Preservation
Destiny 2's Content Vault: Deletion by Another Name
Bungie doesn't shut servers down to retire old content. It vaults it instead, playable one day and gone the next, with no promise it ever comes back.
3 min readPreservationAfter Flash Died, Volunteers Rebuilt It From Scratch
Adobe ended Flash Player at the close of 2020, and an estimated four million animations and games went dark with it. One volunteer archive and one open-source emulator are why most are still playable.
3 min readPreservationGOG's Preservation Program: What the Pledge Actually Covers
'Games live forever' is a bold promise from a storefront. Here is what the program commits to, and the part of the preservation problem it was never built to solve.
3 min readPreservationThe GTA Source Code That Got Taken Down Twice
Fans reverse-engineered GTA III and Vice City's code in early 2021. What happened to the project afterward is a case study in how fragile fan preservation gets when a rightsholder objects.
3 min readPreservationThe Video Game History Foundation Finally Opened Its Library
After years of promising a public archive, VGHF put a working one online in early 2025. Here is what researchers can actually access, and what it deliberately leaves out.
3 min readPreservationYuzu Is Gone: What Nintendo's Emulator Lawsuit Actually Settled
A $2.4 million settlement ended the most-used Switch emulator in eight days. Here is what the case established, and what it carefully avoided deciding.
3 min readPreservationToontown Online and the MMO Built for Everyone
Disney's 2003 cartoon world traded swords for pies and gags, and its fans refused to let it disappear in 2013.
3 min readPreservationWhen the Servers Go Dark
A shutdown notice is a different kind of ending. Documented cases, and what each one taught the preservation community.
3 min readPreservationCity of Heroes and the Shutdown That Was Reversed
Its 2012 closure looked like the end. What came after is one of the strangest and most instructive stories in online-game preservation.
3 min readPreservationPanzer Dragoon Saga and the Problem of the Unreleased Classic
A four-disc Saturn role-playing game reached shelves late, in small numbers, and became a case study in how fragile access to a great game can be.
3 min readPreservationStar Wars Galaxies and the Sandbox That Was Switched Off
A Star Wars MMO that let you be a chef, a dancer or a city planner, closed in 2011 and left an unusually stubborn community behind.
3 min readPreservationWhy We Preserve Abandoned MMOs
Server-side history disappears the moment a studio flips the switch. Here is what preservation actually looks like.
11 min readPreservationGTA Urban Legends: What Is Documented, What Is Myth
A quick field guide to the series' famous rumours, sorted by how much evidence stands behind them.
3 min readPreservationThe Fan Translators Who Kept Japan-Only Games Alive
Long before official localizations caught up, volunteers were doing the work. A factual look at what they did and what happened next.
3 min readPreservationThe Licensing Gamble: Why Old GTA Radio Is Hard to Re-Release
Licensed music made the radio unforgettable. It also put an expiry date on how long those songs could be heard.
3 min readPreservationHow PC Modding Became Part of GTA's Story
From multiplayer for a single-player game to a roleplay platform Rockstar eventually brought in-house.
3 min readPreservationType Your Name, Break the Game: GTA1 Cheats and Debug Culture
The first Grand Theft Auto hid its cheat codes in the high-score name field, and one of them opened a door into the developers' toolbox.
3 min readPreservationHot Coffee: The Mod, the Rating, and the Recall
A piece of code left on the disc turned a modder's weekend project into a ratings change, a retail pullout, and a federal inquiry.
3 min readPreservationAbandonware: What the Law Actually Says (and Doesn't)
The word sounds official. It isn't. Here is an honest map of what is settled, what is contested, and where preservation groups fit.
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