How lucky are you feeling today? In this episode, Madpro and Calm Evening talk about video game preservation and the ‘Gacha Game’ genre.

Originally recorded Christmas Eve, 2025.

Data Horde Linktree: https://linktr.ee/datahorde

Data Horde Podcast: https://shows.acast.com/data-log

calm evenings’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfipY14xS7gGw9acsCn1RQ

and gacha preservation Discord Server: https://discord.gg/67Pu738vVE  

* Gacha Archive: https://archive.org/details/gacha-archive

* Calm Evening’s Android Apps Guide: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Android_Applications/https

* More About AlexaRank and how Way Back Machine Crawls: https://datahorde.org/pulling-rank-the-legacy-of-alexa-internet/

* Kahvibreak website https://bluemaxima.org/kahvibreak/ and Discord https://discord.gg/aGK8NuBG3e

* KeitaiWiki website https://keitaiwiki.miraheze.org/wiki/ and Discord https://discord.gg/tWUYbF3N9F 

* iPhoneOS Obscura: https://discord.gg/rTJ9zxjMu3

* Rent A Girlfriend Gacha: https://archive.org/details/jp.enish.kanopazu

* Lost Media Wiki https://lostmediawiki.com/Home

* The Mission to Save「Domino’s App feat. Hatsune Miku」by Nick Robinson https://youtu.be/341IsnWdaT4 

Credits: Gashapon machines (Hong Kong) by Mk2010 on Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gashapon_machines_%28Hong_Kong%29.jpg

• Jason Citron quote is from New York Times
• Discord CDN filehosting changes rumor and announcement
• EA/FIFA game delistings
• Nintendo 3DS/Wii U online service shutdown
• Typepad
• Goodboy Galaxy Interview
• Discord-Matrix Bridge: Out-of-your-element

BG: Jungle Waterfalls by Mark Ferrari.

Music: Meadow Breeze written by TECHNOTRAIN on Dova Syndome.

• Podcast: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/data-log
• Old Phone Preservation: https://twitter.com/OldPhonePreserv
• More info on i-Mode: https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2020/04/complete-guide-to-i-mode-games/
• Emoji and the Unicode Consortium: https://home.unicode.org/emoji/about-emoji/
• Snake on 7-Segment Displays, DIY project for the insane engineers among you: https://hackaday.io/project/166556-snake-on-7-segment-displays
• 7-segment by Vishnu Mohanan on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/9mSe-QS5JrA
• 3G by SoQ錫濛譙 on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/qiaomeng/5059237997
• Broadcasting tower in Trondheim, Norway by on Wikimedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_broadcasting#/media/File:Tyholt_taarnet.jpg

• 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/

• Ruffle: https://ruffle.rs/
• Public Domain Day 2023 Film Contest: https://blog.archive.org/2023/01/21/public-domain-day-film-contest-highlights-works-of-1927/
• Internet Archive: https://archive.org/
• Internet Archive Twitter: https://twitter.com/internetarchive
• Internet Archive Mastodon: https://mastodon.archive.org/users/internetarchive
• Jason Scott: https://twitter.com/textfiles
• Center for MI Jewish Heritage: https://www.tiktok.com/@mijewishheritage

Yesterday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced a purge on inactive accounts. Musk has cited the reasoning as “freeing [up] the name space” for users who might want a new handle. Musk then went on to assure Twitter that these “1.5 billion accounts” would be accounts which have not tweeted or logged-in for the last few years.

This is very much, an expected move. You might recall from our blogpost a while ago that Musk had expressed interest in purging accounts early in November. It should also be noted that Twitter’s previous management had failed a similar policy change in 2019, to expire accounts which had not been logged into for 6 months. That policy change failed due to outrage and protest across the platform.

Well then, should you be worried? Probably not for your own account. Some have expressed concern over the accounts of loved ones or deceased celebrities, which will more easily fit this criteria. If you have such concerns, we can recommend a useful utility from our friend JustAnotherArchivist, called snscrape. snscrape allows you to save public tweets from accounts on Twitter. It also works for a few other websites like Facebook and Reddit.

The code is available at https://github.com/JustAnotherArchivist/snscrape, but if you have Python 3 installed pip3 install snscrape is all you need to install it.

