What "Lost Media" are you interested in?

Free Tvs! from the Half-Life 2 beta, and the old Shrek.

Sony MiniDisc's...

I always wonder how much stuff got lost forever for games from the 80s/very early 90s that had level/quest editors before the era where wider Internet access was a thing.  How many levels and whatnot were just swapped around on floppy disks/tapes among family and friend groups, or at most posted to some BBS somewhere, that got lost forever when the media rotted/was thrown out as "obsolete"?  Granted, most of it was probably crap anyway, but who knows what gems could've been out there.

I would also love to see anything related to the original third Heretic/Hexen game "Hecatomb" but as far as I'm aware it was a fairly short-lived concept that died when John Romero split from id and didn't get much/any work done on it before changing into what we eventually got as Hexen 2.

2020 marked the end-of-life for flash games as we know it. Between Adobe, Google, Apple and Microsoft dropping support we can no longer play them online without using other means. There are many flash game emulators and services that archive these games and make them playable today. Without these services many resort to using Firefox or older versions of Internet Explorer to play them. Sites like Y8 have chosen to keep these games up on their site, to help preserve their history and others use embedded emulators like Ruffle. Y8 also has their own browser, dedicated to play flash games and everything else that they support.

Additionally, there are archive services like Flashpoint and Flash Game Archive that use a downloadable launcher to manage and play these older games. While Flashpoint has tens of thousands of games in their archive, and one can request games for curation, they do not become available to play in their launcher for a very long time. It could be many years before you could play them with Flashpoint. After their last release of Absence 2 I haven't been able to view or play anything because their service seems to be broken. Flashpoint doesn't seem to be supported or updated as it used to be.

Flash Game Archive on the other hand is updated regularly and 50 or more games are added to their service on a biweekly basis and are ready to play and stream without issues or additional downloads. FGA3 supports downloading the games to play offline and running games that you already have downloaded from other sites. Because of FGA3's newer simplistic layout and its consistent addition of curated games I like it a lot better than Flashpoint. Because I want to help support the service by requesting games, I am in the process of compiling a list of my favorite flash games from Y8. From their entire history, which I looked through them all, Y8 has 64,433 flash games, to which less than 50 games interested me. I am still working on compiling my list and I hope to submit it soon. In this process, I found some interesting flash games.

In my opinion, flash gaming could have been so much different. As a gamer looking back and was never able to play these games when I was younger, I feel that flash games could have been so much better. I feel that flash games could have been used to tell an interactive story or be more like interactive art than simplistic mind-numbing games that most of them are. Out of the best games that I found at Y8 some of them fit these criteria nicely. One of my favorite flash games of all time is Katie Commando from XformGames. After looking back, I've also learned that a bunch of games that my family bought decades ago installed from a disk were flash games packaged to run in their own environment. Also, early games from PopCap and WildTangent were most likely flash games too.

Also, in my opinion, flash game support died not because of their security issues but because companies like Microsoft, Google and especially Apple couldn't control their fair use and their marketplaces anymore. You could embed advertisements and links into the games, which Apple especially hated. They couldn't control the advertisement revenue, or page viewership, so they cut support for the games entirely. That's just my two cents anyways.

2000s sitcoms

On 4/24/2023 at 1:12 PM, Halfblind said:

2020 marked the end-of-life for flash games as we know it. Between Adobe, Google, Apple and Microsoft dropping support we can no longer play them online without using other means. There are many flash game emulators and services that archive these games and make them playable today. Without these services many resort to using Firefox or older versions of Internet Explorer to play them. Sites like Y8 have chosen to keep these games up on their site, to help preserve their history and others use embedded emulators like Ruffle. Y8 also has their own browser, dedicated to play flash games and everything else that they support.

Obviously, Adobe Flash wasn't even capable of transitioning to the smartphone era.

We understand that when the iPhone launched in 2007, Apple took the step to exclude Flash Player. Adobe planned to offer a lightweight version of Flash Player called "Flash Lite", which would've been optimized for iOS, but nothing regarding the iOS version of Flash Lite has ever materialized. It would be the release of the iPad in 2010 when most publications took notice of Apple snubbing Flash Player.

In response to the whole Adobe Flash exclusion debacle from most critics, Steve Jobs wrote the open letter "Thoughts on Flash" which outlines Apple's reasons to not support Flash Player on their iOS devices, ranging from its proprietary and closed-source nature, abysmal security issues, terrible performance on mobile devices, rapid battery/energy usage and lack of touchscreen support. Jobs' argued that HTML5 was better at web video and performed better than Flash Player on mobile devices.

