>>Version 1.0 -- 28 September 2022<<
>>Version 1.1 -- 19 February 2024<<
I've been doing this project on and off since about 2016, trying to preserve as much digital gaming history as I can before it's lost.
Be prepared, there's gonna be a lot of:
Some background:
I'm in my forties, so I was pretty young and 'in' the scene(s) back in the day of the late 1990s and early 2000s when so many things were going on:
Operation Flashpoint: FFUR, and tons of stuff like that.
Space Empires IV/V; tons of mods going on, etc.
Steel Panthers; the early releases of Steel Panthers: WAW by Matrix and the SPCAMO DOS versions of WW2 and MBT.
Close Combat; tons of mods, especially for Close Combat III such as RealRed, etc.
European Air War; tons of new things, like modding the game totally to play on the Eastern Front:
or to the Deserts of North Africa:
NWS was doing NWP for Fleet Command and Fighting Steel...
Well now; it's 2022, about twenty five years later, and...
The internet is terrifying in its seeming permanence, coupled with its impermanence.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die."
Websites last for 20 years (Rugged Defense for The Operational Art of War [TOAW]) and then disappear.
Websites die when the owner dies and he can't renew the web hosting from the grave, resulting in the website becoming a dead spam-filled honeytrap.
Websites die when the hosting service does an "oops"; and the owner, even though he's still alive, wasn't able to keep detailed backups of the database(s) -- this is something common with interactive Web 2.0 websites; as shown by Combat Mission's Scenario Depot:
People develop mods for games, and link to them through an impermanent web link (Google Drive and Drop Box have solved this problem...mostly...but people didn't have a lot of options in the early 2000 to 2010s for large files); leading to the common scenario playing itself out over dozens of game forums:
Case in point:Person A: "Hey, does anyone still have X for $Insert_Game_Name$ ?"
Person B: "Yeah sure, here, let me put it up on my webspace or on a random download server like Mega.NZ"
<five years pass>
Person C enters the thread and gets excited.
Person C: "The link doesn't work anymore!"
*pause*
Person C: "Hey, does anyone still have X for $Insert_Game_Name$ ?"
https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showth ... p?t=119919
Howdy, anyone know where I could download all the 688i custom missions? Looks like Bill Nichols had a bunch at one time. I saw a link stating Over 200 custom missions from Bill Nichols and the VNC for 688i, but cant seem to find the download for it. Thanks for any info.
Lonny
Seemingly permanent landmarks of the web; such as the Wargamer Scenario Depot; which seemed durable enough that game companies (Matrix included) linked to them (see the images below)...Bill Nichols
After a number of computer replacements, I seem to have lost my 688i custom missions.
I know I've sent CDs to people in the past, certainly someone has those missions laying around.
...disappear and die -- the Wargamer has gone through about three different changes in ownership/staff over the years and with each change, more information was lost.
This is what the Wargamer Scenario depot had as of 2014 or 2015, shortly before it died -- somewhere along the way, scenario uploading had been broken; so new scenarios weren't being uploaded for several years.
Elsewhere back in 2020, YahooGroups dissolved and shut down everything. There was a lot of early wargaming stuff maintained in the files of various YahooGroups, because it went from 2001-2020.Age of Empires (3)
Age Of Empires II (1)
Age of Rifles (250)
Age of Sail (2)
Allied General - Mac (65)
Austerlitz (1)
Axis & Allies (6)
Clash of Steel (1)
Close Combat (11)
Close Combat III: The Russian Front (64)
Combat Mission (69)
Combat Mission : Barbarossa to Berlin (10)
Combat Mission: Afrika Korps (6)
Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord (5)
Command Ops - Battles From the Bulge (2)
Company of Heroes (1)
Conquest of the Aegean (5)
Destroyer Command (2)
Divided Ground (32)
Dragoon: The Prussian War Machine (1)
East Front II (154)
Empire (1)
Empire II (26)
Fantasy General (1)
Fighting Steel (112)
Flanker 2.0 (12)
Flashpoint Germany (4)
Fleet Command (2)
Flight Commander 2 (2)
Gary Grigsby's World At War (3)
Gary Grigsby's World at War: A World Divided (4)
Great Battles Series (82)
Harpoon (1)
Hearts of Iron (1)
Histwar: Les Grognards (5)
Horse and Musket (7)
IL2 Sturmovik (5)
John Tiller's Battleground: Civil War (1)
Man of War II (13)
Massive Assault (25)
Medieval 2 (11)
Medieval 2: Total War (5)
Medieval: Total War (45)
Middle East '67 (2)
Pacific General (64)
Panthers in the Shadows (2)
Panzer Commander (165)
