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We Found & Saved 10 YEARS of Lost Video Game History (Q&A in the Comments) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-07-03 19:55:11
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

YOUTUBE LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KKCWGN2fBs 

Hey folks,

This has been a long time coming, but we're finally able to talk about our massive game preservation project in public. Patrons know how much blood, sweat & tears has gone into this work and I'm both excited and anxious to tell the rest of the world about our plans.

I'm going to keep this post public because I want to use it to facilitate any questions you may have about the project. I'll also be on twitter and our reddit doing as much feedback as possible because I imagine people have a lot of questions.

Thanks so much for supporting our work. We started Noclip to make a difference, and I think this is a great example of the work we can do to give back to the world of video games.

Shoot your questions in the replies!

Danny

Files

We Found & Saved 10 YEARS of Lost Video Game History

Support us on Patreon ► https://www.patreon.com/noclip Check out the archive ► https://www.youtube.com/@nocliparchive Check out our Archive.org page ► https://tinyurl.com/nocliparchive Noclip's work is 100% crowdfunded. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/noclip Website: https://www.noclip.video Store: https://store.noclip.video Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/noclipvideo/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/noclipvideo Twitch: https://twitch.tv/noclip Podcast: https://noclippodcast.libsyn.com/ Podcast Channel: http://youtube.com/noclippodcast 0:00 - Intro 1:33 - Why Tapes? 2:51 - The Project 4:01 -The Ticking Clock 5:50 - How to Help

Comments

Alexander Yerkes

Will you continue to use your subreddit even with all the reddit drama?

/noclip

I support the strikes but our sub has so little traffic (we basically just use it as a bulletin board) that I don't think us doing anything either way makes much of a difference. Also perhaps I'm a pessimist but it seems like all the communications platforms online are destined to fail with the current market paradigms. Maybe we should start an IRC

Ian McRobbie

New sub here. SAVE THE TAPES! Thanks for preserving game history.

Brandon K Gann

I said it when it was first discussed, and I'll say it again: This is AWESOME. I really hope as much gets saved as possible. This is great work and is already yielding fascinating results/footage.

/noclip

Thanks so much Brandon, you've been with us since the start and we really appreciate it. It's a big project but hopefully they stuff we've put up can demonstrate that we're up to the task. Processing large amounts of video is oddly enough pretty normal for us, hah. Exciting stuff to come!

/noclip

Welcome Ian, and thanks so much. "Save the Tapes" is a good phrase though it does sound weirdly political. Like a Watergate support group or something. Excited to share more of them over the coming days / weeks / months / years!

Arvindh Mani

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Having just gotten into gaming again after a long hiatus, I'm super excited by the prospect of seeing gameplay, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage of games I used to play when I was younger. Just became a new member and I cannot wait to see what you guys unearth and put together from this literal goldmine of history!

/noclip

Thanks so much, we're excited to get more of it out there!

Tom James

Hi Danny! Long time viewer, first time Patron. So glad to see the tapes are going to live to see another day and looking the best they ever have! We've only really talked once or twice forever ago, but I was the guy who subtitled one of your The Points into Japanese years and years ago, if you remember that. I don't know how many of the tapes you have are in Japanese, but I work as a localizer these days and if you think you might need help properly transcribing any titles or parsing the contents of those tapes and you don't have anyone else lined up on that front, I'd definitely love to pitch in! As someone who used to collect and catalogue old Japanese demo discs, which themselves often contain old archive material not found anywhere else, suffice to say, I have a real soft spot for this sort of material. I know this might be a pretty forward offer from a first time commenter and totally understand if you're not looking for anything like that right now, but just wanted to put it out there! God speed on this project either way and definitely excited to see everything that's set to come out of this! 😌

Zeklyn

This is insane, became a patreon sub just because of this. Cannot wait to see the end result of this, even if it takes years. Imagine having raws of all of this, who even knows what kind of lost media is on these tapes

Svavar Garri

15 years fan of your stuff. since giant bomb podcast appearances. finally able to put a few quid you way, thanks for all the work.

