3 ms·
Just last weekend I wanted to play Cryostasis after seeing a playthrough on YouTube. It's a pretty unique mid 00s shooter that is relatively light on the shooti
by mustacheemperor 3y ago
Just last weekend I wanted to play Cryostasis after seeing a playthrough on YouTube. It's a pretty unique mid 00s shooter that is relatively light on the shooting and heavy on atmosphere - you're a researcher meeting an icebreaker to leave Antarctica in 1981, but when you find the ship it's been wrecked since 1968, and the game follows you unraveling the mystery using supernatural time-jump powers. Instead of a health bar, you have to keep your body temperature high enough. It's a genuinely unique title that approaches the genre differently from pretty much any other...and it's literally impossible to buy.
It's been delisted from Steam, Good Old Games, and any other storefront I could find online. People resell genuine retail keys that can get the game activated on Steam for ridiculous sums. Reposted hearsay online is that the original source code is lost so there will never be a remaster. There's a copy up on Archive.org, and without it from what I can tell this title would just be lost to time.
There's so many cool, weird, obscure games from the 90s and 00s and its their weirdness and obscurity that puts them most at risk for disappearing and becoming unattainable.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y agoMy go-to example of game that are "lost" is No One Lives Forever and its sequel. In this case, though, I don't know about the source. All I know is that studio M&A have rendered these titles to be in eternal copyright limbo.
- mustacheemperor 3y agoDefinitely great examples. Those games are fantastic, so unique, so full of heart, and just gone.
- Solvency 3y agoI mean, there's a point where the blame lies on every single developer and business person involved with these projects. You don't pour years of manpower and creativity into a game like this and then .... not even save a single .ZIP file to your personal HD. It just casts such a nihilistic ephemeral shadow on all of this.
- lolinder 3y agoThere's definitely a mindset thing going on here. It reminds me of how old television shows (like Doctor Who) are often missing good chunks of the early runs because they recorded over the tapes. Television was seen as ephemeral and if they never intended to broadcast it again then there was no need to store thousands of feet of tapes for episodes that (they believed) would never be wanted again. I can imagine something similar happening with video games—they put in the work, shipped the product, and didn't think what they had done was important enough to preserve for posterity, because who actually thinks that about their own work?
- reaperducer 3y agoTelevision was seen as ephemeral and if they never intended to broadcast it again then there was no need to store thousands of feet of tapes for episodes that (they believed) would never be wanted again. A lot of big band music was lost because the band leaders were against recording music, whether for phonograph or radio. It was supposed to be a a philosophical objection, but I suspect they also didn't want to put themselves out of business.
- scheeseman486 3y agoRan into the same problem with Asobo Studio's Fuel, which got yanked off the market only a few short years after it's release. Had to install a shonky repacked version from IA and apply a bunch of fan patches to it. It's a good game and historically important too, being a technical progenitor to modern MS Flight Simulator 2020. It sucks that it's become so buried.