Although Adobe did attempt to get Flash Player on Android in version 2.2, but the choppy and unresponsive performance issues, lack of compatible websites on mobile devices and underwhelming/disappointing touchscreen experiences shed a more positive light to Jobs' open letter, which ultimately resulted in Adobe discontinuing development of the mobile version of Flash Player in 2011 after Android 4.0, and resulting in the Windows Phone version being officially cancelled without an official announcement.

As Flash Player no longer works since 2021 outside of the HARMAN enterprise and Mainland Chinese variants, many indie developers have moved on to creating games on both PC digital distribution platforms (Steam, GOG & Epic Games Store) and consoles (Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo Switch), which are now powered by Unity, Game Maker or RPG Maker.

Redwood Falls, a game that borrows heavy inspiration from The Thing.

So, there was a web plugin from the mid-90's i discovered at the Flashpoint community called Atomic3D Player (previously called Neutron Viewer) developed by Nucleus Interactive, it is really unknown outside the Flashpoint community and not much is known about it, There is a paid authoring tool called Proton Pro for the plugin which hasn't been cracked yet, though there is a later free version of it simply called Atomic3D Animator which is lost.

There is a found manual for the lost Animator version, which is included in the attached .zip

a3dmanual2.zip

LittleBigPlanet prototypes...

Just gonna drop in a quick comparison between the final release, and what is commonly referred to as Milestone 5:

Pretty big difference, huh? This happened in a time span of less than 2 years!

Xenome, a Fallout-like game for the iPhone. From the looks of it, it was going to have multiple episodes, but like most forgotten ambitious episodic projects, it only got ever got one. I discovered it when it popped up in my Youtube recommended page, probably because of my interest in Gunman Chronicles, which also has an enemy faction called the Xenomes. Its developers' channel is still up, if you're interested. no longer available, apparently.

film: i want to someday see that one king kong in tokyo movie from the 30s, the deleted scenes from the jurassic park movies that are lost to time, all the footage of back to the future with eric stoltz as marty, etc.

videogame: i would adore to play the n64 version of resident evil 0, the cancelled doom 4, the cancelled sequel to doom 64, the original version of half life 1 that was scrapped because it "wasn't fun", etc.

4 hours ago, fishy said:

film: i want to someday see that one king kong in tokyo movie from the 30s, the deleted scenes from the jurassic park movies that are lost to time, all the footage of back to the future with eric stoltz as marty, etc.

videogame: i would adore to play the n64 version of resident evil 0, the cancelled doom 4, the cancelled sequel to doom 64, the original version of half life 1 that was scrapped because it "wasn't fun", etc.

Code of the Doom 64 sequel may surface one day! The first thing they added to it was multiplayer and Aaron Seeler said it was working. Then in the past few years I hear they found the Doom 64 source code and tools over at id/Bethesda. Wouldnt be surprised if the WIP Doom 64 sequel was around there.

like the wind, of course

The Apollo 11 Missing Master Tapes - NASA's original SSTV recordings that were higher quality, though broadcast on TV in 1969 in low resolution NTSC, PAL and SECAM quality. The tapes appeared to have suffered the same fate as many TV shows of the 1950s and 1960s with almost all copies being wiped/junked from existence. This, among other things, has led to many conspiracy theories about the landings, though both NASA and non-NASA authorities have repeatedly debunked any claims of foul play.

Really silly, but I've been wanting to find episodes of "Its On With Alexa Chung", an MTV Talk Show that aired in 2009. Only reason is that when I was on a school trip to New York we were on the show in the background, and Alexa had said something to me and I choked on TV, while my friend just yukked it up real good. 

Even emailed MTV to see if they had some of these episodes. Shockingly, no response.

"The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet", "Fond My Mind", "Poor Christmas", and other lost music.
"Jeff The Killer Original photo", "Origin of Backrooms photo", film "Him" from 1974 (yeah, i'm not crazy)
There's many, actually, I just can't remember.

Not so much lost, as hard to find, but NASA's historical image galleries have always been a mess. I assume it's because NASA was one of the first organisations to embrace what was then the world wide web, so they have the pioneer's curse. The organisation's images have always been split between different websites run by different bits of the US government, and latterly Flickr for some reason. It's particularly frustrating because it's fairly easy to search for an individual image - NASA has a consistent, multi-decade-old image naming scheme - but actual structured galleries are hard to come by.