Panzer General - Win 95 (12)
Panzer General II (344)
Panzer General III: 3D Assault (5)
People's General (15)
Rising Sun (32)
Rome: Total War (27)
Russo German War '41-44 (4)
Semper Fi (3)
Shogun: Total War (3)
Silent Hunter (13)
Soldiers at War (180)
Soldiers: Heroes of World War II (1)
Squad Assault: West Front (6)
Squad Battles: Eagle Strike (4)
Squad Battles: Proud and Few (3)
Squad Battles: Tour of Duty (3)
Squad Battles: Vietnam (12)
Starcraft (3)
Steel Panthers (562)
Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles (315)
Steel Panthers III: Brigade Command (11)
Steel Panthers IV (1)
Steel Panthers: General's Edition (1)
Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank (188)
Steel Panthers: World at War (555)
Steel Panthers: World War II (104)
Strategic Command (6)
SWAT 2 (3)
Swat 3 (42)
Take Command: 2nd Manassas (4)
The Operational Art of War III (71)
The Operational Art of War VOL I (211)
The Operational Art of War VOL II (55)
The Operational Art of War: Century of Warfare (257)
The Operational Art of War: Wargame of the Year (27)
Tigers on the Prowl (2)
Titans of Steel: Warring Suns (5)
War Plan Orange: Dreadnoughts in the Pacific 1922 - 1930 (1)
War Wind 2 (26)
West Front (217)
West Front with Operation: Sea Lion Expansion (8)
Wooden Ships & Iron Men (9)
To give you an example of how this impacted the digital history of gaming, I was only able to recover a 745 scenario, 31 campaign compendium for SSI's Age of Rifles because long ago, I joined an Age of Rifles related YahooGroup, and downloaded it, keeping it on my hard drive; so when YahooGroups went poof, I still had the data.
But even before the Second Age of the Internet in the mid to late 1990s; there was the First Age of the Internet (yay, a Tolkien reference!).
It used to be a long time ago; when people got modems for their computers, they'd use phone lines to dial into other computers running Bulletin Board System (BBS) software, to exchange files or play primitive shared online games (BBS Door Games)
(PS: God help you if someone picked up the phone while you were downloading something).
There were also "national" BBS like systems such as CompuServe, Prodigy and America OnLine; which maintained special file areas, as per the Harpoon I FAQ from 1994 on where to find Harpoon scenarios in 1994:This user edited scenario originated from the Harpoon Scenario Editor BBS; operating it's terminal at 718-746-7466 in ANSI emulation (2400/1200 N-8-1) using A WWIV TERMINAL VERSION 4. Sometimes you may find Procomm Plus terminal up when sysop is conducting other business. However this terminal also accesses the directory with the HARPOON SCENARIO WAREHOUSE files.
On July 16, 1990 the Harpoon Scenario Editor BBS Warehouse was started as a place where a central point could be maintained for the uploading and downloading of the Harpoon Game edited scenarios. As interest and usage of the BBS grew. The BBS improved it's service and terminal to a full fledge BBS on October 2, 1990. The BBS will continue to work on improving the terminal and services as long as interest continues for Harpoon scenarios. The true test of success will be the users and plenty of uploads of scenarios made by members with the Scenario Editor.
Feel free to call at anytime to upload any scenario you wish to share and download some more for your pleasure, and share this scenario with others.
When you connect to the BBS and you are a first time user type in "NEW" and follow the prompts for initialization as a member. Veterans of the original Pro-comm Plus terminal will also have to reinitialize onto the new WWIV terminal.
Correspondence can be mailed to 19-21 Clintonville ST. Whitestone, New York 11357
To save callers time on line; the following files have been made:
HARPTEXT.ZIP/ARC - File containing all text files associated with the edited scenarios available for down loading
GIUKTEXT.ZIP/ARC - File containing all text files for scenarios to be played under the GIUK battleset.
NACVTEXT.ZIP/ARC - File containing all text files for scenarios to be played under the NACV battleset.
HARPBB.TXT - File containing information regarding the Harpoon Edited Scenario BBS.
BBGUIDE.ZIP/ARC - file containing the WWIV terminal manual explaining the commands and menus used.
A big thing for these early BBSes was file sharing (besides Door Games); and by the early 1990s or mid 1990s, many BBS owners had racks of CDROM drives loaded with "shovelware" CDs that provided files on demand.On CompuServe, in GAMERS forum library 3 (user created scenarios)
The Harpoon Scenario Warehouse BBS located near New York City. The BBS can be accessed via modem at 516-829-2557. Currently offline, but likely to reopen once Harpoon II ships.
