Pikmin Archives is a group dedicated to collecting developer notes and promossional material on the Pikmin series of games.

What do they do?

The Pikmin series are RTS games where players must guide a swarm of aliens to thrive in the wild! The Pikmin games are very memorable for their unique artstyle contrasting everyday objects over sci-fi technology and fantastical nature. Celebrating that artstyle, Pikmin Archives is focussed on documenting the creative process behind the Pikmin games.

For example, Pikmin Archive member Flamsey restored the old Pikmin 2 USA website which had ceased to function due the discontinuation of Flash Player.

How do they do it?

Pikmin Archives is most active on their Discord server which is a hub for exchanging files and fostering discussion. There, a dedicated #archive-submissions channel is used to submit media and submissions are then curated by the mod team.

Occasionally, members might post their findings to Twitter; but there is no dedicated Pikmin Archives social media account or website at this time.

How do I sign up?

Just hop on board their Discord Server!

So what are you waiting for? Become a Pikmin Archivist, today!

Looking to discover other archiving communities? Just follow Data Horde’s Twitter List and check out our other Community Spotlights.

• David Helgason Interview: https://www.pocketgamer.biz/interview/58959/not-everyone-needs-to-be-king-or-supercell-unitys-david-helgason-on-unity-5-everyplay-and-unreal-engine/
• Unity Pricing Changes Blogpost: https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
• Cult of the Lamb Steam Page Announcement: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1313140/view/7249162346641740420
• The Chaos at Unity by Alex Heath: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/15/23875408/command-line-the-chaos-at-unity
• BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint (Home to some Web Unity Games): https://flashpointarchive.org/
• Fundraiser for Donkey Kong Programmers Story: https://hitsave.org/fundraiser-translation-of-donkey-kong-programmers-story/

Not all Flash media is the same. You see, the interactivity in Flash relies on a language called ActionScript. In 2006, ActionScript 3 came out with new features. Alas it was backwards-incompatible with AS2 and so not everyone was to keen on it. It wasn’t until the release of Flash Professional CC (2013), that authors were required to switch to AS3.

This has made Flash emulation quite a challenge. Understandably, Flash emulators have had to choose between prioritising AS2 and 3. For example the emulator Shumway focussed on AS2 (with some AS3 support) and Lightspark focussed on AS3. Unfortunately, Shumway hasn’t been updated in ages and Lightspark isn’t browser-based.

On the other hand, Ruffle, a relative newcomer to the Flash emulation scene has been picking up speed. Written in Rust and sporting WebAssembly, it runs wicked fast and cross-platform! Though Rust’s focus has too been mostly in one direction, namely AS2, they have started to make progress on AS3 well. Below is an abridged version of an announcement shared on the Ruffle Discord Server by our friend Nosamu.

The first few ActionScript 3 games are finally playable in Ruffle, Demos below! One of the first fully-playable games is Not To Scale, a simple but clever photo puzzle! You can try it out right now on Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/575849/format/flash?emulate=flash

Even more exciting, the beautiful minigolf game Wonderputt is now mostly playable with the Ruffle desktop app! The first hole is quite tricky due to collision bugs, but a fix is in progress, along with web performance improvements.

Watch our #announcements channel for updates in the coming weeks! As always, you can download Ruffle from https://ruffle.rs/#downloads.

But wait, there’s more – Ruffle web builds now have a fancy loading animation! If you own a website, now is the perfect time to update Ruffle! No longer will your visitors be greeted with a blank white screen while waiting for Ruffle to load. Check out the animation:

Also, if you’d like to add your own flair to the loading screen or disable it altogether, there are a few customization options: preloader, --preloader-background, and --logo-display. For more information, see our wiki.

And finally, we’re looking for help developing an official Ruffle app for Android! If you have experience with Rust development targeting Android, please check out @szőlő’s WIP repository: https://github.com/torokati44/ruffle-android and join the development thread: Native Android App.

Do you have a favorite Flash game you just wish you could play right now? It’s not emulation, but Bluemaxima’s Flashpoint collection might be able to run what you are looking for right now. Be sure to also check out our Flash Player Emergency kit for more tips on Flash after its end-of-life.

