I guess it doesn’t do me much good to obsessively collect every new piece of IF if I keep it to myself and don’t use it in some way. So I checked out Google Drive, plus a program to keep folders synched (many thanks for your help. Vaporware!), and, well, here it is.
Be sure to read the readme. Basically, this is a copy of my own collection, the way I organise it. Hopefully it’ll be a reasonably-reliable backup for many games, and hopefully it’ll be as complete as possible. It’s not all sorted yet; the “Pending Games” folder is a repository for games I’ve yet to play and cathegorise. It’s a slow process.
If you find that I’ve forgotten to take out any commercial game at all, or any commercial emulator, PLEASE tell me and I’ll remove it at ONCE.
Now, short of posting this link in a bunch of places, I’m not sure where it would really belong. I’d like it to be proeminently available. I’d like for people to be able to say “Hey, guys, where I can find this game?” “Well, you can look in IFDB, the ifarchive or in this guy’s Google Drive collection”. I’m not quite sure how that would work. If anyone has any idea where the link could be posted for this to happen, I’d be grateful.
Update: it’s been brought to my attention that having Magnetic Scrolls, Level 9 and Infocom games could be an issue, legality-wise. So they’ve been removed from the collection (well, the public one; I still have them!). Any more such issues, just let me know!
Really glad you did this and I’ll be sure to keep it bookmarked. I only took a cursory glance at it- just out of curiosity, does your organization system put much effort on keeping past versions of games?
The first version of 9:05, for instance, has an extra fun action that was accidentally made unavailable in the second release, and I imagine a collector might want to keep different versions of much-expanded-upon games like Curses.
I know it’s too late to easily do anything about these games if you have long since deleted the older versions, but just the same, it’s a suggestion for the future.
As it happens, no, I don’t keep older versions. That’s because I’m not a die-hard collector like that - if so, I would hunt down every release of every game. I only keep the most recent versions, because I’m the sort of collector who plays the games; rather than keep them out of historical interest, I want to be able to play the version that the author intended.
In fringe cases like Last Resort / Lydia’s Heart, where a game is expanded to the point of becoming a new game and the author does not disavow the previous game, I gladly have both. But those are exceptions.
The only exception to this “rule” is Adventure, because the additions are not by the same author and they can be quite different from version to version. Even then, I did not avidly seek those versions out; I catalogued the ones I happened to find.
I’d be most grateful if anyone could take it out for a spin, check to see if it’s easily usable, check to see if it’s not too slow.
MEGA seems to allow downloading whole folders at once, so that makes getting multiple-files games much easier!
EDIT - Unfortunately my testing indicates downloads may be excruciatingly slow, even if you have Firefix and have the MEGA firefox extension installed. Further impressions from anyone else would be most welcome.
Update: the switch is done. It’s not as slow as I thought - unless you’re trying to download a double-digit number of files as ZIP; however miniscule the files, that’ll take ages.
It’ll take a little while to load for the first time, but once that’s done, it’s plain sailing. Pretty darned good.
I would like to announce that someone has decided to inform MEGA that my collection was infringing copyright. MEGA has promptly removed the whole lot.
Just so y’all know. I’ll keep my stuff to myself from now on. The amount of resistance I got on
this - exclusively on IntFIction, I should add - and now this aggravation, it really isn’t worth it. It was my way of giving something back to the community. I made sure to remove games whose authors asked me to (only one, to date). If some people are really that concerned, well. I’ve better things to do with my time.
Thanks for the support - those of you who did support it and found it useful. I think there’s more of you than there were of the other people, but you know, the other people were loudest.
So sorry this happened to you. I know you’re very proud of your collection and it means a lot to you.
Perhaps the answer is to become the “IF Archivist”…and let people know you’re the guy that they can contact if they are looking for an obscure piece of IF that you might have in your private library. That should protect you from any vulnerability due to copyright issues.
Thank you for your kind words. You’re right, it is a source of pride… maybe that should have clued me that there would be fall?
I suppose “the archivist” is the next best thing, and by now everyone and their goldfish knows that I’m here, so hey, “The Archivist”. Rather like a geeky superhero.
Funny, you’re not the first person to suggest this. Thing is, having been legally called out on it and admitting that it was legally correct to do so, I don’t have a moral (or ethical, or whatchamacallit) ground for putting it back up again in any way.
Not a dumb question at all. The archive is both more and less complete than my collection. The archive includes such treasures as full documentation for game design tools, previous versions of games, and even, I believe, issues of The New Zork Times. It is a treasure trove. My collection only has the games and their documentation.
On the other hand, there are gaps in the archive, because not every game has been submitted there. My collection has every game I could find - and I’m still finding new stuff. And of course, new stuff’s getting released all the time.
The idea is that I could help complement the Archive, which should always be everyone’s first stop anyway. Well, second stop - IFDB is probably the best place to start.
Also, I freely admit my collection is skewed towards what I can play. Windows-only versions of interpreters. My collection includes Spanish, Italian and French games as well, but I’m very liberal with the translations I allow in there, and I don’t have German or Russian or Swedish games because I don’t understand those languages.
Well, I know how fruitless the endeavor can be (as many people have abandoned whatever interest they had in IF X years ago), but maybe this can be a good incentive to contact authors and ask yet again that they upload their games and documentation to the IF archive.
The answer I got from hindsight is, the Archive is a lot more careful than I am over what it hosts. If I were uploading my own games, it’d be pretty obvious that I consented to everything the Archive stands for. Uploading other people’s games… not so much.
I’ve recently repackaged some TADS games with their resources (make it easier for mobile terps to read them, 'cause all the media is in the same file as the actual game), submitted them to the archive, and was told that they would prefer not to add some of the games I sent them. The ones that were already in the archive were fine, of course; and so were the ones that made it clear (in documentation or in-game) that the author allowed such distribution. The others, it was felt best to skip.
Given what happened just now, that’s probably a very wise decision.
But even before I knew this, I would have to compare my collection to the archive game for game to check whether they had the game I wanted to add. A bit more work than I was willing to do.
