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

For those of you scratching your heads, this game was available on a particular forum, the Pink Rose Garden, dedicated to PinkKittyRose. Now then, from what I can find, this was released around 2012(?). (I have a video mentioning it was just released dating back to that time.) This was back when annotations were still a thing and Pink was still using YouTube and text, as opposed to Twitch. Those forums have since gone down. When? Uh, I don’t know. I was never on them.

But I still have the zip file on my hard drive and I just might upload some place for posterity. Perhaps I could talk to our new overlords partners, Gaming Alexandria, about hosting it.

So What is This Blasted Thing?

If you recognized that last word, you may have an idea of how it plays. If I had to make a comparison, it’s to Pink as A Super Mario Thing is to raocow in that it’s a game themed around a particular internet person and their community. And they start as early as the first level theme.

In terms of gameplay, it’s a bullet hell game. What does that mean? Imagine a game like Gradius or Galaga. Now fill the screen with bullets and other deadly things. You have a pretty good idea of what it is. Or just imagine a Touhou game.

– glmdgrielson