Depending on where you look online you may be led to believe XeNTax is/was a company, supposedly a foundation and definitely a website. Yes, that is a XeNTaX website xentax.org distinct from the XeNTaX forums forum.xentax.com. In actuality, XeNTaX has its roots in the Dutch demoscene and it has just kept reincarnating.

XeNTaX started as a team of two, Mr. Mouse and Captain Corney, who were hacking/modding Commodore 64 games. XeNTaX grew into a much wider community over time because Mr. Mouse and Captain Corney wanted to be able to focus retrocomputing and to support others working on similar projects. For this XeNTaX developed MultiEx Commander which is a tool for unarchiving 100+ retro game formats, certainly no longer limited to C64.

On October 6, XeNTaX made a more upfront shutdown announcement[Wayback] with the shutdown being scheduled for the end-of-year. While there was still some possibility of a buyout or handover, it was unlikely. Instead, the XeNTaX community was encouraged to join the XeNTaX Discord server. Again, no surprises there: it has become fairly routine for old forums to retire to Discord which offers free hosting and a ton of features.

With this announcement, a second wave shot out. Word got out once again leading to several mass archiving efforts. However, this upset the staff enough to issue a warning on the Discord, with an emphasis on Data Privacy and consent. To quote Mr. Mouse:

Note: Members of the Xentax Forum have agreed to terms of the Forum and any public information. They have not agreed for their information being used on other sites. You may wish to look into the subject of data privacy. As such, while you’ve leeched my posts, I did not agree for those being hosted somewhere else. So remove my posts.

…

Remember to ensure approval from people before you put their stuff up that they did not agree to. In this age of data privacy and consent that is very important. As for Wayback Machine, they have a process that enables removal of pages if asked and are usually collaborative.

XeNTax Discord

This was a remarkable reaction because two things are being said here. First is the obvious point on data privacy and consent, but second is an undertone of leaching off of previous work and exploitation. The fact that the Xentax forums have shut down does not mean that the staff and contributors have quit completely. They are still around and will frown upon their work being plagerised now just as much as they would have while the forums were alive. And that is an issue most fellow archivists and hoarders have been fairly negligent of.

Amidst the archiving craze focussed on preserving the record, there was also a second preservation effort going on. An effort to preserve community. Although the XeNTaX Discord server offered a solution, many did wish for an independent forum. Even a short gofundme was run to see if maintenance costs could be crowdsourced.

The shutdown date was pulled a bit forward to November 3, 2023 as members were instructed to relocate to a new forum, Reshax, per the updated XeNTaX forum banner[Wayback]. In fact, when the forum did first shut down it began immediately redirecting to Reshax.

I’ve reached an agreement with Mr. Mouse, the owner of the Xentax forum, to promote ResHax and breathe new life into the slowly declining forum. Additionally, I’ll make an effort to bring tools from their site to ours. Once their forum becomes inactive, I’ll attempt to persuade Mr. Mouse to redirect the domain to our forum, ensuring that all users can find a new home here

Reshax admin michalss, “What about Xentax and Zenhax ?” on ResHax, Wayback Snapshot.

michalss also lamented on the recent death of the sister community Zenhax, which was abandoned due to the owner losing interest. And this could have been the end of the story, but people kept begging, asking “where are the tools, where are the assets?”…

On November 8, Xentax Discord Admin Richard Whitehouse came out with an announcement, later also shared on his homepage: Reshax and XeNTaX had reached an alternative agreement. From this point on, Reshax would be free to focus on reverse engineering however so they pleased; and XeNTaX members would be free to continue the tools and projects that they were already making. Whitehouse paints a picture of how he believes the XeNTaX community has been unfairly taken advantage of, and that this was a destructive force.

Many developers stopped sharing their findings and specifications (myself included) because they started to see their work exploited. By companies, which is morally reprehensible (and sometimes in direct violation of a given license/copyright) and serves to devalue the entire skillset associated with the labor. By other developers, who are socially positioned to exploit the labor in some other way. By people who just want to rip content to turn around and sell it, or claim false credit for it. In conjunction with unhealthy ego competition, this exploitation has made it impossible to create a culture of trust and sharing between developers.

…

We want to create an environment where developers are safe to work together without being exploited, and where developers feel valued by fellow developers enough to not feel the need to engage in pathetic ego-based assertions of skill. We want people to be fueled by their creative ambitions and technical fascinations, not their social standing. We want to create a culture beyond what Open Source can achieve under the constraints of our current socioeconomic systems. No matter how many people are left standing in the end, this is where we’re going.

Richard Whitehouse

On r/DataHoarder and other venues, the XeNTaX forum shutdown was treated as nothing more than a lost cause. There was once a XeNTaX, now there isn’t; we must therefore uphold the memory through downloading all we can. But to the alive and well XeNTaX community, these forum dumps were nothing more than an intensification of the routine stealing of their work they had grown sick of. Whitehouse’s open letter, which I have only abridged here, makes it clear what the Discord staff consider a XeNTaX contributor willing to invest time and effort to learn as opposed to internet passerbys who ask for something, take it and move on.

To further hammer in the point, Mr. Mouse issued another announcement on November 12 imploring members to not share full backups of the XeNTaX Forum on the XeNTaX Discord server. Once again, the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine were exempted as special cases, but else it was not allowed. This however did attract some internal protest from guild members, as one might gather from the reactions to the message.

This goes to show that the Internet Archive has built up enough of a reputation to not merely be heralded as leachers and pirates and that’s a good thing. Although, there is an implication here that websites just find their way onto the Internet Archive, when in fact there are automation processeces and groups like Archive Team who facilitate this. Thus we find ourselves in a Catch 22, where if something has landed on the Internet Archive it is deemed legitimate, but if it is stuck in transit it was stolen unfairly.

This is a paradox that underpins the challenge of being an archivist today: sucess means being invisible and that your archives are never widely distributed. Does that perhaps sound familiar? It’s the exact same situation the XeNTaX community finds itself in. They would rather preserve their tools and assets internally, circulating on a need-to-know basis than have it out in the open. This ensures that the community retains its knowledge, but also controls it. It’s self-determination against potential exploitation.

The XeNTaX situation is not over and hopefully it will never be over in the near future. The XeNTaX forums might be gone, but XeNTaX lives on. And I believe it sets a good example: Archivism as a hobby or profession is something which should prevail within every community, instead of the interventionist culture from 3rd parties that we have grown accustomed to today.

But that reversal we have is warranted. Many times communities do vanish or are made to vanish, whether it’s subtitlers on YouTube or artists who can no longer use Macromedia Flash. Often times, these communities do not have an obvious way of preserving their memories; the decision is out of their control and attempts at preservation necessitate challenging authority, ad hoc solutions and technical expertise (often from outside).

Whether you define yourself an archivist, a hoarder, a pirate, a cracker, an archaelogist or whatever; it is a must that you understand where the files come from. You don’t have to obey all of the wishes of the original creator, but you have to respect them. Especially if they’re still alive and kicking. The costs couldn’t kill XeNTaX, but from the looks of it archivists almost did.

Melinda teaches high school in the Bay Area and recently reached out to us with a problem. Her students just finished a video history project that she wanted to share with their parents and classmates. But she was concerned about posting the videos publicly because she didn’t want the whole world to find them (frankly, neither did her students). Melinda told us YouTube’s private sharing options — a 25-person cap that’s limited to other YouTube users — didn’t work for her. She needed a better option to privately share her students’ talent.

Later today, we’ll be rolling out a new choice that will help Melinda and other people like her: unlisted videos.

On this day, 12 years ago, YouTube introduced unlisted videos as a compromise between a public and a private video. Perfect for sharing your history project with friends, video outtakes, or just about anything you didn’t want cluttering your channel.

Some time later, a non-targetted exploit was discovered which could reveal the links of existing YouTube videos, but not the content itself. So in 2017, YouTube changed how links were generated to make links more unpredictable. It could have ended there, but it didn’t.

Years later in 2021, YouTube decided that having their links be hypothetically predictable, might be problematic for old unlisted videos. So they decided to haphazardly automatically private old unlisted videos, uploaded prior to 2017.

Users were offered an option to opt-out, if their channels were still active AND they acted within a month of the announcement. Unfortunately millions of videos were lost in the name of security. Vlogs, school projects, outtakes, patreon videos; things people wanted to share BUT they didn’t private.

