A Twitter bot accidentally helped uncover info on an unreleased 28-year-old video game - Sensationalist Headlines

[QUOTE]Something pretty fun happened yesterday that I wanted to share with you all: a bot on Twitter accidentally provided the clue that finally solved a 28-year-old mystery about a DOS game that never shipped. Yesterday, the VGHF Twitter account was tagged in a thread by @awesomonster, who was frantically trying to figure out the origins of a screenshot: [t]https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/3/eyJwIjoxLCJ2IjoiMSJ9/patreon-media/post/16866652/ffb0345297694f6ea90e34c3c2d435f4?token-time=1519257600&token-hash=XlsH1KrXMTd6Z3Snk4eS-0tDXHKc9us8zQelek7izm8%3D[/t] The account that @awesomonster was quoting, @gifs_bot, is actually a bot that randomly tweets out images from the GIFs Galore CD-ROM, a collection assembled and distributed by Walnut Creek CDROM way back in 1992 (coincidentally, I actually follow this account, but didn't even notice the screenshot go by). The collection seems to mostly consist of images that were shared on BBSes at the time. The image says it's from a game called StarTribes: Myth of the Dragon Lord which, as @awesomonster astutely noted, seems to be an early version of what eventually became Laser Lords, a CD-i exclusive game with something of a cult following. ... We now know that there was an early version of Laser Lords on DOS, and we also know that it is the same game as the mysterious "StarTribes" briefly advertised in magazines. And if it wasn't for that bot randomly tweeting the screenshot, and for an astute Laser Lords fan noticing it and digging in, that evidence might have just floated in the void forever.[/QUOTE] [URL="https://www.patreon.com/posts/16866652"]Source (The Video Game History Foundation)[/URL] Just thought that this was interesting, basically none of this would have been unearthed if it weren't for some random bot's image dump. There's photos of the game in the source. I couldn't find any other people who made a report on this so this is the best article I can get.

-I'm not myself and talking bollocks.-

Pretty fascinating, it's like stumbling into an old artifact inside a giant pile of junk I wonder if one day archeologists will be sifting through endless quantities of backed up data instead of dirt Most of it is going to be weird pornography and horribly compressed memes so I don't really envy them

So this disk that the bot was referencing to is a compilation of images from BBS's ( or forums ) of the late 80s and early 90s? I wonder who posted such a image at the time, and if they came from the developer or from some one who has already dug into the disk's files.

This is a bit of an anecdote, but this story reminds me of my own discovery about an old CD-Rom game I had called Knex: The Lost Mines. It was a pack-in with a big-ass Knex set that featured an isometric shooter with 5 levels. It was actually pretty fun - but what was even more interesting to me was the text-files I found inside the game folder that were from a completely different science-fiction game. I did some research on the game's developer, Electronic Animation Inc, and they were one of those studios that existed solely to produce licensed shovelware games. However, the Wikipedia page also listed an unpublished first game by the name of X-Fire, of which there was basically no information about on the web. I can't remember where I found it, but I did eventually locate a single screenshot of an X-Fire prototype - and sure enough as I suspected, it was also an isometric shooter with a sci-fi theme. As far as I know, I'm the only person on the web who has managed to piece together that Electronic Animation Inc. re-used the game engine from their unpublished debut title to make a fucking Knex pack-in game.

[QUOTE=Ryo Ohki;53116152]Pretty fascinating, it's like stumbling into an old artifact inside a giant pile of junk I wonder if one day archeologists will be sifting through endless quantities of backed up data instead of dirt Most of it is going to be weird pornography and horribly compressed memes so I don't really envy them[/QUOTE] Well both the new Library of Alexandria and the Internet Archive have been relentlessly backing up and storing every internet page they run across. So yeah, archeologists of the future will delve through hundreds of petabytes of data.

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;53116584]Well both the new Library of Alexandria and the Internet Archive have been relentlessly backing up and storing every internet page they run across. So yeah, archeologists of the future will delve through hundreds of petabytes of data.[/QUOTE] They'll probably see this post too.

[QUOTE=General J;53116639]They'll probably see this post too.[/QUOTE] hey data archaeologists, im gay

[QUOTE=General J;53116639]They'll probably see this post too.[/QUOTE] "What did he mean by this?" --Some guy in 3489

[QUOTE=General J;53116639]They'll probably see this post too.[/QUOTE] lol fuck you future nerds

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;53116584] So yeah, archeologists of the future will delve through hundreds of petabytes of data.[/QUOTE] I doubt that it will be around for so long. Modern media has a very rapid decay. The most reliable information to this day is physical - we have still chalk drawings and writings in stone but CDs Backups are already rotting away or is just not useable anymore.

[QUOTE=CyclonatorZ;53116326]This is a bit of an anecdote, but this story reminds me of my own discovery about an old CD-Rom game I had called Knex: The Lost Mines. It was a pack-in with a big-ass Knex set that featured an isometric shooter with 5 levels. It was actually pretty fun - but what was even more interesting to me was the text-files I found inside the game folder that were from a completely different science-fiction game. I did some research on the game's developer, Electronic Animation Inc, and they were one of those studios that existed solely to produce licensed shovelware games. However, the Wikipedia page also listed an unpublished first game by the name of X-Fire, of which there was basically no information about on the web. I can't remember where I found it, but I did eventually locate a single screenshot of an X-Fire prototype - and sure enough as I suspected, it was also an isometric shooter with a sci-fi theme. As far as I know, I'm the only person on the web who has managed to piece together that Electronic Animation Inc. re-used the game engine from their unpublished debut title to make a fucking Knex pack-in game.[/QUOTE] I found this game a couple of months ago and played it and I actually noticed the same thing for some reason. I can't remember what but I did find something on the internet about those left over files though. Seems like it was known at the time, but it's just an obscure as hell game in general anyway so I guess in general noone really talked about it.

[QUOTE=Ryo Ohki;53116152] I wonder if one day archeologists will be sifting through endless quantities of backed up data instead of dirt Most of it is going to be weird pornography and horribly compressed memes so I don't really envy them[/QUOTE] I'm pretty sure machine learning will be able sift out 99.99% of it. Identifying memes and being able to recognise twists, spinoffs, reposts and such. Building family trees of memes and the most significant variants. Maybe automatically recognising the difference between actual content creators and mere bloggers with their rants and food selfies.

[QUOTE=Chris Morris;53116136]-I'm not myself and talking bollocks.-[/QUOTE] Alright, I wasn't Myself when I made the original post here and I think I posted about 1,200 words of pure garbage, but I had a point. Basically I'm scared of the day when all these little tidbits of fascinating info are gonna disappear. I myself have delved into the depths of relatively obscure games and mods and have uncovered shitloads of info about them, and while I try to share it where I can, I know that someday it's gonna fade into dust, and it makes me navel gaze about how much stuff in regards to humanity and the world around us has been lost through similar entropy. It's a spooky thought caused by something very simple.

I totally hear you, and I recently posted something similar in another thread: [QUOTE=Talvy;53114224]What a brilliant style of art, I especially loved the look of the baddy. This reminds me of all those animated student films I still have on VHS. It's a shame how short-lived small animations are, because they're uniquely great. One day this too will go 404. I hope to one day put up an archive channel for works that don't exist online.[/QUOTE] [editline]edit[/editline] Basically, it's death we're talking about here. Eventually everything fades away, including our creative works.