[nakkiel]

Well, they put themselves in the same situation as other ROM distributors. They probably mention somewhere that it's illegal to "keep" a ROM unless you actually own the original game and pretend to provide them for the sake of "backup".

[joezydeco]

I would expect a DMCA takedown on this from at least Namco and Nintendo before the week is over. So grab it while you can (if you don't have an archive like this already).

[VonGuard]

We've been having a very large discussion about this on the IGDA preservation SIG discussion list http://wiki.igda.org/Game_Preservation_SIG

What it comes down to is that Jason Scott, at Archive, is fearless. He saves EVERYTHING. If you think putting these MAME ROMS on Internet Archive is ballsy, check out what else he's put on there: https://archive.org/details/tosec

The standard policy, as he explained it to me, is to put it all up, and if someone complains enough and gets enough lawyers involved, the individual file cited is removed, not the whole damn archive.

Why brave the lawsuits? Because about 10 years ago, Aardman Animation( http://www.aardman.com/ ) makers of Wallace and Gromit had a catastrophic fire in their archive building. The fire destroyed a large portion of the stop-motion animation studio's history. A lot of the stuff destroyed was not preserved anywhere else, and is thus, now, lost to the world forever.

Since videogame companies are acquired at the same rate as radioactive particles are emitted from an element with a half-life measured in seconds, it's very common for a company to go under and for the acquirer to just dump everything in the trash, save for the very non-physical IP rights. I've seen what game companies throw away, and even discovered entirely unpublished, unknown yet finished games ( http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/cpk/cpk.htm ) because game companies don't care about old assets, only old IP.

The next step in this effort is to preserve the source code behind these games, but that's a far more difficult proposition, and most of the code that's out there was deleted long ago.

It's our collective cultural heritage. We have a right to preserve it if the original creators or owners can't/won't. Rather than pick and choose what to save, Jason Scott saves everything. That way, nothing is lost in the cracks of history.

[tmoertel]

Incredible! That C64 archive is immense. From the collection description [1]:

There are an astounding 134,000+ disk, cassette and documentation items in this Commodore 64 collection, including games, demos, cracktros, and compilations.

And I thought the Apple II collection was impressive at a mere "4,800 floppy disk images." [2]

[1] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_C64_TOSEC_2012_04_23

[2] https://archive.org/details/Apple_2_TOSEC_2012_04_23

[hnha]

The vast majority of credit should go to the rippers, dumpers, maintainers of the archives! Scott merely downloaded them and put them on archive.org (which is great but just the tip of the ice berg).

[VonGuard]

I agree, but that's sort of an illicit, nameless mob of people who probably don't want too much attention. TOSEC is kind of like a hive-mind memory project. I love how utterly comprehensive it is, without any central governing body other than the standards. TOSEC goes way beyond anything an academic body would be able to piece together, or anything a museum could muster. It's basically the Internet put to a task. Where else are you going to find Sega 32X technology demos?

[kordless]

I'm going to have a good chuckle when we wake up from this life and they hand us a backup disk of it. "Here's your life, including all those 8bit games from the early 80s. Enjoy!"

[FrankenPC]

Heh! You are right at the crux of humans base fear about death. Fear of losing the archive.

[FrankenPC]

Thanks for you post. I was unclear about what was going on with Archive.org. Fascinating. I believe I'll donate to them.

[glassx]

I looked it up after reading your comment, and they're receiving donations right now that will be matched 3x (!) by an anonymous donor... they're just shy of a million bucks...

https://archive.org/donate/?img=group0a

[nakkiel]

Very informative, thanks.