Is there any silver lining to all of this? Not all is lost. There are collections like filmot which offer a non-invasive database of metadata on these unlisted videos, minus the videos themselves. There was also a project by Archive Team to archive a few TBs of unlisted videos, even if only a small sample. More than anything, YouTubers have been uploading re-uploads, in the case of inactive channels and/or significant unlisted videos.

Not to sound like a beggar, but we would really appreciate it if you could share this short blog post. Almost one year later this situation has still not become common knowledge. Also be sure to check out our unlisted video countdown from last year:

Today, the internet has become such a big part of our lives, that it’s hard to imagine a time without it. Yet only 30 years ago, the internet was hardly accessible to anyone. Not in the sense that it wasn’t affordable, rather what could be called the internet wasn’t very inter-connected. You had separate networks: ARPANET, which was heavily linked to the US’s military-industrial complex; FidoNet, which was a worldwide network connecting BBSs; USENET, which were newsgroups mostly adopted on university campuses… Each network, had a particular use-case and was often restricted to a particular demographic. It wouldn’t be until the vision of an “open web”, that a common internet would emerge.

In the early 90s, many disillusioned DARPA-contractors began leaving ARPANET on an exodus to San Francisco, synergising with the city’s pre-established tech eco system. Maybe it was the advent of new protocols such as Gopher and the World Wide Web. Perhaps it was the growing Free Software Movement. Not to mention gravitation towards the technology clusters of Silicon Valley or the Homebrew Computer Club. It was more than happenstance that California, and the San Francisco Bay Area had become home to a lot of network engineering experts.

The tricky question wasn’t how to get the internet to more people, it was how to do it the fastest. Many small companies, startups, and even NGOs popped up in San Francisco to address the different challenges of building a massive network. From building infrastructure by laying wires, to law firms for dealing with bureaucracy. Of course, there were also companies dealing with the software problems on top of hardware.

One such company was Alexa Internet, founded by Bruce Gilliat and Brewster Kahle. Alexa started as a recommendation system, to help users find relevant sites without them having to manually search everything. On every page, users would get a toolbar showing them “recommended links”. You may think of these recommended webpages, like suggested videos on YouTube or songs on Spotify. Alexa was “free to download” and came with ads.

Those recommendations had to come from somewhere and Alexa wasn’t just randomised or purely user-based. Their secret was collecting snapshots of webpages through a certain crawler, named ia_archiver, more on that later. This way they were able to collect stats and metrics on webpages themselves, over time. This is how Alexa’s most well-known feature, Alexa Rank, came to be. Which sites are the most popular, in which categories and when? Over time, this emphasis on Web Analytics became Alexa’s competitive advantage.

Alexa was a successful business, only to keep growing, but founder Brewster Kahle had something of an ulterior motive. He was also in the midst of starting a non-profit organisation called the Internet Archive. ia_archiver did, in fact, stand for internetarchive_archiver. All the while Alexa was amassing this web data, it was also collecting it for long-term preservation at this up-and-coming Internet Archive. In fact, one can tell the two were interlinked ideas from the very start; as the name, Alexa, was an obvious nod to the Library of Alexandria. At one point, Alexa -not the Internet Archive- made a donation of web data to the US Library of Congress, as a bit of a publicity stunt to show the merit of what they were doing.

[For your video], there is this robot sort of going and archiving the web, which I think is somewhat interesting towards your web history. It’s a different form. You’re doing an anecdotal history. The idea is to be able to collect the source materials so that historians and scholars will be able to do a different job than you are now.

Brewster Kahle, teasing his vision for the Internet Archive in an interview by Marc Weber (Computer History Museum) from 1996. Fastforward to 31:53 into the video below.

For the first few years, Alexa and the IA enjoyed this dualistic nature. One side being the for-profit company and the other a charitable non-profit, both committed to taking meta-stats on the wider internet. This came to a turning point in 1999, when Amazon decided to acquire Alexa Internet (not the smart home product) for approx. US$250 million. Alexa needed growth and the IA needed funding, so it was a happy day for everyone, even if it meant that the two would no longer act as a single entity.

Kahle left the company to focus on the IA and former-partner Gilliat ended up becoming the CEO of Alexa. An arrangement was reached so that even after the acquisition, Alexa would continue donating crawled data to supply the Internet Archive. Their collaborator Tim Požar, who you might recognize from the ’96 interview from above, would remain at Alexa for some time as a backend engineer. A lot of what Požar did was ensuring that Alexa’s crawled data would continue to be rerouted to the Internet Archive. A lot of these data dumps are now visible under the IA’s Alexa crawls collection.

Afterwards, the IA and Alexa went their separate ways. The Internet Archive expanded to non-web digital collections as well. Books, in particular. The web archive part was dubbed the Wayback Machine.

By 2001, the Internet Archive was no longer a private collection but was made open to the public for browsing. The Internet Archive really lived up to its name and became the de facto hub for archiving on the web. Ever since, the IA has continued to attract not only readers, but also contributors who keep growing the collections.

As for Alexa, Amazon’s bet paid off as they dominated web analytics for the coming years. Alexa rankings became the standard metric when comparing web traffic, for example on Wikipedia. Alexa listed some public stats free to all, but remained profitable thanks to a tiered subscription system. If you needed to know the 100 largest blog sites in a given country, Alexa was your friend. Then you could pay a few dollars extra to find out what countries were visiting your competitors the most. Alexa was great, so long as you were interested in web-sites.

Alexa was born in a very different web. A web of sites. Yet today’s web is a web of apps. Social media, streaming services… The statistics of this web of apps are kept by centralised app markets such as Google Play and Apple’s App Store. Alexa tried to adopt; for example, they changed traffic stats to be based less on crawl data across the entire web, but also on shares posted to Twitter and Reddit. Sadly these changes have not been impactful enough to save Alexa from obsoletion.

(Google Search Trend showing the rise and fall of alexa rank, alternative link.)

Amazon telegraphed their intent to either adapt or shutdown by gradually dropping features over the past few months. For example, they replaced Browse by Category with a more narrow Articles by Topic. Finally, the service closure was announced in December 2021.

So what will happen now? The closing of Alexa is different from most shutdowns because it’s not only the loss of data itself, but a data stream. Alexa was, indeed, at a time a web crawling powerhouse. Yet it’s no longer uncontested. We still have, for example, Common Crawl which also came out of Amazon, interestingly. As for the Internet Archive, they have many partners and collaborators to continue crawling the web as well, so they won’t be alone.

Alexa was also valuable in its own right. Though there are new competitors for web analytics, you won’t see many investigating global/regional popularity, or different categories. Even so, there aren’t very many services interested in overall web traffic, as opposed to site analytics. On top of this, Alexa ran for 25 years. That’s a quarter of a century of historical data on what sites rose and fell before Alexa, unavailable almost anywhere else. Almost.

Just as Alexa helped the Internet Archive grow, from this point, the Internet Archive shall reciprocate by keeping the memory of Alexa alive. Not just the sites crawled by Alexa, but also in snapshots of public statistics gathered by Alexa.

If you have an Alexa account you can also help! Users can export Alexa data by following the instructions here! You can bet any and all data would be very valuable, either on the Internet Archive or elsewhere. Please make sure you act quickly, as there isn’t much time left until May 1.

glmdgrielson: So, first question, what is Gaming Alexandria?
Hubz: At it’s core it’s both a Discord community and a separate website dedicated to preserving various aspects of video games, such as scans, interviews, unreleased games, youtube videos etc. It mainly started as a site where I could share high quality scans but has grown thanks to many people joining up with various skills to help expand the website. The Discord community itself is really an entity unto itself at this point where lots of gaming historians/preservationists have come together to share their works and also help each other out when needed with various projects. I love getting to see all the passion in everybody’s projects that they put forth and the willingness of the community to offer help when asked.

g: Tell me more about this community. I’m active in the server, but what does it look like from your end?
H: From an admin standpoint I have access to all the channels which include the private #staff and #mods channels where we discuss upcoming articles or projects for the site as well as handling the occasional argument or bad apple in the chat. Dylan Mansfeld (DillyDylan) handles a lot of great articles on undumped/prototype games that were previously unreleased. Ethan Johnson writes for his own blog (https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/) and Gaming Alexandria at times and is our editor so he glances through and cleans up all the articles that get posted. Jonas Rosland who is the Executive Director of the NPO, I’m a board member of, called Hit Save (https://hitsave.org/) does a lot of thankless technical work behind the scenes that includes a NAS he has setup for not only the staff of the website to store project files but the community at large which is a huge help. Wietse van Bruggen (Densy) handles a lot of the moderation of the chat and has been a huge help keeping the Discord community friendly and clean with his balanced moderation style. Last but not least there is Stefan Gancer (Gazimaluke) who did the original site redesign and has been a great idea man for ways to improve the site and community as time has gone on. For me personally I try to keep up with all the chat in the channels (though it can be tough at times!) just to have an idea of what’s going on and seeing what I can help with or connect people to further projects as well as post my scans and projects as they’re completed. Thanks to the rest of the staff I rarely have to step in and moderate which is very nice!

g: I’m going to skip over the omission of Norm and ask about the history of how the site has evolved.
H: LOL yes Norm is a menace to society and must be stopped.

