This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at some of the updates that have become long-lost, and the quest to track them down.
With the internet’s ability to connect the world and make information and content readily accessible, there’s a particular interest in using it for preservation. It’s why there’s debate over dumping ROMs of games, particularly those that were never released and could otherwise easily become lost media. We’ve felt the sting of lost content in our modding community. So many great mods from the early days are long-lost now, and even more recent releases have disappeared because they were uploaded to file hosts that won’t guarantee availability in perpetuity.
And then, there are the long-lost official updates for various games. We actually have some old official patches in our Downloads section, as well as official roster updates, but it’s not a complete archive. Files that can be downloaded disappear from personal archives as well as the web, and in-game content updates likewise vanish and become long-lost when servers are shut down. This leaves us on a quest to find those long-lost updates, but all too often, it’s unfortunately been a fruitless search. Let’s take a look back…way back…