Op-Ed – Data Horde

What Was It Doing There? Quick Anecdotes Of Games We Found In The Weirdest Locations

flashfire42 — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 18:56:30 +0000

Originally published on: https://medium.com/bluemaximas-flashpoint/what-was-it-doing-there-5d471188c823

Imagine never being able to play the one game you enjoyed so much as a kid. The thought of a beloved game being lost would scare most gamers: Mario Kart gone without a trace, Sonic and Knuckles thought to be a fever dream. However impossible this may seem, for many this has become a scary reality. In the world of web games, the internet is an ever-changing place. A game can be played one minute and gone the next, leaving only mere mentions of it from a few people, stranded in an ancient forum, hosted on a potato.

Because web games can be lost so easily, there are a lot of people searching for their web game white whale. Enter the Hunters of Flashpoint. We aim to find what others consider lost: from Postopia breakfast bonanzas to games that are generally considered to carry curses. Hunters find the weirdest nonsense you thought was a fever dream. See, web games are fairly unique, in the sense that they can easily be put on multiple sites with little to no effort. As a result, many web games were hosted on thousands of different sites, plenty of which are carbon copies of each other. Such an effect is a double-edged sword. Flash developers have had their works stolen time and time again, which is bad for business. However, when that original site goes down because the creator decided that it just didn’t live up to their expectations, the game runs the risk of being lost to time. Luckily, some Iranian fellow has your back seeing as he stole the game 3 days after it went up.

With the nature of our work, some of the games we have found have some interesting stories behind them. One Hunter who goes by the online username of ‘Steviewonder’ curated the 28 Weeks Later movie tie-in game, not realizing we thought it lost. Another of Stevie’s stories happened during a time he was scouring open Dropbox accounts, where he found a lost game hidden in the files of a random person from another country. A version of the King.com Luxor game was found on a Chinese site, miraculously working with all assets. I myself am a fairly new face to the project, but even I have my stories. I was able to find South Park: Big Wheel Death Rally (screenshot in the thumbnail) on a site called joflash.hu, which is a Hungarian site that for some strange (but lucky!) reason was not using the broken embed every other site had used. The owner of joflash.hu had instead taken the .DCR and all its assets and ported them to their site, bypassing the problem everyone else who stole the game had when the embed died. Much more recently though for me was a game by the name of Pebbles Popstar, one of the lost Postopia games. This game turned up on a site that I won’t directly mention due to the fact it hosts copyrighted material. (I will say though it’s a Polish filesharing site themed around hamsters, which should be all the info you need.)

However, odd locations on the internet isn’t the only place lost games have turned up. Computerdude77 asked an unusual question to the Flashpoint staff one day: could games be extracted from an old Internet Explorer web-cache? Turns out, after some effort, yes, yes we could. Hearing this information, Computerdude77 took it upon himself to search through the web cache of his grandmother’s computer in hopes of finding some games he played as a kid. Boy, did we get lucky. Many a lost game was found, and a few games that were already in Flashpoint but incomplete were finished thanks to Computerdude77’s work.

Not all hunting goes smoothly though, and there have been more than a few blunders. One time I spent 3 days working on tracking down a game from the Flashpoint Lost Games list. Everywhere I looked for this game it was missing some assets or it hadn’t been copied properly. After 3 days I finally found a copy of it. I was so excited. I posted my findings in the Hunter Lounge, only to be told that the game had been found months ago and curated with a different name. Nobody had marked in on the sheet as found, so I had spent days looking for a game that was already rescued. But hey, those things happen when volunteering one’s own time to save history. These examples are why we need more folks to come together to help save the web games of our collective childhoods. Adobe ends support for Flash in 2020, and when that happens so much more will be lost. It is a race against time, and we need everyone.

If you would like to find out more about this strange and fantastic project, just check out the community spotlight for more info, or if you’re already sold head on over to the website or Discord Server!

Community Spotlight: BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint

The History of Invidious

Cadence — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 11:57:39 +0000

Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube.

It lets you load YouTube videos in a lightweight, open source, free software interface with no ads and without your browser loading Google trackers.

Or at least, it did. The main Invidious instance is closing down, and its only developer is leaving the project forever.

But more on that later. We need to go back in time.

Terminology note: When I write "Invidious", I am referring to the open source code that anyone can run. There are several public hosted Invidious instances. If I am instead referring to the main instance, invidio.us, then I will make that clear. Only the main instance is deliberately choosing to shut down.