Editor’s note: Hubz has a mock rivalry with Norm, a.k.a. the Gaming Historian and is a frequent running gag on the server. I do not believe there is actual malice.

The website itself started officially on October 23rd, 2015 and was just a basic text website that I could easily upload to in order to share my scans, it was very barebones. The reason I wanted to get high quality scans out was due to using an emulator frontend called Hyperspin. For popular systems it had a lot of decent quality artwork for boxes. But for lesser known systems it was sorely lacking and that triggered my OCD and made be realize that scanning stuff in high resolution was something that needed to be done. Slowly, but surely, I met others that wanted to scan in high quality and have their stuff hosted and they would submit stuff such as Densy. At some point I got involved with the VGPC discord and met Kirkland who had been quietly doing something similar with his collection and collaborated with him and others on establishing scanning standards to use going forward to have some level of consistent quality with those that were willing to do it which eventually led to what is the https://scanning.guide/. In late 2018 the site was graciously redone by Gazimaluke and relaunched in the design you see now. We started branching out into actual articles written by our staff and releasing prototypes and unreleased games that we came across. The site continues doing this to this day, though we are branching out into more guest authors from the community posting interviews and articles as well in the near future.

g: As well as hosting my site, for which I am grateful for. So, what is the day to day like for you?
H: Day to day on the scanning I try to get at least one magazine done daily. Doesn’t always happen but, in general, I debind a magazine the night before, then in the morning scan it in before leaving for work. If work gets slow I work on processing the scans, or else I’ll do it later that night and get them uploaded to the site and the Internet Archive.

g: Interesting. So how big do you think your archive is by this point?
H: Archive upload-wise I’m probably right around 2900 items if you count stuff that was removed lol. Then there’s a bunch on the site that wasn’t done to the higher scanning standards I go by now that’s not on the archive. So I’d guess in the 3000-4000 item range currently.

g: Do you know how big it is in terms of filesize?
H: Let me see real quick…
Looks like 2.5TB which is another reason I’m so thankful to have the Internet Archive to host my scans on due to the space and bandwidth that would be required otherwise.
The site alone usually has about half a TB of traffic per month so I can only imagine what it would be like if the magazine scans were also hosted directly on it.

g: Neat. Is there anything interesting that you got to be a part of due to GA that you would like to share?
H: Biggest thing is probably working with The Video Game History Foundation on scanning their extensive magazine collection so digital copies can be provided along with physical copies at their library. Being able to leverage the Internet Archive so people all over the world can easily access the magazines I’ve scanned that they might not have been able to easily otherwise is a great feeling personally for me. So many of these things are quite difficult to acquire and expensive as time goes on so having them as an ally in the preservation world is a godsend. There’s been lots of other connections and other projects I’ve worked on as well but I won’t ramble forever on that. Not only is Gaming Alexandria a tight community that likes to help each other out but there’s plenty of other preservation groups like VGHF, TCRF, and Hidden Palace just to name a few and we all get along great and try to push preservation forward together.
There’s so much work that needs to be done that we need all the help we can get and we need to support each other any way we can I think.

g: True that. Last question for now: anything that you would recommend to a would-be archivist?
H: I think it’s a good idea to preserve what interests you, which seems to go without saying, but I mean it more from a sense of not only going after what is popular. While you might not get much fanfare initially for the more obscure stuff it’s likely you’ll be the only one doing it and it’s important it’s being done. If you do good work for long enough it will get noticed, and to make good work easier it’s best to go with what you’re passionate about. The other thing I would suggest is not beating yourself up or comparing your output to others. Do what you can when you want to, this is a hobby after all. If you make yourself miserable trying to do something your output will naturally suffer or you might even burn out and stop altogether. Like I said before, we need all the help we can get, so try to avoid that if at all possible.

g: Thank you for being here, overlord Hubz. It’s been good talking to you.
H: No problem! Thaks for the interview.

– glmdgrielson, being a very good minion interviewer

Desert Bus For Hope is a yearly charity stream, running under the premise that the more money that is received, the longer the stream goes on for, and the more the organizers have to play the dullest video game imaginable. So dull, in fact, that Desert Bus has never been officially released, actually. This year’s fundraiser gave us a stream that is just exactly an hour under one week: 6 days and 23 hours! So this was a very long stream with a lot of data to preserve. So follows the story of how that happens.

Note: DBx refers to the iteration of Desert Bus for Hope. For example, this year, 2021, was DB15. Also, I have only minimally modified our interview, by adding in links where applicable and making minor spelling corrections. 

glmdgrielson: So first off, outside of the VST, what are you up to?

Sokar: I do video editing and Linux server security / software support, and various other (computer related) consulting things for “real work”.

g: So you started off with just the poster for DB6, according to the site, correct? How did that work?

S: We didn’t actually start doing the interactive postermaps till DB8, then I worked backwards to do all the previous ones (still not done).
The VST itself started formally during DB6.

g: That’s when Graham contacted MasterGunner, who presumably contacted you, correct?

S: Tracking the run live in some way was a confluence of ideas between me, Lady, and other members of the chat at the time, Graham knew how to get ahold of Gunner about making live edits because he was one of the people who helped with the DB5 torrent.
I honestly don’t remember how most of the DB6 VST crew was put together, it was very last minute.

g: Do you know anything about how that torrent was made?

S: The first DB5 torrent?

g: Yes.

S: Kroze (one of the chat mods) was physically at DB5 and brought a blank external HDD with him specifically for recording the entire stream, then after the run Fugi and dave_random worked together to create the torrect (with all the files split into 15min chunks) I wanna say the torrent file was initially distributed via Fugi’s server.
DB5 was the first time the entire run was successfully recorded.
LRR had previously toyed with the idea (DB3, but ended up doing clips instead) and steamcastle attempted to record all of DB4 but was unsuccessful.

g: And DB6 was the first year the VST existed. What was that first year like?

S: The first year was VERY short handed, we only had 14 people, a LOT of the “night” shifts were either just me by myself or me and BillTheCat
We really didn’t know what we were doing, the first rendition of the DB6 sheet didn’t even have end times for events.
There was just “Start Time” “Event Type” “Description” and “Video Link”.
At some point we (the VST) will just re-spreadsheet the entire run, because we were so short handed we missed a lot of things, when I went back to make the DB6 postermap I think I ended up uploading ~17(ish) new videos because that was how many posterevents weren’t even on the sheet.

g: What sort of equipment or software did you use back then?

S: We used google sheets (and still do, but not in the same way anymore), and then all the “editing” was done via Twitch’s Highlight system at the time, which then had a checkbox to auto upload the video to youtube.
Then there were a few people with youtube access that could enable monetization and other things like that.
Twitch’s Highlight editor (especially at the time we used it (DB6/DB7)) was extremely painful to use on very long VODs, there was no “seek by time”. You had to use the slider and kinda position it where you wanted and then just wait and be quick on the cut button.
We didn’t actually start capturing the run ourselves until Twitch’s overzealous VOD muting happened ( 2014-08-06 ) and we had to figure out a new way of doing things.

g: And just two years down the line, you had to start making your own tools. What was that like?