From your terminal or command prompt, the following command will save a local archive of Elon Musk’s tweets:

snscrape --jsonl twitter-user elonmusk > muskytweets.json

And if you want another account, just substitute the username and a file to save to:

snscrape --jsonl twitter-user RetroTechDreams > RTD_tweets.json

I might write a more detailed tutorial on snscrape if people are interested.

But for the time being, spread the word! Save what endangered accounts are valuable to you and be sure to tell all of your friends about snscrape.

This new era of Twitter has been quite turbulent, to say the least. More than half of the workforce has been fired or has quit, and site functionality is becoming unstable, as reported by the Seattle Times. Mastodon has emerged as a serious Twitter alternative. In fact, some of those who have departed Twitter now have their own Mastodon instance over at macaw.social. Personally, I am excited about the rise of mastodon as an alternative as I have been posting Data Horde updates over at @[email protected] for about two years now.

So, why not leave Twitter behind and move on? Now, Twitter allows you to request a copy of your personal data: Tweets and all. But it’s probably hard to leave a site that you have been on for over a decade. Especially, when requesting your personal archive is not even working correctly. Many people have reported that archive requests are being ignored or processed with delay. On a test account, we at Data Horde found that it took over 3 days to receive a personal archive.

In 2022 this is a big deal, not only for archivists but also for legality. Article 13 of the GDPR mandates a responsibility to provide a copy of collected data to users (i.e. data subjects) upon request. Outside of Europe, California’s CCPA has a similar clause protecting the right to know.

There are repercussion for not respecting these rules. Recently another messaging app, Discord, was fined 800 000 Euros for failing to respect data retention periods and security of personal data by French Regulator CNIL. That was actually a reduced fine, given Discord’s conciliatory attitude. If Twitter does not up their game, they may meet a similar fate, if not a worser one.

Now that I have your attention, I would like to direct it to the help page on how to request a personal archive from Twitter: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-download-your-twitter-archive . Even if a bit unstable, this is what you need to follow to save a copy of your Tweets.

The Twitter archive is big and burly but not perfect. Johan van der Knijff recently wrote a blogpost on some shortcomings, such as the t.co URL-shortener and some workarounds: https://www.bitsgalore.org/2022/11/20/how-to-preserve-your-personal-twitter-archive

Oh, and by the way. It gets worse: Elon Musk has also stated interest in purging inactive accounts and their Tweet history.

This might not seem like a big deal, except to the one or two of our readers who periodically scrape politician accounts off of https://ballotpedia.org. Yet it is actually a serious turning point. Currently, Twitter does not purge inactive accounts, except in the event of death or incapacitation and by special request.

In 2019 there was an attempted Twitter policy change to expire accounts which had not been logged into for 6 months. This sparked outrage across the platform by those who saw this as unfair to the memory of inactive accounts. In particular, fans of deceased K-Pop artist Kim Jong-hyun, otherwise known as Jonghyun (김종현/종현) came to the defence of his legacy overturning the attempt altogether. Turning back on this decision would go against all of that heritage, people’s heritage, Twitter’s heritage, web heritage. Alas this the projected course of things, even if we cannot prevent it, it is perhaps our duty to protest why it is wrong.

What about the extreme scenario of a total collapse of Twitter? What does that mean for web history? Well, the good new is that people have been thinking on this for much longer than before this year.

Already in 2010 the Library of Congress announced that they would be copying the entire internal archive of Twitter, starting from March 2006.

There are also many smaller grabs on the Internet Archive and archive.today, some of which you have seen linked above. Special mention goes to Archive Team‘s periodical Twitter Stream archive.

Last but not least, you can help! The Internet Archive is collecting Tweet dumps from people as we speak: https://archive.org/services/wayback-gsheets/archive-your-tweets Whether you just want extra insurance for your back-up, or to contribute to the wealth of the web you can help by using the above tool to upload your Tweets to the Internet Archive for generations to come.

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.

Then comes along Archive95 which is an archive of the pre-IA internet of 1995. It primarily uses two sources, the World Wide Web Directory and the German language Einblick ins Internet, to give an impression of an era when the web was small and monitors were bulky as heck.

– glmdgrielson, a young whippersnapper

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: