Double Dragon Internet Archive
Rosham Rosebure
"The plastic is such a major component of the experience that it may not be enough for some researchers and users to be handed a version of the visual output to really know what the game was like," internet historian Jason Scott said in a post announcing the archive's release.
If you're of a particular age, you can remember growing up with handheld video game system that were each dedicated to one singular title. You usually you could move your character between three locations on screen and, if you were lucky, fire a weapon. Tamagotchi was the most universal experience, but some of us only got to experience Double Dragon on the school bus via a stupid plastic box that ate batteries. For folks like that, who for some reason missed this experience, your day has come. The internet now has a beautiful and extensive archive of all those ridiculous LCD titles.
There's an incredible and heartbreaking breakdown of this genre of game and the efforts the emulation team has gone to in order to archive these titles for history and for your maybe-enjoyment. There's so much here, ranging from Garfield adventures to shooters to puzzle games, and many of them existed on platforms that only existed for a single game -- including one game system that's an actual pyramid. It is 100% worth your time to read this piece about process and gaming history over at the Internet Archive Blog.
This image floated around message boards in the 2010s, posted with commentary or as a general use for a slightly off-putting photograph of a less-than-well-maintained location, and was, by most standards, rather indistinct. The internet, after all, is filled with odd images and weird drawings that cause a reaction, often after many different attempts to achieve the effect. Survivorship Bias for memes, one might say. So if one more image of an indistinct indoor landscape was out there, not much was going to happen of it.
That changed in 2019, when the image was given a legend and history, made up out of the air, that it was a rare photograph of The Backrooms. The phrasing of the original declaration speaks for itself:
This extended period of not finding the original source of the image left an unfinished tune, a half-written poem, about where it came from and what it meant. And the lack of information in the image as it showed up on these image boards seemed to ensure the mystery would never be found.
A Subreddit called /r/backrooms, an extended web video series called Backrooms, and endless CGI models and creations meant to extend the legend and the origin story became years of effort by thousands to draw the missing pieces of a puzzle that was never a puzzle.
Supporting this explosion of creativity and storytelling was the continued fact that nobody knew where the photograph came from. This situation, of a core image having a completely shadowy and unexplained origin, is arguably the foundation of its power.
18 times in the last 20 years, crawlers affiliated with the Internet Archive moved through this page and grabbed portions of it, speculatively, to store for future research and reference. As the whole image was grabbed, reading the metadata of the original image reveals the date it was taken (June 12, 2002), and the camera used (a Sony Cyber-Shot model). The great unknown image, the unsettling photo of a mysterious place and time, was revealed.
That simple mistake on my part had truly stunning financial consequences. When the tax bills and penalties started hitting my mailbox around 2014, it became a mass of stress. The IRS is undefeated in the award for Most Intense Collection Letters, and they were coming on a regular basis, even as I started directing more and more of my paycheck towards paying the debt.
A few friends generously sent me money to help beat back the interest and costs, but the combination of this and other debts had me backed into a corner, so I decided on a simple plan: Run a Patreon campaign where I told stories and opinions in short episodes, which were then supported by the audience, with all the proceeds going into debt repayment. The resulting podcast, Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It, helped dig me out of that hole.
Which brings me to the latest, continual tinkering with the tools and environment available to analyze materials with algorithms. I began asking a large language model to look at the generated transcriptions and create a summary of a given podcast episode.
You read transcripts of a podcast and carefully write out descriptions, in the form of narrative paragraphs, to accurately describe the content of the podcast. Longer and more complete descriptions are better, and encouraged. You describe the main subjects, conclusions by the participants, and provide helpful context for the subjects. The podcast you listen to is:
A matrix of calculation, fast beyond my reckoning but not less mysterious-and-not-mysterious as CPUs and networking itself, begins analyzing the language in the transcriptions, cross-connecting ideas mentioned, occasionally volunteering more information based on matches to terms, and within a few minutes, language comes out.