Brian Marsh

Oh but then the drama will be which server do you use? Freenode? DALnet? On a more serious note, have you considered Mastodon or Lemmy?

Ben Mininberg

Just wanted to say 'hey'! Been hearing about the tape archive for a bit and saw the video about them and decided it was time to support the project!

/noclip

Thanks so much Ben, it helps a lot! I can't tell you how much these tape decks cost! :D

/noclip

Thanks Svavar - I love the duders. As the tape project probably suggests too!

/noclip

thanks so much, yeah i feel like there are probably a handful of absolutely amazing pieces of game history hiding in here - it's gonna be fun to uncover them.

/noclip

Thanks very much Thomas! I'll keep that in mind -there are a few trailer on the archive now that are in Japanese (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w5tznjkA8I for instance). It's a shame youtube doesn't allow community captions anymore, but if you ever do any sub work feel free to email me (noclip.video/contact and ill upload them.)

ShinySkell

Been enjoying your content for years, about time I start adding some support! There's just about nothing I enjoy watching in the background more than old gaming press and bts footage, can't wait to see what gold you find in those boxes.

rydiaroads

Great video, convinced me to finally be a patron. So exciting but a massive amount of work, I'm happy to support!

Traalshek

This is some amazing news! I can't imagine what will be found on this media. Question- I am already a supporter but would like to do a one-time extra donation to support this historical project. What would be the best way to do that? Thanks!

/noclip

You are too kind! We have a donate form on our website (https://www.noclip.video/fund), but also we're launching a new merch store in a few weeks which may be a more fun way of helping us out. Loads of cool stuff on there like hoodies, shirts, cups and even mouse mats.

Robert Gibson-Bolton

New supporter joining to endorse and support this project. Keep doing what you do guys, you're a great ambassador for elevating games as a medium

overdev

seen the video on youtube and subscribed here :) what an awesome project!

Gribb85

Resubbed for SAVE THE TAPES! Sorry if this is covered in the video as I may have missed it but, can you say where you saved the tapes from?

Targray

This is amazing! Thanks for all the effort you're putting into preserving this treasure trove of video game footage. Can't wait to see what's being uncovered. Resubbed!

Renki

Hello, new supporter here and a long time fan, like many others I subscribed because of the tape archive project. You do amazing and very important work, thank you for everything!

A Big Old Skeleton

Where did you get these tapes? Was this the bigass Gamespot archive that Giant Bomb was going through back in the day, or was this a different archive? I guess either way this is extremely fucking cool, and I've never been so pleased to be a patron of this fine organization.

Graham Turner

Great stuff. Unfortunately I'm in Ireland, but I do a lot of tape digitization as a side gig, so this is exciting to me, very jealous that I don't have those tapes myself lol

pavak

was overwhelmed to the point of tears by how important this project is. immediately made me subscribe to the patreon. this is incredibly important work youre all doing and it needs to be successful. thank you so much

Eoin

Signed up for the tapes, love this stuff! Once tapes make it onto archive.org is it ok for others to use them? I don't mean that in a "rushing to unsubscribe" way, I signed up for a year; but I love watching livestreams like "OldTimeyComputerShow" which play old tech videos and I feel these videos would be perfect additions to their playlists.

/noclip

Thank you so much that means a lot

/noclip

Absolutely, we don't own any of this. We're not sticking any thumbnails on anything - as far as we're concerned they belong to the internet. FWIW we are planning to run a similar livestream ourselves but we feel like it's gonna repeat a lot now cos waiting a few weeks till we've more set up. But do what you want Eoin, like I said, it's there to be enjoyed by people

/noclip

And thanks for your support!

Jordan Cohen

Thanks for sticking with this and making it real, Danny! It’s been exciting hearing you talk about this for a few months and it’s awesome seeing these first tapes materialize. How are you thinking of prioritizing what to digitize and release, and when?

Ryan Lundy

Hey Noclip team, if needed, I live in the area and would be happy to volunteer time to help with the archiving process. Having done something similar in university, I know it can be repetitive and tedious.