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

For the uninitiated, Touhou Project is a series of shoot ’em up games, known for its dense bullet patterns, characters, music, and developer. There’s just one developer, by the way, Jun’ya Ota, better known as ZUN. It is also notable for having a wide variety of fanworks.

As for why we’re here, the games are also notable for their scoring system. Top runs are tracked and ranked by score, rather than time. The place you would find top scores is, fittingly, called a scoreboard. A popular Touhou Project scoreboard was Royalflare (ロイヤルフレア), which has been online for 15 years, since 2007. You can find scores for runs for 16 different games, in various categories.

Now earlier this January, Royalflare suspended replay uploads and announced that it would be closing its doors at the end of the month. The site-owner was distraught, stating that there had been run submissions with faked names, faked replays and even some doxxing. This led them to conclude, that the site no longer serves its role as a reliable scoreboard. Royalflare was left read-only, for the duration of January, to shutdown thereafter.

We would like to thank the many players who have contributed to the site over the years since its founded in 2007.

Despite the routine, albeit shortlived, outrage on Twitter and Reddit, it didn’t take long for the internet to quickly forget about the shutdown. Yet, as is often the case in communities with large fandoms, Touhou players were not going to forget so soon. In particular, Maribel Hearn, who already had a personal website dedicated to shoot ’em up games, announced that he had began mass-downloading every replay available on Royalflare to his own site.

Interestingly, this wasn’t his first hustle either, apparently, as he had also made an archive of the former Gensokyo.org scoreboard, before it shut down in 2019. Voile! Mari’s Royalflare Archive is now fully-operational and even upgraded with some search improvements. Now go out and shoot the bullet to spread the word!

Mari’s story is a story, that goes to show that the web doesn’t just need dedicated archiving communities, but also dedicated communities, archiving. The people best suited for archiving Touhou scoreboards, in terms of understanding what they are and how they are categorized, are probably going to be Touhou players. If anything, they are the most likely to be paying attention to shutdown deadlines.

As web archivists, we should not just fish for people but we should try to teach them how to fish. Perhaps, this tutorial on how to use the Wayback Machine and wget might someday help another Touhou fan, or the fan of some other community

Note: I have added links where relevant, but have not otherwise altered the text of this interview.

glmdgrielson: So, first off, outside of i-Mode, could you tell me a bit about yourself?

RockmanCosmo: I’m a very big Mega Man fan. I also run two scanlation projects that aim to scanlate the entirety of the Rockman DASH Daibouken Guide and Rockman DASH manhua. Both have never been translated into English before, and the Daibouken Guide especially has untranslated developer scribbles that will help give everyone greater insight into its development.

Rockman DASH is more commonly known as Megaman Legends in the English-speaking world. Info on these projects can be found here: https://rockmancosmo.weebly.com

g: Interesting. So tell me, how did you get involved with i-Mode?

R: Last December, I was browsing Twitter and I came upon a video of someone playing Rockman.EXE Phantom of Network on a flip phone. Being a Mega Man fan, I knew about the Rockman feature phone games and how rare they were. I researched the phone model and contacted Protodude, who runs Rockman Corner, the most prominent Rockman blog on the internet. The phone was a BREW phone and ran on EZweb. Protodude invited me to a group chat, where I continued to do research on EZweb documentation. A member of the group knew somebody who had the EXE games on a similar feature phone. It turned out the EXE games were actually on an i-mode phone, and we were able to raise money to rent the phone indefinitely and have it shipped to a member of our team. Once we got the phone and started to get the EXE games off of it, I looked for people online who had expertise with feature phone extraction. I came upon a community called >Kahvibreak, and I found some very knowledgable people in its Discord server. That is when I truly discovered the hidden world of feature phone preservation and i-mode.

Even then, I was still mostly focused on the Rockman preservation projects. It was only in June 2021 that I learned about the i-mode website shutdown deadline. As months passed with no awareness being raised by gaming preservation organizations, I decided to write an open letter to them in September. I saw that all feature phone/i-mode projects were suffering from the lack of expertise, which was a result of this sect of preservation being largely overlooked by mainstream public.