S: When that happened we had roughly 3 months to figure out what to do. dave_random put in a ton of time figuring out how to capture the run (using livestreamer which has since been forked to streamlink). The way it worked during DB8 was that the video would get uploaded to youtube with a couple of minutes on either side of the video, then the video editors would go in and edit the video using youtube’s editor.
Then we found out that there is a limit tied to youtube’s editor and you can only have a set number of videos “editing” at once, then you get locked out of the editor for a while, we (the VST and DesertBus in general) always end up being en edge case.
MasterGunner wrote the first version of our own editor so we could edit the video before it got sent to youtube.
The VST website itself also didn’t exist till DB9, a lot of the poster revisions archive only exists because J and myself kept copies of all the revisions.

g: After DB9 is when you started trying to backup the previous years, right?

S: Yea, so (internally) the VST had talked about archival problems over the years, and when Anubis169 went to DB9 (in person) to volunteer, he also went with the express purpose to grab as many of the Desert Bus files as he could find at the time.
When he got back home he and I went over the files he managed to get and he sent me a copy of everything he grabbed, I also spent the time trying to figure out how uStream had stored all the DB1 and DB2 clips then downloaded a copy of all of them.
It turned out to be a very good time to do that, since for a few years later IBM bought uStream and deleted all archives

g: So that looks to be all of the history questions I have. Now for the fun part: describe the process of archiving a Bus.

S: As in as it currently stands?
As in “how did this year work”?

g: Yes. How would the process of archival go as it currently stands?

S: well, that’s a hard one, haha

g: Not surprised, given the scope of the event we’re dealing with.

S: For old stuff: I already (also) flew to Victoria to get the missing DB3 and DB4 files, which was successful, the next time I go it will be to recover old prize data (I’m in the process or making a full prize archive)
For what we “regularly” capture setting up for a new run goes pretty much like this:
The current version of the wubloader (our capture architecture) (re-written by ekimekim, and chrusher after DB12) is used by ekim all year, so he reguarly workes on it and fixes it to work around anything twitch changes.
~3 months before the run we will put out the signup form to the internal VST place, a week or so after that it will be the IRC channel, and the LRR discord (in the desertbus channel)
During about 2 of those 3 months I’ll finish up any new stuff for the VST website I’m working on, so they are ready for the run.
The VST Org. Committee has meetings during the year to talk about any changes we want to make to any of the internal tools of our external facing stuff, the first of which usually happens in June for a new run.
Sorry, some of this is out of order.

g: You’re fine.

S: If we need to inform regular VST members of some major changes we’ve made we schedule meetings over some form of video chat for them to signup for and then to do a quick check over on everything new so we can get any questions answered and have everyone on the same page (usually about 30min per-session).
New people will get a separate training session that’s usually about 90-120 min in length, new people will always start off as “spreadsheeters”, we don’t rotate in new editors until they’ve been around for a couple years and they kind of have a feel for what we do.
For setting up the VST website for the run, there’s a separate “front page” for when the run is live, and also the head node is dropped back to being non-public and we stand up a 8-node globally located DNS cluster to handle the load, it runs on a 5 minute update cycle because late-run when there is a new poster revision a full update and sync takes about 3 & 1/2 minutes.
For setting up a “new year” on the VST site, there’s an amount of manual work, but it’s only about 3 hours or so, really depends on how many of the other things we track are setup at that point.

g: Other stuff being things like the charts, the clock, chat stats?

S: The clock is pretty easy, the chat stats require the chat capture be enabled and going, the graphs require that the donation capture is going already, so that can’t be setup till donations re-set, the gamejam page can’t be setup till Famout gets the gamejam on itch.io setup, the gameshows page can’t be setup till Noy2222 actually knows what gameshows he’s doing this year. The spreadsheet page can’t be setup until all the google docs spreadsheets are setupThe posters page requires that Lunsford has the poster that they’re drawing be setup somewhere for us to query. And the animated poster evolution page requires 3 poster revisions before that works at all. The postermap page is updated manually when I have time to draw/trace and then import the new postermap(ImageMap) of the poster Lunsford has drawn (still not done with this year’s yet)
For standing up our capture infastructure: There’s at minimum 2 nodes on “hardware” as in non-virtualized, that are “editing” nodes, only one of which actually uploads to the youtube channel, after that (usually) all the other nodes are virtualized and (this year) were provided by 6 different people, these are completely separate from the VST website nodes.
We also always try to make sure all the capture nodes are geographically distributed so a random network outage can’t hurt us, and so if one node misses a segment the other 7 can fill in the blank.
Once all of those are stood up and working, they’re all imported into the monitoring dashboard so we know if one of them has a problem. Usually we have all the capture (and website) hardware stood up about 1 week before the run starts. Then we have time to test it and ekimekim and chrusher (Wubloader), ElementalAlchemist (who coded the new version of thrimbletrimmer, our editor), and myself (website) have time to fix any bugs / finish any new features. At that point all the approved (new and old) VST members will also get an invite to the private sheet. Also, we invite any new VST members to the private chat space we use during the run (self-hosted Zulip).

We also spend a lot of time working on the schedule (as part of the signup form people tell us their available hours), people are limited to a max of 6 hour shifts, so scheduling ~60 people over a week where we try to maintain ~8 active people on the private spreadsheet is actually quite complex. ekimekim created a python script to create an initial rough guess, we then have a VST Org meeting to smooth things out. The resulting (schedule) spreadsheet is then given to everyone on the VST so they can check for errors in their personal schedule, and then (for during the run) the schedule’s csv is fed in to a zulip bot that announces who’s going on/off shift. Also, once I have the VST website nodes setup I give J access to one (geographically) near him, that he also uses for his own capture of the chat, twitch, and poster revisions, that way if the VST website head-node misses something we have a backup copy with the stuff J sets up as well.
I think that’s it, everything I’m thinking of now is post-run stuff. Oh, J also runs a capture of all of the Prize data that we preserve for the (upcoming) prize archive.

g: Well, that’s one heck of a process. Mind going into the tech used, like Wubloader and thrimbletrimmer?

S: Sure, wubloader is a ekimekim/chrusher coded Python3 project that is a custom HLS capture (as in we capture every 2-second long .ts segment twitch sends out when the stream is going). It uses PostgreSQL for backend databases, nginx for web, FFMPEG for doing the actual video editing, and docker for easier node deployment. It uses the GoogleDocs API for interaction with the private sheet and the YouTube API for uploading to youtube / managing the playlists.
Thrimbletrimmer (Now coded by ElementalAlchemist) uses HLS.js and a bunch of custom javascript and html for the editing interface, it can make multiple cuts (so we can cut the middle out of a video) and has the ability to add the chapter markers to the description if we want to do that on a longer video.

g: So the upload process is done by Thrimbletrimmer?

S: When someone makes an edit in Thrimbletrimmer, it talks to thrimshim (that then passes the actual edits on to the wubloader that then does the edit and uploads the video to youtube.
thrimshim is a piece of the wubloader that is kind of like an API to all the data in wubloader
so when a video is marked in the private sheet for upload there is a link to thrimbletrimmer that has a UUID on it, that thrimbletrimmer passes to thrimshim so it knows which video segments correspond to the requested video. On the way back it’s like “edit this uuid with the following edits, here’s the video title and description”

g: So what about the Twitch chat? How do you grab that?

S: Twitch chat is captured in 2 ways: via irssi (unix command line IRC client) both J and myself run a capture using that, and (this year) ekimekim coded up a capture for it that also captures all the meta-data for each chat message.
So before the run starts, J and I just setup our irssi sessions on 2 respective servers, and just leave them running in screen. ekimekim runs his custom capture off 2 of the wubloader nodes

g: So how has this setup evolved over time?

S: For chat capture or video capture?

g: Both.

S: Chat capture has largely been the same, old (pre-DB6) chat capture was just done with whoever made the capture’s IRC program (mIRC or IceChat).
Video capture has changed quite a bit, the first version of the wubloader (DB8) [coded by dave_random] was done with livestreamer (saved to mp4 files) and only did rough cuts, the 2nd version (DB9-12) came with Thrimbletrimmer (coded by MasterGunner) which did specific cuts, but also still used livestreamer as the capture source, During DB12 we discovered Twitch had implemented a “24-hour watch limit” which caused both capture nodes to miss part of Ash & Alex’s driver intro. Starting with DB13 ekimekim and Chrusher implemented a custom home-grown capture method that attaches directly to the HLS stream, and resets itself every so often to avoid the 24 hour watch limit.
The new capture metod saves all the 2-second long .ts files as they come out and each node fills in for any other node that got a partial or missed segment, now the capture nodes are a cluster instead of independent.
The editing process has gone from using twitch highlights -> using youtube’s editor -> using a custom editor coded by MasterGunner -> using a further improved editor coded by ElementalAlchemist.
Compared to using twitch or youtube’s editor the ones coded by MasterGunner and ElementalAlchemist are an amazing improvement, and much less buggy.

g: Anything else you want to add? Advice for somebody considering a similar archival project? Other than “don’t”?

