It is really cool to see people go to such great lengths to recover lost software projects.
I wonder about what other interesting failed products from this time will later be found important enough to attempt to piece together and display to people in the future.
Perhaps an app that was prescient in its intent or the career of one of their makers seen as remarkable in some way that their digital detritus is dug up and placed under glass.
With all the security paranoia these days, the future of "digital archaeology" seems pretty bleak. Even if you do manage to find the storage media, it's likely to have been encrypted with an algorithm that remains unbroken.
At a glance there are a number of Daydream apps that are removed and unavailable anywhere right now. Likewise mobile games that get pulled for whatever reason.
>> an unreleased NES game – an unpublished version of Days of Thunder done for Mindscape (a separate attempt done by Beam Software was ultimately published in its place
I wonder how many other games reached playable or nearly-complete states, and were just cast aside because of schedules, contract snafus, etc? Imagine what we missed out on.
There's an unreleased Dreamcast game with a playable near-complete build leaked, called Propeller Arena. It's probably in my friend group's top-4 favorite multiplayer games for the platform, despite not actually having been released. Actually aside from MVC2 (still more fun for us amateurs than MVC3—and kinda looks better?) it might be the most likely game for us to play on the DC, just because the others have newer, better replacements, but I've not seen anything newer that's quite as arcadey and easy-playing as Propeller Arena in its niche (multiplayer propeller aircraft dogfighting, mostly)
I really wish they’re re-release it on a modern console. My DC’s gonna die one of these days and it’s a pain to keep old consoles in service. I’d really rather have it than 3. Which is probably why they don’t—it’d directly compete with the new one.
Not anymore. Was for a while (and also other platforms) but hasn’t been purchasable in IIRC several years. Though I’d forgotten it was for a while. Still, aside from iOS even those consoles are old enough that I’m trying to find new platforms for all the games I play in them, so I can get rid of ‘em.
Despite the game's concept being entirely arcade-focused that prototype date makes me wonder if the plane focus had anything to do with the cancellation...
To build on this, there are currently unreleased games sitting in collectors' hands and some refuse to dump them as it devalues the game. Dumpers have launched crowd funding campaigns in the past in attempts to purchase these rare games so they can get a physical copy to archive.
It happens to non-game products too. Way back during a college internship, there was a third-party vendor that had by far the best algorithm for a hardware product my employer was producing. The product was pretty close to finished, when a former employer of the founder of the vendor sued them under a questionable non-compete contract and claimed that the algorithm was stolen (the company that filed suit had a significantly inferior algorithm based on the hardware product's criteria).
Most of the development had to be scrapped, and a new, non-compete-free team was hired to build a clean room algorithm. There was a firewall inside the company where people on the old team practically couldn't even say hello to the people on the new team. And the new algorithm was decent, but not as good as the original vendor's algorithm.
If you're interested in exploring further, https://www.unseen64.net/ has been cataloguing and writing about lost, cancelled and prototype video games since 2001.
Apparently only the qualifying was in 3D, the actual race was in 2D and there weren't even any curves (at least not visible ones, although it looks like the player had to steer from time to time going by some cues which I wasn't able to make out). The race wasn't really challenging either - the player started last, but was able to overtake all opponents in 30 seconds, same after the pitstop... but maybe the image they found was just a debug build, I guess the game would have gone through some more playtesting and fine-tuning if it had been released.
I have worrying thoughts about how many prototypes get trashed and lost forever every year, yet have no idea how we could go about systematic recovery of lost games such as these. Can we buy up old game studio assets somehow?
> Is it possible with multiple disks and an extant error correction algorithm to prevent data corruption indefinitely, assuming some maximum error rate?
This is the main thrust of the Dynamo paper, yes. You can solve all the technical problems. Put something in a "living system" like Amazon S3 (where data has 17+ clones; and where ops people are there to both replace individual hard disks as they fail, and to gradually port the system over to new storage layers as new technology displaces old), and then—presuming the company providing the service is still there—it'll be vanishingly unlikely that your data will have degraded on a human time-scale.
What's left in the way of "indefinitely", though, are political problems. "How do I preserve data indefinitely" gets into the same sort of hairy problems as "how do I enforce my will on my descendants after I die?" kind of questions, where you start to see people putting forward ideas like immutable autonomous trusts.
The key question being: how do I ensure that the stuff I want to stick around, sticks around, after I'm dead, during a period when literally nobody else cares about it, until a later time when somebody else does care about it?
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