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If it wasn’t for home of the underdogs as well as 3d shooterlegends/adventurelegends i would never have known many very old and truly special games…

There are really good games even nowdays that almost nobody knows so imagine the older days before the internet how many great games came and left without most people even realising there were such games….

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Cunzy is right. I work as an archivist, and we do struggle – my employers need another two of me to really get any of our long-term projects off the ground, and half my department is retiring next year. And we’re a pretty major organisation, not just some obscure rural county record office.

The sheer effort involved in identifying and cataloguing everything, including finding the expertise needed to do so, is enormous even for simple pieces of paper in (mainly) English. Multiply that by the necessary knowledge and time to find the hardware/emulation for all these games, and then again by the resources it’d take to accomodate all the different hardware formats and iterations of operating systems, and you’re looking at a budget that would dwarf pretty much any existing archiving project.

HOTU is a brilliant site not just for the purpose of archiving games and information about them (including how they were received, who worked on them, etc.), but potentially for showing the difficulties the industy faces and why they’re significant. It’s not just about preserving dusty old legal documents of no interest to 99% of the population, but about showing future generations – even people just 20 or 30 years away – what life is like now. Not just the international events everyone will read about that don’t really affect us all that much on a day-to-day basis, but the ordinary things that normal, real people do and where the things those future people have came from.

Of all industries, the games industry is surely the most fragile in terms of record-keeping. Just imagine if there’d been a truly concerted effort to archive and maintain all the earliest movies and photographs made. Film students and filmmakers today would be creaming their pants. The games industry, judging by its enormous growth and its overlaps with the computer and film industries, is likely to be even more influential and more interesting to future students and historians.

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Nice to see someone else who loves ROTH so much! I vividly remember picking up the director’s cut edition in, of all places, my local supermarket. I still own and cherish the huge box with the cool front cover. I miss those days, before they went to the smaller boxes and then just DVD cases.

The atmosphere of ROTH was unparallelled. The way the developers filled it with references to occultism, religion, history and mythology screamed dedication. The letters of Florentine to R.J.! Aelf! The Tower and the audio fragments ‘lost in time’ you would hear when passing through it! The hand-drawn maps! The puzzles in Arqua! Belial! There’s just too much to be nostalgic about. :-)

It appears someone took it up him or herself to preserve the game for the ages btw:

http://www.realmsofthehaunting.com/
Sorry… forgot to say great post – can’t wait to read your next one!

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Nice to see someone else who loves ROTH so much! I vividly remember picking up the director’s cut edition in, of all places, my local supermarket. I still own and cherish the huge box with the cool front cover. I miss those days, before they went to the smaller boxes and then just DVD cases.

The atmosphere of ROTH was unparallelled. The way the developers filled it with references to occultism, religion, history and mythology screamed dedication. The letters of Florentine to R.J.! Aelf! The Tower and the audio fragments ‘lost in time’ you would hear when passing through it! The hand-drawn maps! The puzzles in Arqua! Belial! There’s just too much to be nostalgic about. :-)

It appears someone took it up him or herself to preserve the game for the ages btw:

http://www.realmsofthehaunting.com/

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. Are there any recorded cases of them tracking down the only extant copy of a game? Most things on there seem to be sourced from people’s attics.

I’m not sure why these two are mutually exclusive, although I doubt there were any literal last extant copies on HotU. I mean, plenty of “only known version” of works of art/literature have been found in boxes in people’s attics.

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Don’t torrent sites already exist?

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