NB

Thank you for doing all of this and sharing it with the community. Just wonder if you guys have looked at places like the digital faq and videohelp forums for help on any tapes that were problematic? Also I know getting these capped far outweighs perfection but any thought to capturing interlaced for the internet archive backups? Either something lossless like HuffYUV or Lagarith or even MPEG-2 at 10Mb/s? Thanks again for all you do!

Traalshek

awesome! looking forward to the new merch store :)

Ross

I’ve been listening to the podcast for a bit now and I know you’ve mentioned concerns about Patron numbers slowly going down - has this video gotten you back up to a “good enough” level or is there more finagling to do?

/noclip

It's definitely helped a bit but we have more to do for sure.

AfroKing42

Hey i saw this and remembered i have about a decade of videogame magazines between 1997 (play station mag sneak peak at ff8) and like 2010. i was gonna take on the task of digitizing them but if yall are already making the effort maybe i can send them to you?

saddestsalad

hi! new sub here to help save the tapes! i’m also a librarian who did a lot of digitization work while I was in grad school, so I absolutely understand what a massive undertaking this is. best of luck to you guys!

/noclip

The Video Game History Foundation (which is close to us here in the bay area) is eager for magazines - they have a large collection of them. Here's thier website: https://gamehistory.org/ - obviously magazines are heavy though so I'm not sure if it would cost you a lot to send them. Perhaps they can help? I'd reach out to them for sure.

/noclip

Thanks for the advice - I spend a lot of this year trying to get up to speed with capture best practices but advice like this helps a lot. I'm collecting a bunch of it we've gotten over the past few days and gonna implement what we can. Really appreciate it! As for the problematic tapes, we're putting them aside to have external folks take a look at some stage.

/noclip

We're gonna do some patron votes, and otherwise I'll just upload was seems relevant / cool / whatever as we go along. Not gonna overly think about it cos there's just a lot of it! I guess a good mix is what i'd like to produce. Not too much of any one type of content. We're gonna do "batches" of specific games too though. That'll be what people votes on

Riccardo Margiotta

You've been talking about the tapes on Patreon and the podcast for quite a while now, but it's so wonderful to see you announce the project publicly and read the 800 positive comments on YouTube... that's not something you can write often!

NB

Yeah, analog video capture seems to be a mind field and has only gotten worse hardware wise. I picked up bits and pieces of info on both forums while trying to find hardware that was recommended and also not crazy expensive on ebay. Which even at the time in 2010 was kind of hit or miss but I did luck out with 2 great D-VHS decks that work great for regular VHS tapes. There's lots of talk on the most perfect way/gear but it's one of those things where once I had settled on what I thought was a decent future proof workflow, MPEG2 for common stuff and Lagarith for rare stuff at 480i for me, I never had to adjust it much or keep up with anything new that was going on. I know h264/AVC can save space but at the time keeping the files interlaced was just not working for me. Not sure if it was the software available or what and since I wanted to make sure I had as good of an analog backup as possible I ditched it. I do know it is possible because I've found files that are properly tagged and clearly show 60 fields per second but as this point I only get the odd VHS tape here or there and I've already committed to the HDD storage for my backups. Thanks again for everything you all do!

Julio Adorno

You guys make such amazing work. This is the kind of stuff that bringsmeso muchhappiness, because we've supported the noclip team to reach such big heights. Saving and preserving these tapes hold such unimaginable historical significance to me and many others. It gives me so much sadness to think these tapes were going to end up in a landfill, potentially losing all its tales that it could have provided from a bygone time. I'll continue to support the noclip team, not just because I love the work that they do, but because they deserve it.

Knut Andreas Ruud

This is really great, I’ve just signed up to support you because of this initiative. It’s important work for a lot of reasons, and one particular reason from my point of view is to be able to sample stuff from some of these clips to incorporate them in my music. Cheers!

csmarble

I love seeing these old game videos, and I love that you and the team are undertaking this project to preserve them and make them public. I had to come give you some support when I heard about this!