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70 Long-Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered In a 67GB Folder of ROMs On a Private Forum (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Until yesterday, rare Japanese PC game Labyrinthe, developed by Caravan Interactive, was long thought to be lost forever. That is until the almost mythical third game in the already obscure Horror Tour series was found on a 67GB folder of ROMs on a private forum. Other rare games from the folder are expected to become public soon. According to a YouTuber called Saint, who posted a video of him playing the game and a link to download it on Mega, Labyrinthe and as many as 70 other rare or never-before-released Japanese titles have been circulating in a file sharing directory on a private torrent site.
Labyrinthe, alongside other rare titles including Cookie's Bustle, Yellow Brick Road and Link Devicer 2074 were in a folder called "DO NOT UPLOAD." Members of the private forum hesitated to upload Labyrinthe in the fear that the private collector would take down the folder and leave the collection out of reach once again. This hesitation demonstrates the often tense relationship between game preservationists and private collectors. According to a screenshot uploaded by Saint, the private collector threatened to pull the entire folder of content from the directory and stop uploading games altogether if anyone leaked Labyrinthe. In uploading the game to Mega, it's possible the folder will be pulled from the internet. But in doing so, the person advanced the interests of game preservationists worldwide by leaking the this game and others.
Labyrinthe, alongside other rare titles including Cookie's Bustle, Yellow Brick Road and Link Devicer 2074 were in a folder called "DO NOT UPLOAD." Members of the private forum hesitated to upload Labyrinthe in the fear that the private collector would take down the folder and leave the collection out of reach once again. This hesitation demonstrates the often tense relationship between game preservationists and private collectors. According to a screenshot uploaded by Saint, the private collector threatened to pull the entire folder of content from the directory and stop uploading games altogether if anyone leaked Labyrinthe. In uploading the game to Mega, it's possible the folder will be pulled from the internet. But in doing so, the person advanced the interests of game preservationists worldwide by leaking the this game and others.
No matter how old lost and abandoned these games are, sharing the ROMs is still piracy. And the Japanese in particular take piracy very seriously, so much that while we had torrents in the west, Japan used TOR-like anonymized P2P networks like Perfect Dark.
It is understandable that collectors want to keep a low profile.
It is understandable that collectors want to keep a low profile.
By uploading they've already failed to do that. Other people downloading and re-upping the files elsewhere won't change that at all. They've already taken the action of uploading them, the smartest thing for them to do is to never touch those uploaded files again. Therefore, they are either a staggering idiot (of which there is no shortage) or just refusing to share their toys with the other children, which is pathetic and childish.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is a certain appeal to being one of a small group with secrets. For a game collector, it's not about being the last to ever play the game, but simply to have something that nobody else does. That's why "collectibles" are numbered and often have limited production runs. That rarity is what the collectors value, not necessarily the game itself. That's also why having collections in unopened boxes is valued - being unopened is a rare feature that can't be restored once lost.
As for re-uploading, throwing around a 67GB file is still not trivial, especially when it carries a (small) legal risk for being copyright infringement. Somebody still owns the copyright on those games, whether they realize it or not, and it's entirely within their (legal) rights to sue someone for redistributing the games, when they'd rather see them completely disappear - perhaps to re-release a "discovered" copy found in a corporate vault.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
There is no such legal category as abandonware. It's only an ethical categorization.
At least this one had copied them from the original media. There are collectors with games on actual physical EPROMs who refuse to have them dumped at all. Bit rot is a thing, eventually after enough time the charge will leak away and the chip will erase itself bit by bit. It just takes longer without being exposed to light. CD-Rs also have similar degradation with time. They would rather sleep on their dragons hoard while the actual game vanishes and becomes almost worthless, than take the chance that someone else having a soft copy of it might cause more than a penny of its value to vanish.
And I say this as someone who has found at least one game that nobody else has ever found, and I dumped and shared that sucker right away.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }