70 Long-Lost Japanese Video Games Have Been Discovered in a 67GB Folder of ROMs on a Private Forum

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/...the-japanese-game-discovered-on-private-forum

Any (better) source for this? I'm kind of fascinated. But every news site that covered it is basically saying the same thing. But no sources, well, except the Youtube video / channel.

Edit : After some digging, here's what I got. The summary of this thing is that a Japanese game collector with very rare or sometimes even unreleased games was in talk with some game preservationists. That small circle's trust was ruined when the Youtube channel owner uploaded a whole playthrough of one of those games and gave a copy for anyone to download.

I'm assuming this : http://archive.fo/O2eyX
person is also a member of that preservation community reacted to that leak by also releasing some of these games. However after a while he changed his tune and stopped it.

https://obscuritory.com/blog/lost-japanese-game-labyrinthe-released/

Part of those leaked games was uploaded into archive.org

https://archive.fo/hE7Gp

I'll be glad to change this if I got anything wrong, this is original research. =P

 

Did anyone grab the games from that last link? All of them seem to have been removed, I didn't know people could request for things to be removed from archive.org. Seems to defeat the whole purpose to me if things can be removed at a moment's notice, that would imply nothing is safe there - who watches the watchmen, who archives the archivists' work?

 

Sadly, not me. I came in too late. I think the story broke like 3 days ago I think.

 

I'm torn on this. One one hand, I'm really, REALLY pleased to see that these obscure titles have been preserved, and I was excited that they'd be unleashed to the public for us all to enjoy, but on the other hand, I feel really bad for the person who must've spent countless cash and time digitally collating and archiving these treasures, only to have his moment in the sun stolen away from him by someone he trusted.

I just hope that this issue doen't end up with the games being locked away once more, never to see the light of day.

 

That's exactly how it's likely to end, but not with the leaker at fault. No, it'll be the fault of the selfish collector.

 

I got everything, or at least I thought I did. I got 50G not 67. Archive.org has to deal with takedowns like anyone else. Hopefully they just remove things from the site but keep the data archived so it can be made available to future less litigious generations. Many people archive the archivists. As long as you don't put it online no one will likely know or care. But that includes you so it's worth asking for specific things in lots of places in hopes an archivists archiver sees is. It would be nice if everything could just be out there P2P.

 

Just put it up as a torrent on TPB

 

Is it 67gb once decompressed?

 

There's a torrent out there now
I suspect what I got is over 67G uncompressed. I checked a few files and they're 35%-55%

 

Could you Pm me the link to the torrent?

 

So as to clarify what happened here:

This was my personal collection, uploaded on a forum on a torrent tracker where I am VIP. I will not name the site here but it is easy enough to find out.

I uploaded the games privately so I wouldn't get harrassed over uploads, which is what happened when I was uploading them on public forums. I also did not want freeloaders downloading the games which is why I posted them to a class-restricted forum where you need some upload ratio.

At the time of the leak I had uploaded ~140 titles, which is about 1/4th of my full collection. Of these, I put 20 of them in a restricted folder. All the other games had no restrictions to distribute, but in practice very few of them were shared around, due to the fact that you can count the number of people who care about 90's era Japanese Windows and Macintosh games on one hand. The only people who bothered were some guys from a Russian abandonware site, one of them is a fellow PC games collector and friend of mine.

The reason for the restricted folder was two fold.
First of all, there were some games which I had acquired directly from the developers after tenaciously tracking them down. My chances of finding the games otherwise were extremely low.
These developers included Andrew Davies director of Silicon Scream (a western developed game which was only released in Japan), Noriyoshi Sawa of Overrise, Ikuko Mizokami of Mangosteen, Kazushi Minagawa of Nihon Softec, and several others whose games I had not uploaded.
In each case, they made it clear to me that they did not want the games publicly distributed. Andrew had even told me that he was considering a English rerelease for Silicon Scream.

The other games in that folder including Labyrinthe were relatively valuable. I had been selling these select few games to 2 collectors who were both very kind, generous and trusting (going so far as to paypal me in gift mode for each transaction), one of them agreed to pay top dollar for my games as long as I didn't release them too early. These games would have been released eventually on my terms but I put restrictions on them out of respect for my patrons. I had briefly attempted a patreon before but as I said, no one cared about these games in the first place and I suspect that hasn't changed (yeah vice wrote an article, but it's obviously clickbait)

The conditions were that I would continue to upload games from my collection as long as the games in the restricted folder were not leaked prematurely. Obviously, that condition has been breached.

The members of the tracker were generally trusted. However some idiot on 4chan with a weird fixation on the game "Labyrinthe" was clued in to the fact that I had uploaded the game to this tracker (someone had asked me on IRC if it was okay to advertise on 4chan the fact that I had uploaded Labyrinthe there and I told them to go ahead) and so this guy decided to join the site for the sole purpose of downloading that game, and has yet to contribute to the site in any other way. After seeing that my uploads were becoming less frequent (due to my job/real life), he decided it was time to upload the game to his youtube channel to gain points with his Twitch stream group. At the same time he is attempting a bizarre smear campaign against me, claiming things such as that I was selling "bootleg copies" of the games and that it is my only source of income and I don't even know Japanese (I am half Japanese and I work for a Japanese NPO.)

I have a strong suspicion the leaker is also the exact same idiot from this thread who tries to suggest that I had scammed him on ebay because I owned more than one copy of a game he had never heard of before.

After that the obscuritory guy took it upon himself to upload the remaining games to archive.org which seems to be what prompted the news articles. He then had a change of heart and took them down, but the damage had already been done by that time.

 

Thanks for clearing things up. Such a shame there are people like that out there, just ruins it for everyone.

 

If you don't want something distributed, don't put it on the Internet.

I really don't know why you are surprised someone didn't listen to your terms and did what they wanted for personal gain.

Especially after agreeing to let it be advertised on 4chan!

 

14 years running and I'm still here. Don't trust anyone there, legit or otherwise.

That's a good effort to explain all of this honestly. I dont really have any input unfortunately. I'm hungover from an E3 drinking game, so please forgive me.

 

Not sure about the selling part either - seems you set this up so it would happen. You certainly didn't do any of the right things to protect what you have/had - in fact, quite the opposite from your actions.

How much money did you make selling these copies? And were your 'sources' reimbursed?

I just find your story very strange from the start to end and I suspect I'm not the only one.

 

Don't have any input, eh? Huh, that's funny, it's almost like you didn't have to post at all...

I don't find it strange at all, I do the same thing when I come upon multiple copies of a rare game. I've even done a similar thing as bombman where I had to go to a Japanese developer to get a physical copy because there were simply none around. In this case, I actually visited their office in person. And if you're trying to imply that he's in it for the money, I really don't think that's the case. Collecting and preserving obscure games is very expensive and we often have to do whatever we can to recoup costs.

Thanks for clearing that up, it makes a lot more sense now. If you'd kept them private just for a "muh VALUABLE COLLECTION!!!!!!!11!1!11!" reason then that'd be pretty stupid, but obviously other people had stakes in the situation and you were right to want to keep these things relatively private - it was probably too trusting of you to upload things online that you didn't want to be spread around though, guess you won't be doing that in future. Regardless, thanks for preserving these games and please keep doing it! Not many of us around right now, especially ones that can speak English.

 

DeChief certainly knows what it's like to track down the developers of his most wanted 90's pc games. He actually went directly to Attain's office in Japan and they sold him all their last copies, sealed in the box!

 

What is the torrent we are talking about?

 

Seems a big risk putting 20 games up in a folder called "Do Not Upload" and hoping people would abide by it. Why not just remove those games in the first place?

 

To be fair it was partially my fault for allowing it to be advertised on 4chan (erroneously thinking that the site would get more contributors that way), otherwise the games would still be there.

And I'm nitpicking here but the actual name of the folder was "Please do not share the contents of this folder, thank you." It seems unimportant but "DO NOT UPLOAD" is the lazy version from the description on that youtube video and people think that's what it is now because all the clickbait articles reported it that way.