S: Honestly: “Start on the first year of the event”, “Ask us (the VST) for advice”, “Preserve everything, backtracking to get something you missed is always more painful”
“Don’t try to do it by yourself”
The VST only works because of all the people involved and learning from the mistakes we’ve made over the years.

g: Any closing thoughts before I wrap up this interview?

S: All of this would never have happened if LoadingReadyRun wouldn’t have put “First Annual” on the website banner back in 2007 as a joke.

g: Thank you for your time!

– glmdgrielson, along for the eight hour, mind-numbingly dull drive

YouTube is a platform and a community which live off of reuploads. One might even go so far as to say that reuploads have been a key to YouTube’s success and reuploads themselves have been a product of YouTube. With recent events in mind, now is a good time as ever to re-examine the mutually beneficial relationship between YouTube and the practice of reuploading.

In 2005, YouTube started off as a small video-sharing site. At the time few people would have been able to predict that it would grow to be the 2nd most popular site on the web and yet here we are! One factor Co-founder Jawed Karim attributes their success to is timeliness. In particular, he thinks YouTube came at a time when clip sharing became very common. To quote from a talk he gave in 2006:

The “clip culture” you see now is basically this demand that you can find any video at any time and you can share it with other people, or you can share your own videos with other people. […]

There were a couple of events in 2004 that kind of fueled this. One was this [wardrobe malfunction]. So this, of course, happened on television, but it only happened once and never again. And so for anyone who wanted to see it after that, well they had to find it online. The other big event I remember is this [Stewart on Crossfire] interview. And you know this was also shown on television once and not after that. Everyone was talking about it, but people who missed it really wanted to be in on the joke so they would try to find it online…

Jawed Karim, r | p 2006: YouTube: From Concept to Hypergrowth (25:15)

YouTube was able to meet this clip demand, acting as a universal replay button for any clip people could imagine. It’s no coincidence that obscure/lost media fanatics were flocking to the site not soon after its launch. From Sesame Street shorts to TV pilots, old footage quickly piled up! YouTube had an entire subculture of video remixes called YouTube Poops, which were made from recycled clips from old TV shows and games.

Alas this clip culture was both the boon and bane of early YouTube. As users uploaded these clips liberally, some of the owners and rights holders of the original source material of said clips came to view this practice as copyright infringement. This tension led to the infamous
Viacom vs. YouTube case in 2007, where media giant Viacom sued YouTube and Google for $1 billion in alleged damages! If you are looking for a good summary, EmpLemon did a video on it a few years ago.

Viacom did not actually win the case, in fact it came to light that they had taken advantage of clip culture for a stealth marketing campaign of their own. But the whole ordeal had lasting effects on YouTube. In an attempt to appease intellectual property owners, YouTube introduced their content ID system, then called video ID, for automatically detecting copyright infringing videos.

(Video Identification ~ YouTube Advertisers. If the above video is unavailable please use this Wayback Snapshot)

All of a sudden, videos on YouTube became a whole lot more volatile. This automated system did not only take down a lot of infringing material, but it also hit false positives, matching short-length clips, remixes and video reviews as well. At one point you would have been lucky to have had a few of your videos deleted, as opposed to having your whole channel terminated for seemingly having one too many copyright strikes. Yet clip culture on YouTube has somehow been able to endure, even beyond this era.

The term reupload probably first entered the YouTube lexicon when users began uploading new, higher quality versions of videos on their channel as YouTube kept introducing higher caps to video quality. These YouTube upgrades came around the same time as Content ID, so you will find cases where the reupload of a video has survived but the original has been deleted.

It wasn’t just the video makers themselves who were reuploading though, soon other users also began reuploading downloaded copies they had made of their favorite YouTube videos. This was not merely due to fans appreciating content from their fellow YouTubers, but also due to the fact that the frequent channel terminations could deny the original uploader the right to reupload their channel’s videos in the first place.

Ironically, the term reupload soon was associated with degredation in quality as people began reuploading videos over and over again. There’s even a Gizmodo article about it from 2010. There have also been people who have complained about their work being reuploaded without permission or credit, worse yet plagiarised. Clearly, reuploads are a great power that came with great responsibility. Still, many diligent channels are dedicated to preserving the memory of original content through its reuploads.

The fear of such memories being lost through mass-deletions looms over YouTube, even today. Early ContentID was certainly not the last disaster to plague YouTube videos. Hacker pranks, copyright trolls, the Adpocalypse and Elsagate controversies have all taken their toll on many unfortunate channels. Today, we once more find ourselves on the brink of a scene similar to a mass-deletion, with the mass-privating of unlisted videos uploaded prior to 2017.

A few years ago it was discovered that YouTube video IDs were being generated according to a certain pattern and it was thus theoretically possible to predict video links. This presented a problem for unlisted videos, which were meant to be videos that were to be shared by link only.

Unlisted videos are a tricky subject; on one hand, a video might be unlisted, rather than privated, to make it easier to share with friends. On the other hand, many YouTubers also unlist videos such as outtakes, early revisions of videos, stream archives or off-topic content that might not fit their channel’s niche. Such videos are linked to, in video descriptions, pinned comments or Tweets. So while some unlisted videos aren’t meant for everyone’s eyes, other unlisted videos are only hidden from the channel interface and search results. Yet an exploit is an exploit, and URL predictability could be a serious problem for certain videos.

Some action certainly had to be taken here, so in 2017 the video ID formula was changed into something less predictable, that was definitely a step in the right direction. What is happening today, 4 and a half years after, is a security update to set a sizable number of unlisted videos uploaded prior to that date to private. Thus, several million videos have suddenly been virtually deleted, as they are no longer accessible to anyone but the channel owner. While this decision will secure potentially private content for many channels, it is also a great loss for inactive channels who unlisted videos liberally and were not able to opt-out of the decision.

On the bright side, channels which are still active can set their videos to public at a later date. In fact, YouTube goes so far as to encourage these channels to re-upload their own videos to be able to take advantage of the new URL system. Except, it’s just not the original uploaders and video makers who are reuploading. Reuploads from other users who had previously downloaded unlisted videos are starting to also pop up, the same as it ever was.

With tools like youtube-dl or Reddit’s SaveVideo, the YouTube community is pulling together to salvage whatever they can from old unlisted videos. And they are getting only better, Archive Team’s unlisted video project hit over 200TB of data. As videos die off, here are some folks desperately trying to revive them, trying to uphold what one might call their online heritage.

A few days ago one of the oldest videos on YouTube was made public from unlisted. It was originally uploaded on April 29, 2005. Titled Premature Baldness, it too is a reupload and final memento from a chasebrown.com which is no longer recognizable. A whisper to remind us that while invoking the right to be forgotten we ought not to neglect, on the other hand, a right to be remembered…

Inactive accounts policy
In general, users are expected to be active members within the YouTube community. If an account is found to be overly inactive, the account may be reclaimed by YouTube without notice. Inactivity may be considered as:
- Not logging into the site for at least six months
- Never having uploaded video content
- Not actively partaking in watching or commenting on videos or channels

This policy is not new. Much of the text of this policy actually dates back to at least June 17, 2009, when the policy was originally introduced as part of YouTube’s username policy for username squatting. At the time, the policy was designed to prevent inactive users from holding valuable usernames or usernames that match brand names. This is because, from YouTube’s launch in 2005 until March 2012, every YouTube channel had to choose a unique username that would form its permanent /user/ URL. Additionally, from 2012 until November 2014, all channels could optionally sign up with or create a permanent username without having to meet any eligibility requirements. Because usernames were in such high demand, the original policy stated that the usernames of reclaimed accounts may be “made available for registration by another party” and that “YouTube may release usernames in cases of a valid trademark complaint”, though the former passage was removed by October 9, 2010.

