That broken link to a 2008 flash game archive that still half-works

I stumbled on this old game preservation site the other day, and it had a link to a flash archive that supposedly still loaded. Clicked it, and half the buttons worked but the actual game area was just a white box with a spinning circle from 12 years ago. The difference between the broken links and the ones that kind of worked was whether the original swf file was hosted on the same domain or embedded from a dead source. Most of the working ones were from sites that shut down in 2014 and the archive just kept the shell. Has anyone found a way to scrape those half-dead links before they vanish completely?

2 comments

2 Comments

wade_young867d ago

Man that spinning circle brings back memories of dial-up loading screens. Found a similar archive where the swf files were still up on some ancient Angelfire mirrors, but you had to manually piece together the links from old forum posts.

seanperry7d ago

Heard about this from a retro gaming podcast last week. @wade_young86 they actually dug up a GeoCities mirror with a full Shockwave collection still running. Had to use a old version of Firefox to even load the plugins though. Crazy what people kept alive on those old servers. Saw someone else mention a MAME arcade ROM set was hidden in a Angelfire folder for like 15 years.