For reference, Rockman.EXE is the Japanese name for the Mega Man Battle Network series, which consist of RPGs about cyber security and cyberspace.

g: And that’s how you found out about Hit Save!, I presume?

R: I had known about Hit Save before, but I was never involved with them. Someone told me that my open letter was posted in there, and that’s when I joined the server to contribute to further discussion.

g: And that’s where I found you to do this interview. So what happened next?

R: You referring to what happened after I released the open letter?

g: That and when you joined Hit Save for further discussion, yes.

R: OK. Before I answer that, I’d like to make a minor correction – I wrote the open letter in October, not September. Sorry for the incorrect month!
I contacted the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), Game Preservation Society (GPS), and other prominent gaming preservation individuals at the end of October. Unfortunately, not many of them were responsive.
Most of the individuals left me on read, and the GPS initially ignored me. However, the VGHF got back to me, said that they wanted to put something out on social media, and asked me for resources that they could cite. I answered them promptly, but they didn’t get back to me for a week. I sent a follow up email, still nothing. They responded to my second follow up email (two weeks later), saying that their PSA should come out “soon”. I emailed them a third time two weeks later, they finally put out a PSA on Twitter.

With the i-mode website shutting down at the end of the month, the folks at Rockman Corner wanted to spread awareness for an important preservation project they're working on. DoCoMo's multimedia phone service, i-mode, hosted video games from dozens of well-known franchises. https://t.co/HpYlDqTjUd

— Video Game History Foundation (@GameHistoryOrg) November 17, 2021

The GPS surprisingly reached out to me after its president saw my open letter in the Hit Save! server. I was able to speak to the GPS president and helped him kickstart a GPS effort to save as many games as possible before the deadline. Via a successful fundraiser, they were able to save 500+ games before the website shut down today.
Overall, my open letter reached more people than I would have ever imagined. I think it was successful in raising awareness among gamers and preservation organizations.

g: Today as in November 30th, 2021? …I picked a heck of a time to interview. So how did the archival go? Any idea how complete it is?

R: As I had said, the GPS was able to download 500+ games. They’re being stored on SD cards, IIRC. There were around 200 storefronts still active before the shutdown, and I don’t know how many games were in each store. One thing’s for sure – what was on the store at the time of the shutdown is a small percentage of what there used to be. Publishers like Capcom and Taito already shut down their i-mode stores, so those games are left to linger on hardware.

And yeah, you picked a fitting day for an interview

g: Gonna be quite awkward when I publish it though. Either way, any interesting finds you want to share from the archiving, if there are any?

R: The GPS will likely be giving out a list of games they’ve archived, so look out for that. They’ve downloaded all the Sega store games, so that’s pretty cool.

As for the Rockman.EXE project, we’ve got a progress report:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X3TN1QIvINPMDC6fmwo6vHCgAT477j0FM1zYkWZzdZY/edit

These two Rockman Corner articles are relevant, too.

https://www.rockman-corner.com/2021/09/rockman-exe-phantom-of-networklegend-of.html
https://www.rockman-corner.com/2021/09/we-have-secured-rockman-dash-great.html

Any kind of progress in these projects are “interesting finds”, since nobody’s gotten this far before. In a sense, we’re pioneers in a heavily undocumented ecosystem.

g: We’ve hit the point where it stops being archival and starts being archaeology. I suppose now is a good time to ask, just what was i-mode?

R: Prior to the advent of the iPhone, feature phones were incredibly popular in Japan. Major mobile providers like DoCoMo and au created dedicated mobile internet services to connect users to an assortment of utilities. The most prominent feature phone service at the time was DoCoMo’s i-mode service. Launched in 1999, i-mode was the world’s first true multimedia phone service. You could connect to the service to access a bunch of utilities, from weather to news to email. I-mode (and its competitors) also had proprietary storefronts to purchase and download video games. Each publisher would have its own game storefront on the i-mode website, which could only be accessed through i-mode compatible phones.

g: An interesting piece of information that I should have asked for at the start of this interview. Whoops. Anything else you’d like to add?

