the rpg maker forum i grew up using finally got taken down this year. this is not a total disaster since most of the links there were already dead anyway, but it’s enough to get me off my ass. i’m grabbing what i can through very specific Wayback Machine searches, going through old hard drives, contacting the old site admin, etc. sometimes i encounter a MediaFire link that still works somehow. there are miracles everywhere for those with eyes to see.
even if these games aren’t really of interest to anyone outside of the lost media mystique i feel like i have to preserve what i can for nebulous spiritual reasons. i am not going to be playing most of these before hosting them aside from checking that they launch, but please give them a try anyway.
for now i am rehosting games through the Internet Archive, but i’m open to suggestions. i am not optimistic about IA’s long-term future… but perhaps the same could be said of all websites. but enough talk
i picked the first game to upload arbitrarily. please enjoy The Dolls and Mystic Forest. it was released 12 years ago and received one reply.
if you’re interested in this kind of thing, you can also check out the RMN Game Archive (below), which is probably the largest of these archival projects. i’m not really a streamer type, but i’ve been thinking it’d be nice to play some of these in some kind of “communal” way (maybe a book club???). let me know if you have any thoughts on that. having fun is something i take very seriously
Rainblood: Town of Death lucked out and is still easy to find (it even has an ancient RPS article, somehow… different times), so i’m not going to bother reuploading it
instead, please appreciate the first reply to the forum thread i found for it
Props to you for the solid preservation work! I also have some fears about IA’s future, but for now it’s not a bad place to upload stuff like this. Good work on the metadata for your first upload. It’s much more complete and helpful than the metadata on the RMN Game Archive you linked. The fields you chose (title, engine, etc) are solid but I would also add a creator/author field.
yeah their metadata is weirdly terrible given that they had a bunch of site infrastructure for game descriptions, devblogs, etc and it could probably be handled in an automated fashion if they still have it anywhere. i have run into a decent number of forum threads for games that are hosted there with much more info, but idk what to do with that right now if anything. archival for rpg maker games has always been very stopgap/haphazard
I had this same worry a few years back and acquired ~2 GB of RPG Maker games mostly by backing up pre-existing archives. Not all of them seem to be on IA. If any of these files are unaccounted for I can throw them on Google Drive. Is there a standard format of metadata that would make them easier to arrange? I could try to fill that out too. I have an IA account but I don’t know if it’s cleaner for all the uploading to go through you or what.
this one is two chapters of game that never got finished as far as i can tell. that’s gonna be the story for a lot of these. this one requires the VX Ace RTP; i link to it at the top of the page description.
this one is worth the price of admission for the title screen alone, which is good because that’s all i’ve seen of it. probably also requires the RTP
this rocks, let me get back to you because what i’ve been doing is pretty time-consuming… i might try to automate what i can
appreciating the irony that i had to stop after a few hours because now archive.org is down (edit: posting brought it back i guess but… not a great sign)
let’s take a moment to remember The Goddess Tourney, which i never played (and never will, apparently) but looks incredible
@OneSecondBefore@thecatamites i think this game was featured on Preserving Worlds? or else the author was using some of the same bizarre portrait art for some reason. anyway i just stumbled on it and the only working link i could find was the mediafire link in the youtube trailer, so it seemed worth archiving. watch out… for Society
Yeah, this was in the RPG Maker episode! It’s the one that uses photos of 00’s actors and celebrities for its character portraits, and has a police station full of people talking about their desks. I think about this one all the time.
The site “66RPG” used to be the primary forum/hosting space for rpgmaker uploads in China and someone on Itch uploaded what I guess used to be a commonly used/shared asset pack in that community. I didn’t see it uploaded anywhere else so may be worth keeping a copy.
took all day but i think (hope) i’ve salvaged what i can from HBGames – specifically, anything i could track down that wasn’t either already on itch.io or in the RMN Archive. i can confirm that they all launch. i can’t confirm anything else about them. i took some best guesses at which games required an RTP, but it’s hard to double check since i have all of them installed already. if you catch a mistake, let me know.
i remember playing Legacy of Zagolth and Blacksmith’s Apprentice as a kid and feeling like they were “real videogames”… i don’t know if that’s a recommendation or not. Spaceborne might have been the only RPG Maker game i played that actually used a tactics battle system in a reasonable way. i also played the very short demo for Ninja Penguin when it came out and mostly got pissed off at how badly it made my computer lag.
i’m disappointed i couldn’t track down SkyE or Cell Chamber, both of which i remember being impressed by. i think Cell Chamber may have been taken down on purpose.
there was one game with a working download link where the author requested in the forum thread that the game not be reposted anywhere else… which i’ve respected, but given that dead site is the only way you could find it to begin with… uh, idk
i think my friend still has a copy of Quintessence: The Blighted Venom, which is, uh. let’s call it historically significant i guess. if she can track it down i’ll add it. the forum thread for it had like 50 pages
i also discovered some wild stuff that didn’t need archival, but get ready for me to post about it here anyway
the RPGM2K games i long to replay the most are Dragon Destiny (shockingly complete and detailed game with huge open maps that came with a basically necessary walkthrough readme) and uhhh there was a pretty sick never-quite-completed game that had bespoke CG cutscenes and Majora’s Mask/Ephemeral Fantasia inspired repeating time cycle. i wish i could remember the name i bet those both “hold up" in fascinating ways
edit: oh hey it was NigSek: A Monster’s Tail. which i guess was based on a Zelda fanfic?? didnt remember that detail. this article has some examples of the CG
i still want to see a sb exquisite corpse and/or gamejam using whatever the current cheapest version of RPG Maker is
yeah, yeaster was one of the very few people to release more than one finished RM game but iirc Complete Chaos was the sprawling opus, after Onyx and Onyx 2, and afterwards they became a little more focused. i think i deleted the pile of games i had for the preserving worlds ep at some point but his stuff and the MisterBigT Dooms series were probably the first ones i downloaded for it, as some of the most visually distinct of that scene.
it’s funny now that RM is primarily associated with horror games that Complete Chaos and Dooms were probably two of the earliest horror-tinged games in the english speaking RM community, and both of them drew from a totally different lineage of horror than what would eventually become the norm. like grungy serial killer cop procedural stuff, se7en, clive barker etc.
you might know it but for a long while the main way i was aware of for getting hold of older stuff was the “old/lost rpgmaker games” thread on RMN. it’s down now but the wayback machine still has the link to the giant google doc used to list them all, with mega.nz links to each:
here’s the thread with more info, which also reads now like a running history of how much work goes into keeping any of these things alive - the list of down websites, copyright strikes on accounts, migrations from mediafire to google to mega…
IMO the high watermark of fan preservation projects for this kind of community is the Museum of ZZT, which hosts a very comprehensive, searchable online repository of well-described works with an incredibly robust faceted search, online exhibits, an associated community discord, etc. Obviously a massive project. Last I heard, the proprietor quit their job and runs it full time, thanks to a patreon. It’d be very cool to see something like this for RPG Maker games someday.
