Game preservation has been a hot topic over the last few years, and has recently come to the forefront again with the abrupt closure of the gaming magazine / website Game Informer, which left fans and former employees scrambling to save decades' worth of interviews, features, and news articles from being erased.

So, in the wake of this, two of the industry's biggest names, the Doom co-creator John Romero and the Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, have recently got together with the independent media outlet Minnmax to take part in a new conversation about the importance of preservation.

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Update : The whole of Professor Layton and the Mansion of the Deathly Mirror has been preserved, after all six chapters of the game were found on an F906i phone which has survived a house fire.

"In an amazing turn of events, @YuviApp has preserved the ENTIRETY of Professor Layton and the Mansion of the Deathly Mirror," says @rockmancosmo. "All six chapters were found on a junk F906i. Previously, we only had the first three chapters. An English translation will happen in due time!"

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Remember the bank raid in Michael Mann’s legendary 1995 crime caper, Heat? It's one of the most iconic shoot-outs in Hollywood history, and was so influential it even inspired a video game – one which never saw release and is only now becoming playable.

As documented by Games That Weren't, The Last Job (also known as The Heist) was in development at Acclaim Cheltenham, with a team of around 40 people involved. Intended for release on the PS2 (an Xbox version was mooted but apparently abandoned), it was shown off behind closed doors at E3 2004 and offered a unique premise.

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For the longest time, the humble compact disc was thought to be indestructible. We were told that, if properly cared for, these shiny pieces of plastic would last forever, solving the issue of longevity that plagues volatile media such as cassette tapes and floppy discs.

However, in more recent times, it has become apparent that this isn't the case and that CDs have a finite lifespan, and it's perhaps shorter than we imagined – although the actual time is massively dependent on how a CD is stored, as one unlucky 3DO collector has recently discovered.

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Yesterday's Nintendo Direct double-bill gave us plenty of cool announcements, with the impending arrival of Tetris Forever on Switch, PS4 and PS5 being a highlight.

A collection of 15 games – including lesser-known entries in the franchise such as Super Bombliss DX, Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss and Hatris – the collection will also include more than an hour of documentary footage.

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Last week gave us the not-at-all-pleasant news that Game Informer – a magazine that has been running for 33 years – has been shuttered by its parent company, GameStop.

The news was broken with a rather lifeless statement on social media, which was followed up by a message from the magazine's freshly laid-off staff – which was then deleted, along with the Twitter account.

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A prototype copy of notable Dragon's Quest spin-off Torneko's Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon is feared to have been "lost forever" after it was sold to a private collector.

Released on the Super Famicom, the game sees you assuming the role of the titular merchant from the fourth mainline Dragon Quest adventure. While it was a success in Japan, it never got a Western localisation – however, as noted by Games Radar, an old interview with Nintendo Age's eZine reveals that former Nintendo game counsellor Tom Kirstenson playtested an English-language version back in the '90s, which suggests a North American release almost took place.

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Update : Since we posted this initial story back in September of 2023, we've been trying to get in touch with Sega Europe and, in particular, Sega Forever lead Danny Russell in order to get some clarification on what is happening with the retro-focused channel, which mysteriously went dark in August of last year.

We can now report that Russell appears to have left Sega, or is at least in the process of doing so.

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Popular ROM hack hosting site ROMHacking.net is closing its doors after 20 years, it has been announced.

Citing increased workload, legal pressure and abuse of resources, ROMHacking.net admin Nightcrawler has confirmed that the site database – minus user account information – files and images have been uploaded to the Internet Archive. Submissions have been closed, and all sections of the site will shift into read-only status. The forum will remain live, but social media accounts have been closed.

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Animal Crossing on the N64 (only released in Japan under the title Dōbutsu no Mori) had seven playable NES / Famicom games, but it has now been discovered that an eighth game was made available – and in a pretty unique way.

Gloomyfates on Twitter (sorry, Elon) has been tumbling down the rabbit hole and has discovered that Ice Climber was distributed as a Controller Pak with a unique sticker in a giveaway by Nintendo Dream magazine.