R: If there’s a takeaway from the massive loss of i-mode games, it’s this: it is important to raise awareness as soon as possible. What happened with i-mode in the past month is a result of not enough awareness being raised beforehand. For example, the GPS said in a letter to a Kahvibreak member earlier this year that i-mode wasn’t an emergency. After I spoke with the GPS president, he realized how urgent the situation was and regretted not taking action earlier. There are probably other niche sects of video games that I’m not aware of who need more awareness. Raising awareness to the general public helps small groups like ours find people with specific technical knowledge. Organizations and smaller groups should work together to spread the word; the organizations don’t have to take their own action – all I want is for them to spread the word to people who wouldn’t have known otherwise.

That’s a bit of a spiel, but I hope I was able to get my point across!

g: That’s fine, and I’m glad I was able to have this talk with you.

R: Same. Thanks for doing this! I’m glad that more people will get to learn about i-mode preservation and the lessons we can learn from it.

For those interested in more, the specific bird that you can use to yell at our interview subject is @RockmanCosmo.

It has since been revealed to me that the GPS got 876 games. Out of 3000. Eep.

– glmdgrielson, irritated about having to type an entire Google Docs link in all of its incomprehensible glory.

Long time SNES manual preservationist, author and contributor to numerous emulation projects and friend to many game preservationists Near/Byuu has passed away on June 27, 2021.

Earlier that day, they had sent out a series of Tweets to the effect of a suicide letter. Wishing to remain anonymous, the last person to have talked to Near prior to their death would soon contact Hector Martin “marcan”, believing them to have taken their own life while on the phone. Several hours later the event was confirmed by local police.

This tragic turn of events had followed episodes of harassment, which Near detailed in their final words. Their parting request was that they be remembered for their many contributions to the community, and not for they were about to undertake.

Shutdowns

Last Wednesday, on June 23, YouTube announced a decision to automatically set all Unlisted Videos uploaded prior to 2017 to private, one month later on July 23. The difference being that; unlisted videos are hidden from search results, but people with the link can access them, whereas private videos are inaccessible to other users unless the uploader gives manual approval.

While channels have the ability to opt-out, to keep their unlisted videos unlisted, and not privated, it has come to the attention of archivists that many inactive channels are unlikely to pick this option given the short timeframe presented.

In the way of archiving projects for unlisted videos, there has already been much discussion and some organization on #down-the-tube on hackint, Hacker News, r/datahoarder and the Distributed YouTube Archive. Alas, there is yet no project in motion, at this time.

The Unlisted Videos website, which was made specifically for the purpose of collecting links to unlisted videos, has been scraped or is being scraped by several groups, worth about half a million videos. There is also Jopik’s searchable collection of 4.5 million unlisted videos, which is a monument in its own right. That being said, these are only links, and the video files themselves have yet not been mirrored. So be sure to stay tuned for upcoming projects.

To spread awareness of the situation, we are doing countdown of unlisted videos on the Data Horde Twitter account.

This upcoming change from YouTube comes with a similar update to Google Drive, which will render many shared files inaccessible to users who have not accessed them prior to a certain date.

Updates

In support of the efforts to archive unlisted videos, Sponsorblock has introduced a new feature to detect, and anonymously submit links to unlisted videos, that users might be watching.

The Flash Player emulator Ruffle, is now a bit easier to install. Ruffle has finally been added as an extension to the Chrome Web Store, and you can run it from the comfort of Chromium browsers.

In other news, the mod community/archive Gamebanana suffered a major outage over the weekend. Thankfully, as it turns out, this hiccup was only the result of a billing glitch on their host’s side. The site is now up and running once more.

Can you believe our host accidentally suspended 16 of our servers due to a billing glitch, and nobody was around to fix it because it’s a Sunday. This is the biggest host blooper we’ve ever encountered in 20 years.

tom, Gamebanana Admin

Discoveries

Members of Omniarchive, a group dedicated to archiving old lost versions of Minecraft, managed to recover the elusive Alpha 1.1.1. version on June 25, 2021. The first of many Seecret updates, Alpha 1.1.1. was notable for being online for only a few hours before the Alpha 1.1.2 hotfix.

Archivist ProffApple found a tweet someone who had just downloaded the update had made over a decade ago on the day that Alpha 1.1.1. came out, September 18, 2010 to be specific. Turns out, they still had the game files lying around!

