Just over a week ago, Myrient, arguably the largest and most expansive effort to catalog and preserve video games via downloadable ROMs, ISOs, and other collections, announced that it would shut down at the end of March. In the days that followed, scores of gamers tried to save the site, either by donating or by backing up its collection of SNES titles to the PlayStation.
One effort, from the aptly named r/SaveMyrient sub, stood above the rest, with a dedicated group of archivists working together to back up the entire site.
Flash forward to today, and Minerva Archive, the name of the effort, has reached its completion, managing to mirror a whopping 385 terabytes of data.
The preserved information is not out of the woods yet, as efforts are underway to organize the files into downloadable torrents that could stand the test of time, provided seeders exist. There is also the process of validating checksums to ensure that each file is as complete as it needs to be.
“Thanks to everyone for all the support,” the site's owner wrote on Reddit. “Everyone has been making supportive comments in this thread and other subreddits and blowing up my phone. It really makes me happy to see the community come together to save a common good.
“So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you all for the support. Let's spread the word.”
“Destroy all copies”: No Ubisoft, I'm not going to burn my physical collection just because you don't care about your own history
Game preservation is critical, even if publishers refuse to see it.
Since the official Myrient site won't shut down until March 31st, the team was able to work quickly enough before that date to preserve the content and leave enough room to ensure its 100 percent is a win in itself.
But now that an official archive has been completed, it should free up existing Myrient bandwidth so people can grab the files they specifically want or need before the shutdown. Since the fateful announcement, download speeds had, understandably, been abysmal.
When the news that Myrient was shutting down came, it surprised many. Then came the official reasoning of the site's owner and things suddenly made sense.
Basically, there is no reason why Myrient shut down, but rather a combination of factors that made it financially impossible to sustain it. The owner revealed that they were spending over $6,000 out of pocket each month to keep the site running when donations dried up.
These costs are skyrocketing due to an influx of download managers and bypass software that would pull from the site and ignore available safeguards and donation request notices.
It obviously didn't help that the current shortage of RAM and storage, largely driven by AI, has prevented necessary upgrades to the site's infrastructure and caching. They became too expensive to consider.
“In short, I can no longer afford to run the site,” they wrote in a Discord message.
Now that element has been resolved, and video game preservation efforts live to see another day.
Chris Redfield punching a boulder is pretty normal by Resident Evil Standards
Smashing giant rocks into volcanoes is par for the course in Capcom's survival horror series.