The PC to MAC user scenario convertor is available on CompuServe, in library 15 of the GAMAPUB section
America On-Line: jayg10@aol.com says that due to the dispersed nature of user created scenarios on AOL it is best to use the file searcher with the string "HARPOON" while in the software section. Also try the PC GAMES menu and choose the INDUSTRY CONNECTION section to locate the sub-section maintained by Three-Sixty.
The Internet Archive has preserved many of these shovelware CDs, and if you know how to look, you can dig up interesting stuff (such as Lucasarts X-Wing / TIE Fighter editors) from the First Age; but a lot of First Age stuff is lost.
There's been a lot of loss of Second Age stuff; because places like the Internet Archive only archived if:
1.) The file in question was popular enough to be clicked on enough to trigger an archival crawl by a web-bot.
For example, I was able to save 496 SPWAW scenarios off of the deep backups of the Internet Archive, vs only 61 SPWW2, 124 SPMBT and 1 SP2 scenario. The reason for this is due to the popularity of the games at the time.
In the early 2000s; running DOS was becoming harder and harder -- DOSBOX wouldn't come out until January 2002; so SPWAW was more popular at the time; since it was a native Win9x app, so more of its scenarios were saved, versus the pure DOS versions (WW2/MBT and SP2).
2.) The Web crawler bot could acceess it -- a lot of Internet 2.0 websites liked to "wall off" downloads and such behind a username/password wall -- internet crawlers can only grab what's grabbable by the public.
Elsewhere, there's been a loss of files for a variety of reasons:
1.) We were all young at the time, and Windows broke a lot more. I can't begin to tell you how much data I lost as a kid from Windows 95/98 crashing and requiring a format/reinstall as we didn't have easy technical support from our phones. It's from this I evolved my practice of separate OS and DATA drives in every build I have put together.
2.) We were all young and broke. 30 to 40 year olds look at the price of an external HDD ($100) or a stack of DVDs ($30) and don't bat an eye at paying those costs. But teenagers can't afford to drop money to pay for backups.
3.) Our interests changed. I used to be big into the whole TOTAL ANNIHILATION scene, because Cavedog Entertainment would post offical free DLC that added new units that you could download, and other people figured out how to make Total Annihilation mods; which was a "neat" thing back then in like 1997. I didn't keep any Total Annihilation stuff as I moved from PC to PC.
4.) You look at an old CD-R and think "I don't think I'll need this again..."
5.) It was a lot harder to download files -- for a lot of us, we didn't get cable internet and steady connections until well into the early 2000s. Also, mass download plugins weren't easily available (I think) for internet browsers; making downloading say...50 scenarios an exercise in tediousness.
But enough meandering down memory lane about when needed a new heel for my shoe...So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em...
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The Major Problem Facing Me: Even though I've been able to recover a lot...I'm in my 40s, and there's a non zero chance I might die, and this probabilty only increases each year.
A potential solution for long term "storage" for lack of a better word, might be with the Internet Archive. It's funded by a foundation and they seem to be relatively durable; so they're the closest thing to archival on-line storage we might see for some time.
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GENERAL INTERNET ARCHIVE NOTE: If you wish to download a specific file within the main ZIP container, just click on the (View Contents) link on the contents page.
At first, this started out as a project to recover the Wargamer Scenario Depot; but as time went on, it morphed into a general "save the 1990s-2000s modding culture from oblivion". So there's stuff in here that doesn't quite fit the ethos; or was made after the Wargamer Scenario Depot imploded.
Obviously, I'm not going to try and save every DOOM *.WAD ever made; someone else can do that; plus I don't have the time, lol.
The starting point for my recovery attempts was this site rip by "leonardr":
leonardr's Wargamer Rip (2016-05-14)
=====Recovered Data/Scenario/Mods Placed on the Internet Archive So Far=====This is my attempt (as of 2016-05-14) to archive the 4833 computer wargame scenarios hosted at the Wargamer's Games Depot and at high risk of being lost. I was able to archive all of the metadata but only 1449 of the scenario files--the rest seem to be already missing.
The 1449 scenarios in this pack cover 71 different computer wargames. These are the most common:
Steel Panthers: World at War (528 scenarios)
Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank (127 scenarios)
The Operational Art of War: Century of Warfare (109 scenarios)
Age of Rifles (84 scenarios)
The file scenarios.json contains extracted metadata for each scenario, along with the scenario's (possibly broken) download URL and the path to its (possibly empty) file on disk.