Since November 24, 2014, YouTube’s username system has been replaced by a custom URL system with minimum eligibility requirements that are more difficult to meet using inactive accounts or accounts created just for squatting usernames. As of July 2021, accounts need to be at least 30 days old, have at least 100 subscribers, and have uploaded a custom profile picture and banner in order to claim a custom URL. Additionally, with the new system, YouTube is able to “change, reclaim, or remove” these custom URLs without otherwise affecting the associated channel. As such, the Username Squatting Policy was no longer necessary for its original purpose.

At some time between February 2013 and March 2014, the Username Squatting Policy was renamed to the “Inactive accounts policy” and the sentence about releasing trademarked usernames was removed. As of July 2021, the policy has not been revised since then. It also appears that the policy has fallen into disuse: in March 2021, a Reddit user posted “As a trusted flagger I can tell you that YouTube hasn’t used that policy in years.”

Additionally, at some point between September 2014 and March 2015, YouTube created a new support article which stated that “Once a username was taken by a channel it could never be used again, even if the original channel was inactive or deleted”, which directly contradicts the purpose of the original Username Squatting Policy.

Some archivists fear that the large amounts of video data being stored from inactive accounts may be lost if YouTube decides to delete those accounts. However, it appears that YouTube has found a way to help offset some of the cost of storing these videos. On November 18, 2020, YouTube announced that they would enable advertisements on videos posted by channels that are not members of the YouTube Partner Program. While no explanation was given for this change, it was announced during the same 3 months in which Google announced several major changes that would reduce the amount of storage being used across the company’s products [1] [2], so it can be inferred that this policy change was made for the same reason.

So, why does the policy still exist? One possible reason is that the policy is simply forgotten. YouTube’s support site is large and contains many articles, and many of them have outdated passages and describe discontinued features that were removed long ago [1] [2] [3] [4]. Many pages also contain references to the old version of YouTube, which has been inaccessible to the public since December 2020 [1] [2] [3]. Also, as of 2021, the text of the Inactive Accounts Policy hasn’t been updated for at least 7 years, though the surrounding page was updated in September 2020 to remove the policy on vulgar language, which had been given its own page. So, YouTube could have simply forgotten that the Inactive Accounts Policy exists, and the people responsible for updating the support pages could have just left the policy because they weren’t specifically instructed to remove it.

Another possible reason the policy still exists is that, while unlikely, YouTube could be preserving the policy for possible use in the future. However, YouTube would provide advance warning to users, likely via email and updated support articles, before enacting this policy, and since we have seen none of those shared online, we have no reason to believe this policy is being enacted at the current time.

So, while YouTube has an Inactive Accounts Policy, it hasn’t used it in years because URLs on the service can now be changed and removed without deleting and recreating accounts, and it appears it has found a way to help offset some of the cost of storing the videos uploaded by these channels. At this time, users and archivists shouldn’t worry about this policy, but should instead focus on specific content removal announcements such as annotations, liked videos lists, draft community contribution closed captions and metadata, playlist notes as well as older unlisted videos.

Chin up!

MadV

The name MadV might not be all that familiar to you, unless you were active on YouTube in 2006. MadV was an early YouTuber whose videos included music, illusions and collaboration videos.

Have you ever randomly gotten a video titled Re: One World to appear in your search results? How about several? These are an artifact of YouTube’s old video responses feature which allowed users to respond to videos with videos instead of plaintext comments.

These videos were all responses to MadV’s One World collab invitation. In this Collab, YouTubers, not in the sense of channels but YouTube folks like you and me, were invited to scribble a message, any message they wanted to share with the world, on their hand and respond to the video.

It might not seem like much today, but in its time One World went viral, drawing in thousands of responses from all around the world. In fact, for a time it held the honor of being the most responded video of all time.

Different from the collaborations of today, participation wasn’t synchronous or live, nor was it merely a series of clips edited over a cutting room floor. One World was almost like a small website or community of its own, where people could also respond to responses forming new video chains.

A few weeks afterwards, MadV compiled his own picks into a video titled The Message. Following a nomination for the most creative YouTube video of the year, and some minor press attention, MadV would continue to organize similar collaboration videos in the months to come.

So what happened that we don’t hear much about MadV anymore? Two things actually.

1. If you were to actually look at the view counts on his channel you will notice that they are not all that high. You might also notice that The Message is still there but the original One World is missing. As it turns out, not everyone seems to have been happy with all the attention MadV was receiving. MadV had the misfortune of getting is account hacked twice, which de-linked a lot of responses and hurt the view count of the video. In a way, his account was severed off from YouTube’s collective unconscious.
2. Response Videos did not last long on YouTube. Spam and the infamous reply girl phenomenon are often cited as reasons YouTube dropped response videos. Thereafter, any surviving response videos were de-linked and new video responses could no longer be submitted. If a response video was using the default “Re:Original Video” you might still find it lying around. While MadV also did other videos, this signaled the abolition of his niche, seemingly alienating him from the platform.

MadV and his channel represent a different era of the web. Whether it was a better or worse era, it was a time before the commodification of responses: Before checkmark verifications, before reply videos were replaced with celebrity call-out videos, before any notion of a Cringe or Cancel Culture… Being able to speak one’s mind before the crowd, had not yet become a luxury.

MadV’s legacy could have been a card trick with 3 million views, it could have been getting the YouTube staff to do a face-reveal and it could have been One World’s status as the most responded YouTube video of all time. Yet what has endured more than any of these achievements, is the memory of MadV’s projects. A generation of internet folk grew up inspired by MadV to make interesting collaborations and projects of their own. Almost like the plot to a time travel story, MadV saved the world even if it meant that he himself would be forgotten.

Hope is not yet lost. People have found new ways to respond to one another. Or just consider the plethora of Iceberg videos lately, trends might not be able to spread directly from video to video but they continue to do so from viewer to viewer. Or what about TikTok duets?

Chin up, we are all in this together after-all!

To learn more about MadV, check out his Wikitubia and Lost Media Wiki pages.

It currently boasts over 7 million views and 10 thousand favorites on Newgrounds, has been mirrored on hundreds of sites and has several thousand user generated levels. Suffice to say, the game has had a lasting impact on a lot of people.

As you may know, support for Flash Player comes to an end this December. But the Super Mario 63 community has taken the necessary steps to survive the end of Flash Player. So in honor of Flashcember, here’s a brief history of what SM63 is, was and will be in the near future…

Humble Beginnings

Believe it or not, the inspiration for Super Mario 63 was a fan-made spritesheet of all things. Sprite artist Flare, had edited Mario sprites ripped from Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga to give Mario his water pack F.L.U.D.D., in the style of Super Mario Sunshine. Intrigued, Runouw decided to make a 2D Mario Sunshine of his own. But who was Runouw?

Runouw is not the username of a person, but in fact a team! Twins Robert and Steven Hewitt to be exact. For over a decade, the duo have used the name Runouw to upload games, videos and sprite-art to various websites. Generally for their games, Robert oversaw programming and Steven the art design.

So Runouw got to work to make their own 2D Mario Sunshine and they debuted their first demo titled Super Mario Sunshine 128 in November 2006. Although the inspiration in Super Mario Sunshine was still very much there, Runouw had decided to incorporate mechanics and assets from other Mario games as well. Right from the get-go, the game featured levels from Super Mario 64 and spin-attacks a la Super Mario Galaxy.

Over the course of the next 3 years, this game would evolve into the SM63 we all know and love today. Updates that followed introduced new levels, power-ups and of course, the beloved level-editor. The name was changed to Super Mario 63 in 2008 and you might have unknowingly also played earlier versions of the game. A thorough version history is available on Runouw wiki for any readers who want to compare the gameplay across different versions.

Super Mario 63 Classic

The most popular, and likely most familiar, version of SM63 (aka SM63 1.4) was first released on SheezyArt on June 26th 2009, followed by the Newgrounds version one day after. You have your basic premise: Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach and it’s up to Mario to save her. Instead of Stars, you’ll be collecting Shine Sprites like Super Mario Sunshine. Couple this with perfect controls, superb level design and some very creative rehashing and you have a game which is already a ten. But it was the Level Designer which really cranked it up to 11.

The level editor allowed players to make their own levels by combining, and placing items Runouw had already programmed. Tiles, enemies, sling stars etc. While not everything in game was available in the editor (such as the lack of event-triggers), it probably had 95% coverage. You could reposition, replicate or repurpose anything you saw in the game with zero programming knowledge! And even better, you could share your levels on a portal where people could rate or comment.

