They were found in a folder called “DO NOT UPLOAD.”

June 6, 2018 7:47 PM

70 Long-Lost Japanese Video Games Have Been Discovered in a 67GB Folder of ROMs on a Private Forum [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 [YouTube][4:10:02] 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.”

posted by Fizz (19 comments total)

There are some interesting comments on that Youtube video. It looks like Saint might have made a few enemies.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:57 PM on June 6, 2018

The motherboard article has a link to The Obscuritory which looks fascinating, if you are into blogs by librarians about forgotten games. (And who isnt?)
posted by surlyben at 8:21 PM on June 6, 2018 [5 favorites]

I have some old tower PCs from back in the 90s collecting dust in a shed. I should probably figure out a way to grab the info off of those hard drives or to just get them working again. It'd be interesting to see what kind of random ass ancient shit is in there. I doubt I have anything as cool as a long lost game, but I'm sure we all have some random cool shit in a folder.

Then again I was also a teenager in the 90s, so I'm sure all I'm going to find is a folder buried inside of another folder with a password where I kept all my porn.
posted by Fizz at 8:34 PM on June 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

How does copyright play into this? Does anyone care? Is some troll likely to descend and sue everybody into oblivion?
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:32 PM on June 6, 2018

So this guy threatened to take down the entire folder, why doesn’t someone just download the entire thing before he does?
posted by gucci mane at 9:49 PM on June 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

How does copyright play into this? Does anyone care? Is some troll likely to descend and sue everybody into oblivion?

The original rights holders are definitely not making money off of any of this stuff currently, and the folks who have rediscovered it aren't making any money off of it either, so it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone with standing to sue would even want to. Generally, in cases of lost/orphaned works like this, archival best practice is to just preserve the dang thing and make it available. Tracking down the original copyright owner is prohibitively difficult, and there's no compelling reason to.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 9:58 PM on June 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

The part of me that's a self-involved arsehole wants to hobbyhorse against the least implicit notion that JP/US games + Tetris = The Entirety Of Gaming History. The part of me that loves games and gaming and earlier expressions thereof is doing a crazy dance though. That is a really cool find and functions as a validation of (certain forms of?) piracy.

Quote:

“It's a weird situation because this really is not a great way to be preserving games, just collecting things that leak out,” he said. “Ideally we should be collaborating with collectors to share games like these. But unfortunately a lot of game collecting and preservation happens in the margins like this.”

posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 10:20 PM on June 6, 2018

Here is the game. As far as copyright issues go, I'm sure archive.org has a way of dealing with legal requests in a responsive way; this has been brought up before in regards to archive.org.
posted by el io at 11:14 PM on June 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's so confusing to see "upload" being used to mean both "upload" and "download".
posted by ardgedee at 2:47 AM on June 7, 2018

If we had a functional copyright system that served the public interest rather than Disney's bottom line, all this shit would be officially in the public domain by now anyway.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:43 AM on June 7, 2018 [13 favorites]

It's so confusing to see "upload" being used to mean both "upload" and "download".

I think it's being used to mean don't upload these games to other services where the undeserving could access them.
posted by zamboni at 6:41 AM on June 7, 2018 [7 favorites]

I like the story about how these games have been sort of known among the rare game collector community for awhile, but it only came out in public this week. Also confused about Youtube; that video is datestamped June 4 2018, but there are comments that are from 7 months ago. Maybe it's the same video page but he updated the actual content?
posted by Nelson at 7:40 AM on June 7, 2018

That is a really cool find and functions as a validation of (certain forms of?) piracy.
I don't think we would have GoG, Virtual Consoles, Minis or classic collections (or at least as many and as popular as they are) if stuff like the abandonware and rom sites weren't so popular back in the early 2000s. Sites like Home of the Underdogs and mame.dk proved there was an interest in old stuff, and it could be commercialised.
posted by lmfsilva at 8:37 AM on June 7, 2018 [5 favorites]

The original rights holders are definitely not making money off of any of this stuff currently, and the folks who have rediscovered it aren't making any money off of it either, so it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone with standing to sue would even want to. Generally, in cases of lost/orphaned works like this, archival best practice is to just preserve the dang thing and make it available. Tracking down the original copyright owner is prohibitively difficult, and there's no compelling reason to.

(IANAL) I am not so sure of this. Before copyright bots were a thing crawling all over YouTube, filing automated DMCA takedowns, Toho lawyers personally issued a complaint against me to YouTube for uploading a 10 second clip of the ancient, rather obscure film Hausu. Properly attributed, clearly fair use in American courts, plus the damn thing wasn't even in possible to buy at the time (though I found out it was later re-issued). To me that is entirely insane, and makes me suspect Japanese companies are far more protective of their IP than we are perhaps accustomed to. I would be very cautious if I got my hands on something like this, personally.

I notice no emulator sites host ROM burns, and a lot even do stuff like have explicit moderation policies forbidding even asking for them on forums/comments. There is probably a reason they do that.
posted by cj_ at 9:39 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

There's a book that I love called Constellation Games, where humanity is visited by aliens. The book follows a group of young people who their time researching aliens through playing their back catalog of games and end up trying to port one of them to a human system.

I like the idea of a galaxy-wide archive of such things. I know some of the stuff I worked on the 90s is probably gone forever, since it was on media in somebody's garage, and part of the rebuild process would involve a copy of CodeWarrior and a PowerPC-based Mac. There's so much we're losing just through entropy and CD-ROM decay.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 1:08 PM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

There's a biiiiiig difference between Hausu - a film that still get rep house screenings and is distributed by Toho, one of Japan's bigger movie studios, and Labyrinthe and game that until this happened people didn't even know if it was every commercially released or not and was from what could charitably be called an obscure studio.
posted by thecjm at 5:39 PM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm going to agree that the success of site like Home of the Underdogs 10-15 years ago is what made storefronts like GOG (which originally stood for Good Old Games) viable. The upside is that sites like GOG actually put the work in to modify old games to run on modern systems (something that even Steam doesn't really care about) or just get rid of old copy protection schemes. Once they have an agreement with the rights holder any DMCA issues go away and they're free to work on the actual codebase of the game.

The downside is that when you move from an archivist model to a sales model, you do have the problem that they just can't see things they don't have the rights to. And there are cases where GOG had games they want to distribute - like No One Lives Forever - and since literally no ones knows who owns the rights anymore they just can't sell the game for fear of the mysterious rights holder showing up out of nowhere and suing them.
posted by thecjm at 5:55 PM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

Yeah I just saw Hausu in a theater not too long ago, I wouldn't be surprised if people have been doing showings for it at independent theaters for a very long time.
posted by gucci mane at 9:15 PM on June 7, 2018

The NOLF case is really one that shows how utterly messed-up copyright law can be. In this situation, any reputable, well established distributor should be able to, in good faith, claim rights for distribution and if in one year no other entity pressed a valid, full ownership counterclaim, that company would get temporary distribution rights with the publisher's cut going into escrow until someone actually proved they own the IP to take their cut and negotiate a permanent deal.

Instead, nobody knows who owns two incredibly popular games, released 18 and 16 years ago, and nobody can do a thing about that because at this point it is just a paragraph on some merger, split, or other deal, and neither of the three parties involved care because there's only potential earnings on the table. If there was an account with some cool 2-5 Mil waiting for someone with a paper that says "we own that", their lawyers' chairs would be spinning after the asses on top went to do some archive digging.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:24 AM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]