HookTube

Before Invidous was HookTube. HookTube was pretty much the same idea from a user perspective, but it was not open source and it used the YouTube API instead of scraping the site. HookTube survived 18 months before it was served a shutdown notice from YouTube’s legal department at some point in 2018. The site still exists, but it now just embeds YouTube, which provides none of the desirable privacy protections. After this shutdown, the site has been altered to advertise the site owner’s various, vaguely fascist "news" sites. It’s not really worth visiting.

CloudTube

Around the time that it closed down, I was using HookTube for my own viewing, and I was very annoyed that it was gone. I quickly read up on the YouTube APIs and started making my own site. Of course mine too would be served a shutdown request as well at some point in the future, but I had a theory to hopefully avoid that: make it open source. If my site was forced to close, anybody would still be able to use my work by running their own copy. I called my site CloudTube.

On July 18th, 2018, I opened CloudTube to the public and announced it on r/privacy. I had two major features up my sleeve that would make the site better than HookTube: subscriptions, and 1080p+ video.

HD Footage on CloudTube https://cadence.moe/cloudtube/video/zeb0L5hEjn8

Omar

On the comments of that post was omarroth, which was my first encounter with him. We had a conversation in PMs about his site, Invidious. Unlike CloudTube, Invidious got all of its data by scraping YouTube, which appears to make it impervious to legal requests for reasons that I don’t understand. We discussed how Invidious exposes an API to allow other services to easily extract data from YouTube, too. This is how I first heard of Invidious. Shortly afterwards, I rewote CloudTube to use the Invidious API.

Both of our sites grew, each offering slightly different features. CloudTube remained the only frontend to have 1080p+ playback. Invidious had instant subscription loading.

Omar and I continued to collaborate, particularly when we worked together on the YouTube annotations archive, which ended up being a truly unbelievable success. Our relationship was a purely professional one, though. I never found out a single thing about him as a person. To this day, I have no idea how old he is, whether he has a job, or even what his time zone is.

As 2019 continued, his presence in the project discussion chatrooms dwindled until it became nonexistent, as did his work on adding new features to Invidious. I simply assumed that he was extremely busy with other things in real life, or just wanting to spend time elsewhere. After all, having a successful project does not define you as a person. (Or at least I hope it doesn’t. Ponder that.)

And then it was 2020. Omar’s presence was zero. Radio silence, apart from showing up in the chatroom around once a month to answer one question and then disappear. I don’t blame him for this. I’m just documenting the history.

Announcement

And then finally, August 2020. This announcement: Stepping Away From Open Source

What does this mean for the future of Invidious?

Instances

While the main instance is shutting down, Invidious is open source and other people can and do host their own instances of it. Being able to access the software should not become a problem.

http://invidio.us/ currently offers redirect to alternative instances

Development

Omar was the only developer on Invidious. This could partially be attributed to the fact that Invidious is written in Crystal, a considerably less popular language than things like Node and Python. There are Crystal developers out there, but certainly the use of Crystal will be a barrier to trying to get new developers on to the project.

I have not seen a single other person in the Invidious chatroom that knows Crystal in my two years of participating there. I believe I have read every message since I joined.

Having a developer is important since YouTube updates its interface every couple of months, requiring adjustments to get scrapers to work again. Next time there is one such update, it is very possible that Invidious may become unusable, and nobody will volunteer to repair it.

To some degree, this has already begun to happen.

API

Invidious’s API is used to power other projects like CloudTube, and FreeTube (which I’d love to write more about, but perhaps not in this post.)

If Invidious dies, then so does everything that relies on it.

FreeTube is undergoing a rewrite that will add alternatives to the Invidious API for all extractors. For CloudTube, I’ve talked about it a little on my blog here,, but I intend to follow this up with another post when I have more to announce about the future of CloudTube. I use CloudTube myself, and I would like to keep it running even if just for my own sake, so I hope that the future will be bright.

Data

You’re on Data Horde, a digital archiving blog. In what way does Invidious relate to digital archiving?

Well, finally some good news: not all that much. Invidious does not save videos, so apart from user settings and subscriptions, both of which are private, I do not believe there is anything stored by Invidious that we need to scramble to archive. The results of the 2019 annotations archive are safe and sound on archive.org.

This article is less about digital archiving and more about analysing the life of a service that a lot of people around the data community will miss.

The future

Alternatives to Invidious and ways to move forward from here will be discussed in the future in another post, either here on Data Horde, or on my own personal blog, https://cadence.moe/blog.

Thanks for reading.

— Cadence [they/them]