obscuritory
The Obscuritory
For games unplayed and unknown. Screenshots and other media primarily from forgotten DOS, Windows, and Mac games and software from the 80s and 90s. Read more at obscuritory.com.
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GDC 2024: What's New in Game History!
Hey, my GDC panel is up, and it's free! Watch me, historian Laine Nooney, Stanford curator Henry Lowood, tech policy lawyer Kendra Albert, and Chloe Appleby from the Powerhouse Museum talk about what's been happening in the field of game history.
We cover a lot of ground in an hour. This is a great way to get up to speed on what's been happening with game history/preservation, the challenges we're facing, and where we see things going in the next year. And yes, we talk about Yuzu.
(If my line "Today's piracy tools are tomorrow's preservation tools" ends up getting quoted, I won't be mad.)
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Water Ways
‘Lomax The Lemming’
PlayStation
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From Emergency Room: Disaster Strikes
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youtube
My panel from Super MAGFest 2024 is up! Meredith Rose and I talk about VGHF's report that 87% of classic games are out of print and the legal battle we're fighting to make game preservation easier for libraries and archives.
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Hello. Is there a way I can view your Game Preservation Crisis talk online? I just discovered your blog, too late to attend, but the questions of availability have been on my mind lately.
Thank you!
Hey! MAGFest is still uploading all the panels from this year. I'll share it once they upload it (I assume they recorded it...?).
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Heading to the Game Developers Conference!
I'm helping run the Game History Gallery exhibit this year for the Video Game History Foundation, AND I'll be appearing on a panel, "What's New in Game History!", to talk about the cool things the community has been up to in the world of game history/archiving. Say hi!
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From Robot Writer Plus!
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Compact discs - the wave of the future.
ANSI found by Aaron Kuhn, author unknown.
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Okay here's the show-and-tell. Last week I posted about a rare and expensive Final Fantasy VIII mug that I desperately wanted... AND SOMEONE BOUGHT IT AND SENT IT.
Nick (who purchased the mug) is a true hero. HOLY SHIT. The only problem it's kinda difficult to drink out of because that Moomba is so delicate and hard to hold. But the quality is unbelievable.
as someone who has made over 100 ffviii gifs, i salute you. 🫡 when you get your mailbag open, i’ll have to submit a picture of the most final fantasy merch to ever final fantasy i got from some novelty store as a kid: a final fantasy viii belt.
Incredible. I didn't even know that was a thing!
This is inspiring me to actually figure out the mail bag tonight. Send it by Tumblr anyway. The next mailbag is going to have the single coolest thing possible in it so it'll be a good one for show-and-tell.
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I've given many interviews but this is one of my favorites.
Something we say at the Video Game History Foundation is that if you want to study a video game, having the game isn’t enough. We think you need to understand how it was played and understood. So with that article in particular, I thought it was really interesting going back through all the magazines any time one would come through that was in the range of when Final Fantasy 8 was getting reviewed. I would always flip through and see what the review said, and people were ecstatic about it!
I think a lot of these things we take for granted. We just attribute it to what was in the air at the time but if you look at what was happening in different places of gaming culture, you can see how that shift happens. You can see how ideas get established early on, and that’s what we’re trying to build. Our collection is around things that will help people understand what role video games have in culture and how it’s changed over time.
I swear my Final Fantasy VIII shitpost website project actually ties back to the issues I work with!
The creator of That Amazing Website got interviewed!!! It's a great interview and I just think it's amazing, brings a tear to my eye we truly are the weird niche die-hard ff fandom haha ❤️
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as someone who has made over 100 ffviii gifs, i salute you. 🫡 when you get your mailbag open, i’ll have to submit a picture of the most final fantasy merch to ever final fantasy i got from some novelty store as a kid: a final fantasy viii belt.
Incredible. I didn't even know that was a thing!
This is inspiring me to actually figure out the mail bag tonight. Send it by Tumblr anyway. The next mailbag is going to have the single coolest thing possible in it so it'll be a good one for show-and-tell.
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i am a total outsider to final fantasy (my formative video game experiences began and ended with stuff made in hypercard, lol) but i love this approach to confronting your writers block. i think i’m gonna have to borrow it!
if theres anything i can endlessly generate (verbal) enthusiasm for, it is the hills i would die on over my impassioned but unpopular opinions about media and ways that unlocks my innate silliness. knowing that i too can reinforce my own lived joy (to MYSELF!!!) with the most beautiful 3 words (“eat my ass”) and a splashy header is genuinely lighting a fire under my ass just thinking about the years of writing i have turned my back on and how to get used to seeing myself create a Thing in the first place.
i hope you have a great time and in time can look back on what grows from your own unbridled enthusiasm, sense of humor, & finding what you don’t have to force!
and thanks for the idea 😎👍
Hahaha I'm glad! Most of the writing I do tends to be something that I want to spend a little more time polishing — analyzing old games; exhibits and archival description for work; and the book I'm still working on. And I have a bad habit of agonizing over the specific phrasing I want, which is something I should probably do later in the process.
So yes, writing loosely and enthusiastically like this is really helping the gears start moving again! Never underestimate the power of giddy energy. The words are flowing fast with no problem right now, and I'm seizing on it! I'm even mixing some more serious (and maybe a little angry) posts into the blog because they're spilling out too; I wrote a 3000-word post in a few hours, which I haven't done in ages!
My goal is that, after doing this for a bit, I'm going to jump back into a few Obscuritory drafts I have and see if I can bang them out more quickly after they've been languishing for a year or two. And then maybe finally I can dive back into the book!
(I also promise I am not COMPLETELY unhinged about Final Fantasy VIII. But I love bristling against the consensus on that game and playing the hell.)
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HMM YES WHO COULD HAVE MADE THIS
The serious explanation is that 1. I thought the domain name was funny, 2. I thought it'd be fun to corral all my thoughts about FFVIII so they don't keep contaminating other places, like this Tumblr, and 3. this is my way of breaking writer's block.
Folks are probably aware that there hasn't been a post on the Obscuritory blog since 2022. I've had a hell of a time writing since I moved cross-country for work, and this new site is a fun way for me to write with no inhibitions or self-editing for a while!
This is a great Final Fantasy VIII website I found on Bluesky last night.
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It's computer lab time
Tonight on the stream (7pm Pacific!), we're gonna get as far as we can in The Amazon Trail, the follow-up to The Oregon Trail! It's a bonafide edutainment classic, but how well does it hold up 31 years later? How many birds can we see? Is the fishing minigame any good because this was three decades ahead of the curve? We'll find out!
twitch_live
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thechosenpumbloom replied to your post:
"Impressive. Real Nice. Now lets see Obscuritory's card."
I know this is an American Psycho joke but my card is real good.
Got a POWERFUL new business card holder. This is vintage merch from 1999. It says "I'm here for business," but also "Something is wrong with me."
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Got a POWERFUL new business card holder. This is vintage merch from 1999. It says "I'm here for business," but also "Something is wrong with me."
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Uhhh holy shit? I've been inactive for the last 3½ years so maybe this should say 7.5 instead. Get on that Tumblr.
But really, thank y'all so much for your ongoing support. The Obscuritory (and this Tumblr in particular) has been so critical to getting me to where I am right now (a professional game history librarian!). I started here on Tumblr because I wanted a place to share all the cool screenshots I was taking, so I hope you've enjoyed the deep cuts over the years.
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