In particular there's a curious dearth of images from the Skylab missions, and all of the Shuttle missions pre-1994 or so. The crew of Skylab 4 were in orbit for 84 days, but NASA only has a couple of dozen images readily available:

https://images.nasa.gov/search?q=skylab 2&page=1&media=image&yearStart=1920&yearEnd=2023&keywords=SKYLAB 4

There's something depressing about Skylab. There's the "we're not going to the moon any more" aspect. There's the fact that the interior colour scheme was brown and pale green and the astronauts wore brown uniforms and looked exhausted all the time. The fact that the interior was so large they had to use a flash, which makes all of the pictures look like a low-budget early-70s BBC television drama. The astronauts trained for Apollo 18-20, but they were cancelled, so they ended up stuck in a broken fuel tank for two months growing a beard. Like in Dark Star. And this was the early-to-mid-70s, when everything was depressing.

Johnson Space Centre used to have a simple but easy-to-use image gallery, but it's now defunct:  

http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/

I mention it because I was curious about STS-5, which was unusual. Columbia originally had ejection seats, because STS-1 to STS-4 only had two crewmembers. Commander and Pilot. The general consensus was that the seats were useless during lift-off - the astronauts would either have been toasted by the SRB plume or killed by hitting the Mach 15+ airflow - and possibly useful during landing but generally not worth the trouble. But for STS-5 alone there were four crew, so the ejection seats were disabled. And for that one mission the Commander and Pilot had to wear a peculiar uniform that consisted of the pre-Challenger disaster blue jumpsuit plus the early gold-coloured launch escape suit.

The only image of this configuration on the internet appears to be this, which isn't even officially there any more, and because the JSC's website is no more - and because it used CGI-script-genreated galleries and not flat galleries, the internet archive doesn't have a copy of the thumbnail page.

2 hours ago, Ashley_Pomeroy said:

pre-Challenger disaster

Speaking of Space Shuttle Challenger, theres at least two pieces of lost media associated with the disaster.

The first being the pre-Challenger disaster version of the 1986 State of the Union address which was originally supposed to be taken place on January 28th, but because of what happened with the Space Shuttle Challenger the same day, it was delayed until February 4th that same year. To date, not a single bit of information or a document of the pre-Challenger disaster version of the State of the Union address is confirmed to exist.

The other is the animated series The Young Astronauts, that was planned to be aired on CBS in February 1986, as well as a tie-in six issue comic series by Marvel Comics label Star Comics. A couple of production material and concept art was made for the series before the show was cancelled in response to the aftermath of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

There were pre-9/11 builds of Grand Theft Auto 3 seen in trailers, with stuff like the cut dialogue and the blue police car. As you might probably know, they had to change plenty of stuff after the aforementioned incident. While the cut radio parts were released on the Advertising Council, Rockstar's archive of GTA's radio ads and the police cars recreated using assets from Liberty City Stories, we still don't know how the cut NPC lines sounded like due to them not being released or appeared in any leaked material.

I've been hoping this kind of build be leaked one day, but considering Take-Two, their handling their IPs and Rockstar upping their security as of late, the likelihood of it happening is about as big as an ant.

Mostly unreleased Amiga games, previews from magazines, early builds, demos, but also prototypes and unreleased games from other systems like first PlayStation, Saturn, Dreamcast, Nintendo64, MegaCD, 3DO, Snes and Genesis.

On 8/3/2023 at 9:34 PM, aloysiusfreeman said:

Really silly, but I've been wanting to find episodes of "Its On With Alexa Chung", an MTV Talk Show that aired in 2009. Only reason is that when I was on a school trip to New York we were on the show in the background, and Alexa had said something to me and I choked on TV, while my friend just yukked it up real good. 

 

Even emailed MTV to see if they had some of these episodes. Shockingly, no response.

You might need to go through certain channels within MTV other then a generic email.

Team Fortress 2's "What's in the Suitcase". It was a machinima that was hosted in Machinima's YouTube channel. It was lost due to Machinima deleting their videos in 2019, and the video isn't available on the Wayback Machine. The machinima featured music from Tape Five's Swingfood Mood, particularly "Suitcase #947". I wouldn't have known about this obscure band were it not for the video.

Here's the link to the video where it used to be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJNDp5A1mYc

AgentTaskForce UK - a software suite that was developed in the early 2000s that utilized Microsoft Agent technology. Their specialty was that they were centered around different topics like video games, movies or the weather. This company made a program called WebScrapbook that was able to design websites and appeared to have connections to another British company WebPrecint.

This small British company was founded in the year 2000 but went defunct three years later in 2003. They had financial issues in 2002, and their software would slip into obscurity. As of today, only three of the Microsoft Agent characters have been recovered, and the other five characters are nowhere to be found. Unless someone who is British have that CD-ROM that costs £9.75 at the time, it is unlikely that the remaining characters will ever resurface.