Ingeniously, the level editor was very well-tied into the main game! Besides the Shine Sprites, SM63 had a second collectable: Star Coins. Unlike Shine Sprites which were required to progress the story, the Star Coins were off the beaten path and were needed for unlocking new features. Most notably, unlocking Luigi and new tilesets in the level editor. If you saw lava, which was unavailable by default, in someone else’s custom level, you had to go back to the main game and hunt down some tricky star coins to be able to unlock it for yourself. Or likewise, if you blindly played through the main story while ignoring the level editor, you would constantly be notified whenever you unlocked a new tileset, encouraging you to try it out.

It was really after this version of SM63 was released that the forums on runouw.com came to life, because people needed to register if they wanted to be able publish their levels on the portal. Although it had been used to share levels directly (via save/load codes) and talk about development prior to the 1.4 release, with the game’s popularity Runouw’s audience grew quite a bit. Before they knew it, the forums were frequently having level design and art contests.

Interim

Following the astounding success of SM63, Runouw was determined to keep making more games. While not all of these projects were successful (notably a canned Super Smash Bros. engine and Star Fox engine), they seem to have sought out a style of their own. Only a few months after SM63, came GT & the Evil Factory, a real-time RPG similar to Megaman Battle Network, with entirely original (albeit simplistic) character designs.

Runouw’s legacy is, funny enough, called Last Legacy. First released in 2013, LL took a lot of influence from Zelda II and was a 2D action RPG with some interesting mechanics. Almost as a call-back to the SM63 days, the player has the ability to terraform tiles using their mana. LL (and Null Space) also featured their own level editors, although neither were as popular as the SM63 editor. A third chapter to LL has been in development for a few years now, but it’s unlikely that it will ever be released seeing as Runouw seems to have lost interest.

Between GT and LL, Super Mario 63 received a final update, sometimes referred to as 1.5 or the 2012 version. But more commonly this final version is taken to be the canonical Super Mario 63 and the 2009 version is referred to as SM63 Classic.

The 2012 version also introduced some changes to the level portal, which migrated ratings/comments to the forum. The 2009 portal was dubbed the classic version and the archive sports an astounding 45,000 levels, a few times more than the modern SM63 portal. That being said, the modern portal also has its advantages, such as being able to jump right into levels from the forum without having to copy lengthy level-sharing codes. Finally, Runouw made an .exe version of the game also available, freeing SM63 from the clutches of Adobe, at the cost of no longer being cross-platform.

From then on, Runouw wasn’t actively involved in the development of SM63 any further, having relegated the role to the forum community who kept organizing events all the while. An unfortunate event was when Nintendo, who hadn’t taken any issue with the game in its heyday, decided to issue a Cease & Desist on SM63 in 2013. This resulted in the Newgrounds version of the game being taken down and jeopardizing the runouw.com version. Couple that with the death of SheezyArt that same year and you had a recipe for disaster.

During these dark days, the player-base of the game was severely crippled and any sense of community outside of the forums was nonexistent. The saying goes that it’s darkest before the dawn, and in hindsight this C&D would prove to be a trial by fire. The retaliation of the determined community in those days will inadvertently lead to SM63 surviving the Flash Player killswitch!

The Super Mario 63 Renaissance

Contrary to initial fears, Nintendo didn’t take any further action against the runouw.com version of SM63 or the forums. So for the next two years the forum community kept the fire burning. When Discord came around, they became early supporters starting a server called PixelLoaf in early 2015. Later that same year, the C&D on SM63 would expire, at least bringing back the Newgrounds version of the game.

After helping found PixelLoaf the Runouw brothers would slowly fade out of sight, presumably since they were continuing their education. From then on, PixelLoaf gradually replaced the forums, becoming the new SM63-central. Level design contests continued, and speed-running which was considerably much less popular during the forum days started to gain a lot attention, eventually splitting off into a server of its own.

So seeing as Runouw had ended development, where did that leave PixelLoaf? The community had been testing the limits of the level editor for years at this point, so of course the next step was modding the game.

There’s also a WIP project to introduce a new level editor, which does not depend on Flash.

So much for Super Mario 63! Let’s talk spiritual successors.

Super Mario 127 is a continuation of SM63 led by SuperMakerPlayer and other community members. Oh boy do the visuals and gameplay look good! It doesn’t use Flash, it’s being made in Godot! And of course people are already speed-running it:

Another continuation of SM63 is, Super Mario 63 Redux lead by @ShibaBBQ. Where SM127 is a modernization of SM63, SM63R aims to be a more of a remake from the ground up. So that means controls more akin to SM63 and other features to improve the gameplay experience without changing the core mechanics around too much.

It’s funny how Super Mario 63 started with a spritesheet, and now, years later, Super Mario 63 inspired an artist to make spritesheet of their own.

On that note, Runouw made a brief comeback recently. Seeing as the forum activity had moved to Discord they’ve frozen the forum and are now redirecting people to the server. Before vanishing off the face of the internet once more, Runouw finally uploaded the full Source Code of SM63 to GitHub. It’s safe to say SM63 couldn’t be in a more secure place than it is today.

What the future holds

The old levels might need some organizing and the search function of the level portal definitely needs fixing. But at least levels from over 10 years ago are still up and online. The forums might be dying, but the Discord server active as ever. In fact they recently rebranded themselves as Hazy Mazy Café.

When January comes around, Super Mario 63 will still be playable through the .exe version. And what’s more, Flash Emulation is coming along nicely. You should expect to be able to play the game on Newgrounds or the Internet Archive with Ruffle. Bugs? Thanks to Runouw graciously sharing the full source code testers and developers will have the perfect reference pinpoint issues in their Actionscript implementations.

Not only has SM 63 outlived flash, through fan-sequels like Super Mario 127 and Super Mario 63 Redux, I’d say we have a lot more good news to hear about.

Long story short, the SM 63 community has set a great example by showing the world how to go around walls that you can’t bring down. Time will tell what the future holds, but things are looking bright!

Alas we find ourselves in an age where everyone collectively suffers from short-term memory loss. All that is ever on our minds is what’s relevant -here and now- and everything that is irrelevant is as good as imaginary.

The digital archivist or preservationist’s job is to, ultimately, save those things that matter. To that end they go to great extents; downloading terabytes of data, reverse engineering decade-old websites or even hunting down the source code for the most obscure software.

But it is not an easy job and it certainly is not getting any easier. Things are disappearing at too fast a rate for even the most attentive archivists to be able to keep up. Today, the digital archivist is fighting against currents they cannot overcome, with outdated wisdom. As it were, the archivist ought to find a way to swim with these currents, by taking advantage of tools and options that would have previously been unavailable to them.

In honor of Digital Preservation Day, I myself, as a digital archivist, would like to offer my own two cents for the next generation, that is to say a new breed of digital archivists. The three As: Adaptability, Acceptance and Acknowledgment.

Adaptability:

Keeping track of what is being retired, what websites are dying and mobilizing as quickly as possible!

This past September deserves to go down in history as Shutdown September, seeing how many websites were shut down that month. And honestly, archivists were barely able to keep up.

• Archive Team, only got to work on archiving the massive Chinese social media site Tencent Weibo about 10 days after the shutdown announcement. While 248 TBs is an impressive feat, it’s only a fraction of the web content on Tencent Weibo. A lot more could have been grabbed if action was taken sooner.
• A similar case was the shutdown of Naver Matome, a kind of Japanese tumbleblog. Despite the early shutdown announcement in July, Archive Team’s archival project only began months later in September, with only about a week to spare.
• YouTube recently removed their community contributions feature and Data Horde started a project to save unpublished drafts. Although the feature removal was known for 2 months, it took us weeks to notice that drafts were at risk and even longer to note that YouTube had restricted the feature last year, leading to many drafts never being published. While we were lucky in that the drafts remained accessible for a month beyond the expected deadline, we might not have been as lucky.

Clearly, there is a need for a watchdog, or two, or three, to be able to inform preservation groups of websites which are closing down, or features being retired before the last minute. While tech news sites like the Verge might occasionally report on shutdowns, these are generally restricted to English websites. As for archivists, there are mainly three outlets:

1. Archive Team’s Watchlist page.
2. The Internet Archive Blog, if they are involved.
3. And us, Data Horde, whenever we find out about a shutdown.