You can read more about the story on this Kotaku Article by Zack Zwiezen and this PC Gamer article by Jonathan Bolding.

“Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.”

Chuck Jones

Any artistic product will have early drafts or scrapped ideas missing from the final version. In the film industry, The Cutting Room Floor refers to a hypothetical space where all the unused footage for a movie is dumped.

True to the namesake, The Cutting Room Floor is an online community who collect cut or unused content in video games, instead of movies. Assets hidden in inaccessible locations or the code itself, shortcuts used by the developers, unusual easter eggs, incomplete levels — you name it!

What do they do?

The Cutting Room Floor primarily use their MediaWiki as a database to publish and/or document unused, unreleased or incomplete video game content. For a sample of TCRF’s discoveries, just taka a look at their “Did You Know…” section. Did you know that Dragon’s Lair for the Amiga actually has a hidden message to discourage people from cracking the game?

How do they do it?

For one thing data mining hidden content is a skill in its own right. While this is often an individual task it’s not an isolated one, TCRF provide thorough guides on how to get started and best practices for reporting new discoveries.

In cases where content is removed from the final release, TCRF work together with their sibling community The Hidden Palace who collect video game prototypes.

How do I sign up?

Consider registering on the Wiki, there’s plenty of to-dos to fill out! TCRF is spread across a number of platforms, but are currently most active on Discord.

Give the Cutting Room Floor a visit, today! And CUT!

Looking to discover other archiving communities? Just follow Data Horde’s Twitter List and check out our past Community Spotlights.

If you have not heard of MAME before, the name stands for Multi Arcade Machine Emulator. It started off as an open-source project to emulate retro arcade-cabinets, later expanding to also vintage computers and calculators. MAME can be run on a variety of systems. Notably, the Internet Archive uses MAME to allow users to emulate video game prototypes from the comfort of their browser.

The MAME team was quick to send Capcom a thank you for the acknowledgement:

It truly is a heartwarming moment to see fans of these retro games coming together like this. On one side we see those who have grown up to work for a company who made games of their childhood, and on the other side we see those who have engineered solutions to make those beloved games playable, despite the obsoleteness of arcade cabinets. Let us hope this monumental moment will inspire the video game industry to take a less hostile stance towards emulation.

To learn more about MAME, check out their website or development repo on GitHub.

The Hidden Palace is a group of video game preservationists who hunt down video game prototypes, cut features and other game development media. You could say they are out to find out how games change throughout their development cycle, what elements and mechanics actually make it to the final product.

The name comes from the Hidden Palace Zone from Sonic 2, an unused area in the original release.

What do they do?

For about 15 years, the Hidden Palace has amassed a collection of over 1000 development builds for various games on a multitude of systems. A good portion of these have been mirrored on the Internet Archive, where you can try them out for yourself via MAME.

More than that, the Hidden Palace is about analyzing differences between different game builds, that is to say different stages of development. The Hidden Palace also frequently cooperates with The Cutting Room Floor to document features which have been cut from the final release. Take a look at their recent joint-update on the elusive Sonic 1 Mega Drive Prototype!

How do they do it?

It’s one thing to hunt down an obscure product, but where do you find a game that was never really released? Good candidates are developers or testers who may have had access to earlier versions of the game. Next come hobbyists or other preservationists who may have acquired a prototype from the above options. At this stage it’s likely that a prototype will go up for auction.

In any case, contributors to the Hidden Palace ship prototypes they have come into possession of, so that they may be dumped and/or scanned. If you would be interested in contributing yourself, get in touch with [email protected] and also have a look at their contribution page (they really value your confidentiality).

How do I sign up?

Even if you can’t travel to the Hidden Palace’s preservation studio for yourself, there is a lot you can do to help. Just join the Wiki, there’s plenty of to-dos to fill out!

Or if you would rather prefer talking and meeting with people, perhaps the Hidden Palace Discord Server is for you!

Then what are you waiting for? Go forth, and discover the next Hidden Palace Zone, today!

Looking to discover other archiving communities? Just follow Data Horde’s Twitter List and check out our other Community Spotlights.