specific examples of companies
which lost loads of material would be good too!).

I've tried Google, but there is no specific pages answering to my
queries ("lost videogames" comes up with...the Lost videogame, thanks
Google! Nothing on Wikipedia specifically either). There is no site I've
got bookmarked or RSSed which hosts such a list as far as I know, apart
from I've not checked the Playstation archive which lists a few
incomplete games/recovered games - obviously actually something else to
list too.

Also; while there are of course a long list of games which are of
limited availability now (ie; no company or archive holds onto them,
only collectors, and even then maybe only a few copies of the game,
making it generally unplayable by historians), that's always going to be
a problem until the archives really are well funded and the size of what
film and TV archives are today, so probably are not worth noting just yet.

Thanks if anyone knows any!

Andrew


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