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.

Comments

A new kind of imbecile

[hjf]

You have to be a whole category of imbecile to keep "private" collections of ROMs.
"Look at me, I'll die the last person to ever play this video game". What kind of virgin feels proud of this?

Also, are the other forum members retarded? Can't they download the folder themselves in full and repost?

Imbeciles, imbeciles everywhere.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[GuB-42]

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.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[Sarten-X]

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.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[Sarten-X]

The collector uploaded them to a group of associates, who presumably all face similar legal risks. They're safe as long as nobody outside knows they infringement happened, so they want that group of associates to stay closed and small. Once the group leaks, however, news articles like this one happen, and others will come poking at the group to see what else falls out... then everyone's fears are realized, and they're left scrambling to erase any evidence of illegal activities.

As Ben Franklin is supposed to have said, "three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to pirate FLAC albums. There is a lot of value in having a rarity to trade. In fact, I would guess that there are many people out there that only trade rare for rare. It sounds selfish (because unlike a dollar bill, copying a file leaves the original), but it's an economy. It sounds like this guy had REALLY rare stuff and didn't want to lose that commodity.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[CrimsonAvenger]

Abandonware means there's no owner anymore so there's nobody to "steal" from.

No, abandonware is IGNORED (as in: not supported) by its owner. If the owner suddenly sees some money to be made from it, he'll start paying attention....

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such legal category as abandonware. It's only an ethical categorization.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[drinkypoo]

As Ben Franklin is supposed to have said, "three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."

They're using a broken model. The right way to do it is to upload it to someplace that doesn't lead back to you, and then never touch it again. Then it doesn't require you to try to keep secrets, which have a way of being told (as this story illustrates.)

It's both a selfish model, and an unrealistic one.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[Megane]

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.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[AmiMoJo]

Piracy is massive in Japan, just like everywhere else. In fact their ultra high speed internet connections are perfect for it.

There used to be magazines on sale in major book shops that were nothing but 100 pages of how to pirate stuff. Lists of web sites, translations of the word "download" into Chinese, Korean and English, how to set up various P2P apps, how to avoid malware and scams... I think I still have one somewhere, I should scan it.

The main worry is getting caught, which would be extremely embarrassing. Hence the desire to use anonymous P2P systems, coupled with high upload speeds making them feasible. This was back in the early 2000s. In the west a lot of downloaders feel the same way, but use VPNs to achieve the same result.

The industry has largely moved away from going after individuals though. There is little legal basis for doing so under Japanese civil law anyway, and a few cases where the police became involved ended up being PR disasters for the copyright owners. They have instead turned to site blocking court orders, similar to misguided media companies in the west. In fact only a few weeks ago one of the biggest pirate manga sites (using BitTorrent) was blocked on the country's largest ISP.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[Joe_Dragon]

also old arcade games have batterys that can leak out and destroy the boards.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[fafalone]

The entire concept of copyright is to grant limited protection in pursuit of enhancing the public domain. Creators rights are balanced with the rights of the public; it's not for their exclusive benefit to do whatever they want in perpetuity (or at least that wasn't the original intent). The trade-off that if they're not selling it, it loses protection, is entirely in line with the purpose of creating an economic incentive to *create*. Copyright maximalists like you are wallowing in unmitigated greed. If you're done realizing the economic benefit of the limited protection of copyright, damn right the public domain is morally entitled to that work, especially if it's older than 28 years (which the games here most are), even if corrupt legislators have allowed the original limited term to be changed to effectively unlimited.

When

[dohzer]

When were these ROMs developed and lost?! How long were they lost for?! Key information left out of the summary!

Re:When

[DontBeAMoran]

From what I gathered, the ROMs were developed in a dark room in 1830, lost around 1945 and then found again last week in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".

Tense relationship?

[sqorbit]

"This hesitation demonstrates the often tense relationship between game preservationists and private collectors." I'm sure I'm a out of the loop idiot on this topic but really? There is "often" a "tense relationship". Exactly how often, twice in history? How many private collectors of games are out there and what exactly are they collecting? If they have pirated the software initially they won't have the rights to take it down anyway. I'm totally confused and this seems like someone wrote an article to create something rather than report on something.

Re: This article needs a minor fix.

[DontBeAMoran]

Hey you guys! Look at my name and do that!

Re:ROMs?

[Sarten-X]

In the world of game emulation, the binaries are known as "ROMs", regardless of their original medium.

The term originates as "ROM dumps", which is exactly what you'd expect - extracted contents of the ROM from old console systems and cartridges. Notably, that's the part that is actually covered by copyright laws, with the actual execution details (originally in coprocessors, and now handled by the emulator itself) more often covered by patents, trade secrets, and simple secrecy.

As distribution technology has progressed such that games no longer have their data on read-only memory, and more importantly as those games have entered the emulation scene, the term hasn't changed. Now, "ROMs" include any game data not directly part of the emulation.

It's worth noting that legally there is very little risk from developing or distributing an emulator, but significant risk in distributing the ROM data. There have actually been some open-source or public-domain ROMs produced from scratch, but of course the biggest trade in them is in redistributing commercial software.

Re: ROMs?

[DontBeAMoran]

Me am a moran.

The collection isn't special if everyone has it

[skam240]

It's the collector's mind set in action. While this person is the only / one of the few people to have these ROMs, their collection is special and unique. Once everyone has access to the ROM there's nothing special about their collection any more.

I get the mindset a bit as this person likely went through a bit of trouble to get these ROMs but ultimately I agree with you that it's pretty petty.

"Pirating" is good-the "owners" are lousy stewards

[Catbeller]

Jerry Pournelle, the late science fiction author, said on a TWIT podcast that his publishers had, really! lost a number of his books that had not been in print for many years. Libraries didn't have the books, NO ONE had the books. But, TA-DA, book scanning "pirates" *had* scanned the books and gladly zapped him the copies, which he put back on sale and were making him a nice bit of income.

And.

[ledow]

Invariably, they will be the worst games ever, with literally nothing going for them, and then people realise why they were so "rare" (unpopular) in the first place.

I've seen the same with everything from books to LPs to consoles to games to artworks to collectibles.

I get the preservation angle.
I get the "all the games from my youth" angle (I'm pretty sure I have them all still, emulated or real).
I even get the "my dad says this was the greatest game ever in his youth, so I want to play it like he did" angle.

But I will never get the "gotta catch 'em all" angle.

A friend of mine paid for fortune pre-Internet for a copy of Geoffrey Trease's The Black Banner Players. It was rumoured so rare that even the author couldn't get a copy for himself, and they were changing hands for thousands of GBP (now you can get a paperback for "only" a couple of hundred GBP or a hardback for twice that).

He managed to find a copy. He read it. He sold it. He says it's one of the worst books he's ever read, and the worst of all the Banner series.

That said, I am still trying to track down a game from my SNES days that was about flying a little biplane. No it wasn't pilotwings. The problem is that I just don't know the name. It wasn't very good at all, but it would just bring back memories to play it. I certainly wouldn't pay more than a couple of quid for it.