Asking an LLM to look at the full text of a nearly 200-page book about the raising of ducks, such as the legendary DUCKS; AND HOW TO MAKE THEM PAY (1924), provides a paradise of questions you can ask the book as if it was able to answer in full sentences:
I got word in 2015 of a collection of manuals inside a business that was getting out of the manuals business, and while a lot of well-meaning people talked a good game, they wanted to cherry-pick (people getting rid of stuff hate cherry-pickers), and I drove down to show I was serious, and after a week of work with MANY volunteers and contributors, we ended up with pallets of documentation inside boxes, tens of thousands of unique manuals, many nowhere else.
Last year, a group called DLARC, doing digitizing and indexing projects around ham radio and radio technology, worked with me and the archive to sort four pallets of the manuals for products related to the history of radio/network technology, and off they went overseas to be scanned. And as of this month, the evaluated, professionally-scanned and available-to-the-world manuals are finished, except for a few stragglers. The loop has closed!
Worlds collided recently when Jordan Mechner, in town for the Game Developers Conference 2024 and doing some readings of his new graphic novel memoir Replay, stopped by the Internet Archive for a tour and discussion with Brewster.
In October of 2022, the DISCMASTER site arrived, providing amazing semantic search of thousands of shareware and compilation CD-ROMs at the Internet Archive. In the entry written on the blog back then, the advantages and features of this site were pretty well enumerated.
Within a short time, even as the hour of midnight of January 1st moved across the earth, countless creations based off the Steamboat Willie character, ranging from the sublime to the profane, rocketed into the Internet.
Along with the flood of images have come a flood of articles and overviews of the legal and other ramifications of a public-domain Mickey Mouse. These are written by very smart people who have spent a lot of time considering these issues.
What it is, however, is a too-long-delayed part of a natural process of works and copyright. The implementation of universal involuntary copyright that then lasts longer than the vast majority of human lifetimes means a disconnect, a vast gulf between the life of creative works and when they become a part of culture at large in anything other than a consumption relationship.
So, let us celebrate this temporary oasis in a truly barren landscape, and work, through preservation and protection for libraries and archives, to ensure each year is a more exquisitely complete and maintained ecosystem.
10 years ago, the Internet Archive made an announcement: It was possible for anyone with a reasonably powerful computer running a modern browser to have software emulated, running as it did back when it was fresh and new, with a single click. Now, a decade later, we have surpassed 250,000 pieces of software running at the Archive and it might be a great time to reflect on how different the landscape has become since then.
Anyone can come up with an idea, and the idea of taking the then-quite-mature Javascript language, universally inside all major browsers and having it run complicated programs was not new.
With the rise of a cross-compiler named Emscripten, the idea of taking rather-complicated programs written in other languages and putting them into Javascript was kind of new.
That all being the case, the idea of taking a by-then 20-year-old super-emulator called MAME, using Emscripten to cross-compile it into Javascript, and then running the resulting code in the browser at Internet Archive to make computers and consoles run, was very new.
It was announced in the Fall of 2013, well over a year after the project started.
Additional announcements came with each expansion of the types of software being emulated, and it became huge news, leading to millions of visitors coming to try this it out.
As emulators besides MAME were added, it became necessary to create a framework for a versatile and understandable method to load emulators. This framework eventually got a name: THE EMULARITY.
Hypercard Stacks for the Apple Macintosh, a critical period in content creation and computer information architecture, have been restored to easy access, surpassing thousands of hypercards to try instantly.
Plastic Electronic Handheld Games, once a staple of toys in the 1970s through the 1990s, have been able to live once again as, including the original housing that these simple (and not so simple) machines relied on instead of graphics.
As the uploads veered into the many thousands, it became more and more difficult for new adventurous users to figure out what, if any, software was at the archive to check out. This has led to specialized collections focused on one type of program, like the Computer Chess Club. People can use these collections as gateways to quickly testing the waters of now-decades of computer and software history, seeing the turns and twists of countless lost companies and individuals who squeezed every last bit of wonder and spectacle out of these underpowered boxes.
c80f0f1006