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After successfully managing to rescue Paul Proctor's Jetpac successor Plasma0 off a bunch of old disks, it seems that Kev Edwards has managed to revive yet another lost NES game from the veteran developer's archives. This time, it's the abandoned 1986 maze shooter Glug.

Paul Proctor, in case you are unaware, is a developer who created the BBC Micro conversions of Ultimate Play The Games' Sabre Wulf, Alien 8, and Knight Lore and later went on to get a job at Rare (the successor to Ultimate) on games like Wizards & Warriors and Pin-Bot.

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Tomohiro Kawase might not be as famous as Shigeru Miyamoto or Takashi Tezuka, but he's had quite a notable career behind the scenes during his time with the company.

His first credit with Nintendo was in 1998 on Pocket Monsters Stadium, and since then, his work has focused largely on emulators, working alongside Hideaki Shimizu.

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Last month, the feature phone preservationist RockmanCosmo announced that a group of individuals had managed to find and extract the files for Katamari Damacy-Kun and its sequel Oi Katamari Damacy-Kun from an i-mode compatible phone. And it now seems that they've made some encouraging strides to adding yet another Katamari Damacy title to the ever-growing list of preserved i-Mode games, preserving a pre-loaded version of Katamari Damacy Mobile.

Just to give you some context, Katamari Damacy Mobile was an impressive Japan-exclusive mobile port of the PS2 title that was released way back in 2007 for a small number of DoCoMo phones. It featured a choice of a traditional control scheme and motion controls, with the title taking advantage of a new piece of camera technology on P904i phone models that could detect the device's movements and would allow the player to guide the Katamari around the screen by tilting the screen.

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Game preservation faces a lot of unique challenges, but one of its major obstacles is opposition from organizations who don't believe the public should have access to remote libraries of games.

Earlier this year, for instance, the ESA's lawyer Steve Englund was quizzed on the topic of game preservation in a hearing on the subject and said that there's " combination of limitations would support to provide remote access", before going onto state that physical buildings housing collections of vintage games aren't the answer. And it seems this issue isn't just exclusive to the Western institutions.

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It goes without saying that not every video game that enters production actually makes it onto store shelves, but the existence of many unreleased games is known thanks to the fact that they get reported on during development.

However, in the case of Out Of The Vortex, a side-scrolling fighter based on the comic book of the same name, nobody outside of the development studio Cryo Interactive knew it existed until very recently.

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Some brand new videos of Farnation — an unreleased Dreamcast MMORPG from the early 2000s - have been posted on YouTube earlier today, giving us our first-ever look at the cancelled Sega project (h/t: Dreamcast Junkyard/Sega Dreamcast Info).

If you're the kind of person who clung to every Sega Dreamcast announcement back in the day or who typically spends their time trawling through lost media sites, you may have heard about Farnation before.

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A prototype of an unreleased Game Boy Advance game called Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi: Puffy Ami Yumi and the Manga Madman has recently been found and preserved by the preservation group Codebound.

Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, in case you're unaware, was a Cartoon Network show that ran for three seasons between 2004 to 2006. It focused on the adventures of the best friends, Ami and Yumi, who were fictionalized characters based on the real Japanese pop rock group Puffy AmiYumi.

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Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII and 18 other Square Enix feature phone games that were previously thought to be lost have just been recovered, as reported by the feature phone preservationist/researcher RockmanCosmo.

The incredible haul of games, which also includes various Kingdom Hearts titles, was retrieved by the Twitter user @NaoyaShinota from a single phone — a DoCoMo P-04B — and was recovered by using a debug cable method (devised by the Kahvibreak Discord member XYZ) that involves shorting specific pins on the FOMA side of a cable to dump internal memory contents of compatible DoCoMo phones using Linux scripts (you can find out more about that here).

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Update : The episode featuring Bill Gates and Kazuhiko Nishi (Microsoft Japan, MSX) is now live. It was originally broadcast on November 17th, 1984.

