Today I found a lost game. I was scrolling through my browser bookmarks and I stumbled upon a Twitter thread. Here’s the gist: Pierre ran a blog reviewing indie games for 8 years and later went back to archive them. A bunch of them were missing from the internet and he had screenshots of the missing games. This game stood out to me in particular and I really wanted to play it. So I found the article on his website and the link to the game, Composition 37 by Rorschach\Larshe. The game page was definitely broken. I pulled up the inspector and didn’t find any leads, other than a jQuery call to run “PhoneStory.unity3d”. On a whim, I pasted “PhoneStory.unity3d” at the end of the URL and it worked!
I downloaded the game. Getting it to run was more challenging than finding it, but I eventually got Chrome 44 and an old version of Unity web player. I played the game and I love the atmosphere. It seems like nothing happens, but maybe it has online features and no players.
While double checking everything for this post, I went back to the site from which I downloaded the game. One minute I was checking the inspector, the next: “404 – website deactivated”. I panicked a little and checked the internet archive, only to confirm my suspicion: I may now have the only copy of this game in existence. Even worse, it was on my 2005 iPod shuffle xD
Edit 2/12/2022 (8 minutes later): Looks like the site is back up! Go play the game!
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