The Quest To Preserve Japanese Feature Phone Games
The Quest To Preserve Japanese Feature Phone Games
"I looked at all these game preservationist organisations and nobody was saying anything"
"I was like, ‘How can this be happening?’" he tells us. "And ‘How come no one is talking about this?’ I was looking at all these game preservationist organisations and nobody was saying anything and the date was just getting closer and closer. So I got worried and pretty much totally out of nowhere I decided to write an open letter to a few different organisations in October, telling them, ‘Hey, you guys have got to start raising awareness of this because thousands of games are going to get lost to time.’"
As a direct result of Cosmo's open letter, the Game Preservation Society in Japan was able to successfully download 876 DoCoMo games before the shutdown occurred on November 30th, but these games now sit on aging hardware with the process of removing them from a device being far from simple.
Crazy that history was almost completely lost because there's no money for these companies in preserving the games they themselves made.
This is a cause I can really get behind, I remember monsters and magic II I think, was on clamshell phones back in the day. That was the first mobile game to ever make me actually cry. Best part is, theres no ads or in app purchases cause that just was not a thing back then
Thankfully java and Symbian games are well preserved already, was playing Deep 3D last year, a childhood favorite.
Wow, that's a really hard work. Hope they manage to work things out