Site Remembers Forgotten Games For You, Wholesale

Anonymous Howard writes "Just found a new webpage called WhatWasThatGame.com - it has the potential to be very, very useful for everyone who wants to play a game from the past, but can't find it until they can remember its name. Basically, you tell the site what you remember about the game, and then readers tell you what the game was! I've been using it for a few days and it hasn't let me down yet, no matter what obscure game I've thrown at it." The site's still early in development, but help them out on their unsolved games if you can.

Comments

Need Some Traffic

[elijahao]

The top game guesser has 25 points when you get 10 for a correct game guess, so I'd say they need a ton more people visiting the site with that nostalgic feeling. Sounds like a cool idea, but I suppose this story didn't get posted to the front page.

Get out there and help them solve their unknown games all you who lurk in the gamers hall of memories :)

Re:Need Some Traffic

[BrokenHalo]

I guess the most forgotten game was Hunt the Wumpus (or rather is the most forgotten; it still comes by default on the Slackware CDROM).

But my favourite game of yesteryear was Rodent's Revenge :-)

How bout an ol' time favorite...

[Sherloqq]

Let's see how long they stay in everyone's favorite game of Global Thermonuclear Slashdotting... :)

They seem to be holding up pretty well so far!

Re:How bout an ol' time favorite...

[qqtortqq]

My karma ran over your dogma.

another great site for oldies

[Dreadlord]

after using that site to remember your game's name, you can visit The Underdogs, it has lots of info on old games, including downloads, reviews, and copyright info (free, shareware, ...).
What I like the most about it is the random pick feature, I found several nice games that I never heard about before, use it when you need a time waster ;)

Re:another great site for oldies

[Anonymous Coward]

not to forget... www.C64.com for the pre-PC gamers... :)

Re:another great site for oldies

[mink]

Also useful is www.mobygames.com for release info and whatnot.

Email Policy

[ghostis]

The FAQ doesn't say anything about what happens to your email address. He sounds like a good chap the wouldn't take advantage of the tons of addresses he's gonna get, but it would reassure me if he put a few lines in his FAQ about email address privacy.

-ghostis

Re:Email Policy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm with you 99%.

Re:Email Policy

[Gazunta]

hey guys, Gazunta here - I'm the guy that runs whatwasthatgame.com - thanks to Anonymous Howard for posting it! (as long as we don't get sent down in flames over the next 24 hours, heheh...but the server SHOULD withstand it...) Anyway, just a note about email addys - they are completely, totally 100% safe. I don't sell them. I don't even store them. I don't even use an address book so I can't send you any stupid virii. The only use for the email address is so I can let you know when your game has been found. Once that's sent the email addys are destroyed locally - and only recalled if you win the month's freebie. But it's a good point to add to the FAQ, and i'll do it asap! Thanks for the advice!

Re:Email Policy

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

You do know those things aren't worth the bytes they stored in, right?

Re:Email Policy

[Mandoric]

Now you just need to fix the commenting in Firebird - no cursor's displayed in the name box nor is it accessible by mouse, and the mail/webpage boxes aren't even tabbable to. And the comment-box doesn't focus unless clicked twice.

Re:Email Policy

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the humor of "I'm with you 99%" being posted all over the place recently? Explanation, anyone?

Re:Email Policy

[evilhayama]

They're destroyed but can be recalled later? How does that work?

Re:Email Policy

[neostorm]

I'm using firebird and I don't have any of those issues.

Running Win2k FB 0.6.1

Also known as

[dirtmerchant]

Google

Re:Also known as

[YaRness]

i've had no problems asking in existing gaming forums. i imagine it'd be a might difficult to gain enough traffic to make this site worthwhile (in either $$$s or usefullness, both requiring a good amount of active users).

In my bookmarks.

[FauxReal]

It's a nice start... I'll be hanging around this site. I like trying to remember obscure things AND I like video games as well as old technology. Sounds perfect for me.

Slashdotting

[MadocGwyn]

I find it funny half the posts are wondering if it'll go down, or if its down yet. Some poor new service comes around and everyone sits on the main page hitting 'refresh' screaming "WHY WON'T IT DIE" as the poor victums bandwidth costs go threw the roof.

More on topic, kickass site, I actually came upon it doing a search on /. for enders game looking for a particular story, ended up posting something about an obscure sega game i've been searching for for years.

Kinda off topic but /. should really start posting the google caches of links in the stories or something to take the edge off.

Re:Slashdotting

[ConceptJunkie]

Were you the guy asking about "Starflight" by any chance?

If so, I found a copy of Starflight for the Genesis a few months ago at Funcoland. That would be a good place to look for it. Of course, the PC version is better because you have a keyboard, and you can find that at The Underdogs.

Re:Slashdotting

[TyrionEagle]

Bit OT, but there goes;

Plural of virus is viruses, virus didn't have a classical plural form. And if it was pluralised like radius, it would be pluralised to viri (one trailing i) as the rule is -us => -i.

See This page for details.

Re:Slashdotting

[ConceptJunkie]

That's my point. It's a rant against all those who want to use the word "virii". See my journal for more details.

Re:Slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't make me put my penii in your anii. Find something else to rant about.

Nice Philip K Dick reference

[quantax]

That has to be one of the only clever Philip K Dick references I've seen in a while...

Re:Nice Philip K Dick reference

[jguevin]

So what is it? I want to be clever, too!

Re:Nice Philip K Dick reference

[edbarrett]

Now all this service needs is god commandeering a satellite to beam the name of the game straight into your head.

Re:Nice Philip K Dick reference

[May Kasahara]

I believe the reference is to "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale", the short story which served as the basis for Total Recall.

is Pacman an obscure game?

[Baikala]

Does really someone ask about Pacman not knowing it's name?

And to run it...

[Rayonic]

And to run that PC version of Starflight, don't forget about DOSbox

RE: Site Remembers Forgotten Games For You, Wholes

[Anm]

For those of you who might have missed the reference to Philip K. Dick, the short story that became Total Recall was entitled...

We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale

books?

[kiwaiti]

nice idea behind that site - does anyone know if this has also been applied to books somewhere? 'cause that's what I'd really like to see...

Kiwaiti

once again

[Anonymous Coward]

google caches don't really do squat to prevent a /.'ing. Google does not cache images, which are what usually eat up a server's bandwidth till the hard drives burst into flames. Maybe the small decrease in bandwidth usage by referencing the /. crowd to the google cache of the site's html will save it from its fiery doom... but then again, maybe not.

"One of the only"?

[Anonymous Coward]

OT: One of the only definitely a novel way to use the language, but I'm left with the question "What does the poster mean?" Perhaps you mean one of the few, or maybe the only. You might also mean something completely different.

The advantage of speaking syntactically correct sentences is that people might actually understand you. And now I apologise, wholesale, for grammar-nazying you.