Original Story : Can you imagine a computer-focused radio show today which could count people like Trip Hawkins, Bill Gates, Gene Roddenberry, Herbie Hancock, Douglas Adams, Ray Bradbury and (reads notes) Donny Osmond as guests? Admittedly, that might be tricky as some of those people have sadly left us, but the point we're making is that it would be amazing – yet that's precisely what happened back in the '80s.

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We've already covered how the History of Games 2024 conference brought to light the extortion and attempted kidnapping of Taito's chairman in Brazil. But there were plenty of other anecdotes too, via the three main talks focused on Brazil.

Doctor Bruno De Paula's talk on Tectoy Digital was especially fascinating, since while "Tec Toy" the company is broadly discussed outside of Brazil in relation to its Sega connections, this offshoot from around 2005 is less well known. (And yes, there is a variation in how you write Tec Toy / Tectoy, depending on context.) We covered Tectoy Digital's Zeebo console previously, with regards to its recent emulation breakthrough.

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Namco's 1982 arcade hit Xevious is one of the most influential shmups of all time. Not only did it do a lot of new things with the genre – such as boss battles and including an actual storyline – it was also a huge commercial success for the company, spawning sequels, ports and related merchandise.

Such is Xevious' high status within Namco's pantheon of games that it was given the CGI movie treatment in 2002 to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Created by Groove Corporation, the 75-minute film was shown during a summer 2002 roadshow in Japan, and while a home media release was planned, it never happened. The movie hasn't been rebroadcast since then.

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Back in 1992, Sigma Enterprises was working on a 2D platformer called Moeyo Butaman for the Famicom which was shown off in Japanese gaming magazines.

Starring a pig-like hero, the game's character designer was anime artist Gen Sato, who had previously worked with Square on the Famicom Disk System game The Quartz Dragon (Suishō no Dragon). According to Famicom archivist @oroti_famicom, it was a "vertical and horizontal scrolling action game featuring comical attacks such as snorting, farting and earthquakes."

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It's hard to imagine the video game industry without Nintendo in it, but back in 1980, the company was so unknown in the West that some of its products didn't even feature its name – as this newly-preserved commercial for a Game & Watch LCD handheld proves.

The commercial – which was has been recovered by Chris Kohler and The Video Game History Foundation – is for the Mego "Time-Out" Toss-Up handheld, which you might know better as the Game & Watch release 'Ball' (thanks, KitsuneNight).

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Remember Kororinpa? The cute Nintendo Wii title from Hudson Soft was released back in 2006 in Japan (and 2007 in North America and Europe) and saw players using motion controls to guide a small marble through a bunch of increasingly difficult mazes.

It wasn't necessarily the deepest game in the Nintendo Wii library but ended up generating a small following — enough for its developer/publisher to make a sequel in 2009 (under the title Marble Saga: Kororinpa).

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Imagine waking up to find you've been sent a mysterious 5.25-inch floppy disk. Where does it come from? It's not a standard disk: there's a series of holes drilled in it, and you realise it's for an obscure, almost forgotten computer from the 1970s, sold only in a specific region of Switzerland. What mysteries does it contain? How was it used? Where does one even acquire a working unit to perform the necessary digital archaeology? It sounds like a wild adventure out of a John Titor movie adaptation, but actually, for Dr Yannick Rochat and Sophie Bémelmans - and their Swiss colleagues - it's just a normal part of daily research.

The pair are part of the elite Confoederatio Ludens squad: about 20 researchers from four Swiss universities, tasked with documenting and studying domestic videogame history, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation to the tune of 3,154,295 Swiss Francs, or about £2.8 million converted. That's a generous volume of funding for a nation-state with a smaller population than London. In the project summary, there is this sentence: " the project is a step to the broader preservation of a highly ephemeral cultural heritage that is currently vanishing". The name CH Ludens is a reference to Switzerland's Latin name, Confoederatio Helvetica.

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