Other than that, it’s a matter of luck if a shutdown announcement makes it to the top page on Hacker News or Reddit. This is unreliable and we need to do something about it.

For starters, we need to not only monitor individual websites, but massive platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Reddit. We need our own unofficial open-documentations to note planned update changes when they are hinted at in tweets or in blogs, prior to official announcements, to be able to mobilize dynamically.

As for websites, especially non-English ones, we need to make it easier for non-archivists who are concerned to be able to reach out to us. Which brings us to the second A: Acceptance…

Acceptance:

Come as you are, we do not just need programmers and librarians, anyone can contribute to preservation and everyone should!

The archiving community is, by and large, in favor of collaboration and open source. But currently this only applies among archivists and preservationists. Even with the source code and tools out in the open, the average person will most likely lack the technical knowledge to understand what the hey they’re looking at.

As difficult as it might be to admit, digital archiving is not very well known. Even the words preservation or conservation evoke ancient manuscripts, or endangered animals. Digital preservation is far from the first thing to come to mind and this degree of obscurity is not something to be desired.

Even if this obscurity comes with a sense of pride from the joy of being of a select few who know this craft, it has also come back to bite us. There is a good reason that a lot of people who discovered the Internet Archive, through their National Emergency Library experiment earlier this year, they weren’t the biggest of fans. Naturally, people were more inclined to trust the verdict of their favorite authors or speculate rather than to go and read what the NEL actually was and how it was justified.

If we, as preservationists, don’t promote our own work, why should other people? For all they know, we are all just rogue people with malicious intent. Then are we to grow old reclusively in our obscure hobby? Seeing how few of us archivists there are out there, I find it sad how many of us have made a name for ourselves as “grumpy old men”. We don’t have to be vagabonds, and we shouldn’t be. Because if we choose to alienate ourselves from the rest of the world, amateurs will develop their own archiving techniques to take our place.

• The Save Yahoo Groups/Yahoo Geddon project was initially led by fandom. While Yahoo Groups might not mean a lot in 2020, many fan groups trace their origins to old mailing lists, some of which Yahoo had later acquired. When it was announced that all public groups would be privated, those people knew what was at stake; the history, the works, the memories of two decades.
  So they blindly charged in. None of them were proper digital preservationists, even if some members might have had an affinity for it. But they organized and developed their own method of hunting down and tracking downloads for ancient groups that the world had forgot.
• Another similar project is BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint, a massive effort to preserve Flash and other multimedia web-content which will (or might) break in the future due to incompatibility. Initial volunteers to the project had some programming knowledge and were motivated to preserve games from their childhood. But they discovered that if they laid down a clear path, other people in a similar situation would be more than happy to contribute.
  They developed their own tools for downloading and curating games into their Flashpoint collection so volunteers would not have to start from scratch. And they did not shy away from letting their project be publicized.

Both of these projects have come a long way, in large part due to the sheer enthusiasm to initiate these projects and later due to extensive help from seasoned archivists who took note of these ideas and supported and nurtured them.

The bottom line is, we need to not shew people away, but embrace them. If an apprenticeship system seems too degrading at the very least we, as archivists, should take note from Save Yahoo Groups and Flashpoint when it comes to writing our tutorials and publicizing our projects.

We shouldn’t merely lurk on IRC chatrooms, we need to be able to reach the same people we’re trying to help, even if it’s on social media. DEF CON is cool, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could stand on our own two legs and had a convention of our own?

And when people come to us, asking for help, with no credentials whatsoever, we need to learn how to help. Which brings us to the third A: Acknowledgment.

Acknowledgment:

Understanding our circumstances and constraints, recognizing that we are not all on equal footing and that we might have very different goals and respecting one another.

It is entirely possible for a seasoned archivist to encounter someone -who is much less knowledgeable in archiving, or even programming- asking for help. And as someone who dedicates their time, to observe different archiving communities, I can acknowledge that every group has their own focus policy.

• Mature archiving groups generally have a lot of tutorials and hardware they are more than happy to share, for their particular focus. Here, let’s acknowledge that every group has their own particular focus, information on a lost commercial is likelier to show up on the Lost Media Wiki, news on a delisted game is more Dead Game News territory.
• Semimature archiving groups generally function as cliques, they have the expertise but are constrained by resources. Anyone expecting help from higher-ups within the group should first make a name for themselves, to prove that their ideas are worth the high council‘s time.
• Some other groups are one-man armies, they find a very specific niche and document whatever they can. They might look to expand, or insist their archive is only for the fun of it.

So mature and small groups are comparatively stable, whereas semimature groups are considerably volatile. This is not really something we can change, so instead we should learn to acknowledge it. Some groups are always itching to lend a hand but other groups really won’t be willing to give outsiders, who have not proven their value and sincerity, the time of day.

Next we have to acknowledge expenses. Preservation is expensive, digital or otherwise. For some communities digitizing physical material is not easy, as the incomplete digitizations prior to the unfortunate fire at the National Museum of Brazil goes to show. It is a harsh reality that we do not receive the necessary subsidies from states, often relying on donations.

Again, mature groups are self-sustaining. For every member who retires, there will be new volunteers joining in. They also often have some form of donation system to maintain and expand their hardware. As for archiving groups which are still developing, they will have their ups and downs. A single Tweet or Reddit post can bring in tens of new people overnight. Conversely, it’s not uncommon for splinter groups to emerge if their focus diverges from the majority. Money and hardware might be supplied through donations, but again it could always be cut off. Most notably, The Eye has been experiencing a lot of downtime and struggling to cover costs these past few months. Of course, if you can’t cover the costs in the first place you’re better off avoiding anything ambitious.

As much as we archivists advocate for open access, it’s a harsh reality that we are more often not able to actually provide this. People outside of archiving circles have already discovered how to turn a profit out of archived material, through ad-revenue or paywalls. Take getdaytrends.com as an example, where you can look up Twitter trends per day, while they cover their costs through ads. Then perhaps, some of us smaller archiving groups could survive through such practices, until they can achieve a more mature stage.

But as a maxim: Access should be opened chronologically, so that nothing which has been opened before is closed off. (Ex. uploads for the last year are behind a paywall, but on 1 January 2021, uploads on 1 January 2020 go open access)

Let’s talk a bit about a community which actually is trying something similar to this, namely OldGameMags. OldGameMags was only a small group of people who’d met each other over the internet and had been pooling resources to gather old game magazines. And they were barely receiving any donations. So they came up with a clever idea: To gain access you either had to make a one time donation, or actually send in a magazine to be scanned into their collection.

Except not everyone was happy with this. Back in June, OldGameMags and the Internet Archive were at a stand-off. OldGameMags proprietor Kiwi, discovered that some of their magazine scans were being uploaded to the Internet Archive and, surprisingly, this was a repeated offense. While the Internet Archive is a massive, well-funded and well-known archiving platform, OldGameMags is a small group who gathered everything they had with blood, sweat and tears. From a utilitarian point of view, the IA volunteer who was mirroring OGM might have found a home which could host these with a much lower burden and make them accessible for a cheaper cost. But on the other hand, if they continued mirroring everything on OGM, there would no longer be any reason for people to join OGM. This was their passion and from OGM’s point of view, it was as good as stealing (even if a donation had been made). Eventually the two sides were able to reach a settlement, but if IA and OGM had been able to better communicate their intention, such a conflict of interest might have been resolved a lot sooner.

Then finally, as it stands, we must acknowledge one another. We’re all in this preservation business together after all, even if our goals might differ. To reiterate, most of us don’t have states, companies or foundations subsidizing our efforts. So we ought to support one another, technically and financially.

This is why we need arbiters such as the DPC, SPN and IIPC to bring us together. We need to do what we can preserve the preservationists, because nobody else will! The best way to do that is to acknowledge one another, working synergistically and doing our best to not offend one another.

Preservation means preserving the past, yet we do it not for the past, but for the future. Then what right do we have to object so vehemently to get with the times? The world is changing, it’s high-time we caught up.

We need adaptability to achieve dynamism, to keep up with the rapid decay of digital information. We need acceptance to foster new ideas and train new archivists. And we need acknowledgement to protect and support one another.

So as we enter a new decade, may these words usher in a new era. A new era for a new breed of digital archiving and preservation…