BIG NOTE: Even if the file says 100% lost, click on it anyway. I might have found other mods/scenarios for it to offset the loss of the Wargamer.com files.
Battlefront's Combat Mission x1 Series (Beyond Overlord, Barbarossa to Berlin, Afrika Korps)
Denhost's CMBO Scenario Pack (1,600+ scenarios)
This one was lost for years until someone dug through some old USB drives and found it for me.
CMBO Scenarios
CMBB Scenarios
CMAK Scenarios
CMMODS v4.03 Archive
This was recovered off a DVD I had kept.
CMBO Mods
CMBB Mods
CMAK Mods
The Last Defense Site Rip - An early CMBO site still up in 2021(!!)
Proving Ground, Scenario Depot II Site Rip
The Blitz' CM Scenarios Site Rip
The Harpoon Series
Harpoon Series (Harpoon I/II, Classic '97, 3, ANW, etc)
HPS Tigers Series
HPS' Tigers on the Prowl Series
This includes not only scenarios but the actual games themselves per an agreement by HPS' Scott Hamilton: (https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4530262)
The Operational Art of War (TOAW) Series by Talonsoft/Matrix
TOAW I: 1939-1955
TOAW: Wargame of the Year Edition
TOAW II: Modern Battles 1956-2000
TOAW: A Century of Warfare
TOAW III
TOAW IV
TOAW Archive
Steel Panthers Series by SSI/Matrix/SPCAMO
Steel Panthers I by SSI
Steel Panthers II by SSI
Steel Panthers III: Brigade Command
Steel Panthers III: Brigade Command - Campaign Disk - Formerly found only in SP:Arsenal Collection.
Steel Panthers WWII by SPCAMO
Russian Steel Panthers Site Rips -- Steel Panthers Russia and Russia: Tanks in Battle
Sonalysts Games
688(I) Hunter/Killer
Fleet Command (100% Lost)
Sub Command
Dangerous Waters
Close Combat Series
Close Combat I
Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far
Close Combat III: The Russian Front (Pt 1)
Close Combat III: The Russian Front (Pt 2)
Campaign Series by Talonsoft/Matrix
East Front I
Strategic Studies Group (SSG)
SSG Run 5 Magazine Archive
Strategic Simulations Inc Games (SSI)
Clash of Steel (100% Lost)
Battles of Napoleon
Wargame Construction Set II: TANKS!
Wargame Construction Set III: Age of Rifles
War Wind Series
Great Naval Battles Series
Imperialism Series
Fighting Steel
Soldiers at War
Panzer Commander
Silent Hunter I
Flanker 2.0
Destroyer Command
Five Star Series by SSI
Panzer General
Allied General
Panzer General II
Panzer General III: 3D Assault
Fantasy General
Pacific General
Published by Matrix Games
Forge of Freedom by WCS
Crown of Glory Series by WCS
Decisive Campaigns Series by VR Designs
Eric Young's Squad Assault: West Front
Uncommon Valor
Massive Assault
War Plan Orange
John Tiller's Battleground: Napoleonic Wars
Gary Grigsby's World at War
Gary Grigsby's World at War: A World Divided
Titans of Steel: Warring Suns
Airborne Assault: Conquest of the Aegean
Command Ops: Battles from the Bulge
Flashpoint Germany
Warplan
Games by Paradox (Newer games like Stellaris have Steam Workshop, but there's a lot of older Pdox stuff like HOI1/2 and Victoria that are aged out)
Hearts of Iron I by Paradox
Non Combat Mission Games by Battlefront/Published by Them
Flight Commander II
Strategic Command I
Games by LucasArts
Their Finest Hour by Lucasarts
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe
X-Wing by LucasArts
TIE Fighter by LucasArts
Games by Sierra/Dynamix
Red Baron
Red Baron II/3D
A-10 Tank Killer
Aces of the Pacific
Aces over Europe
SWAT 2 (100% Lost)
SWAT 3
Total War Series
Total War: Shogun (100% lost)
Medieval Total War
Medieval II: Total War
Rome: Total War
Games by Origin Systems
Wing Commander Academy
Strike Commander
Wing Commander: Armada
John Tiller Games (first HPS, then JTS, and now WDS)
John Tiller Games Archive
This is a compendium of a large amount of stuff I've collected over the years with some digging.
Volcano Mods SiteRip
This was a big mod site for HPS/John Tiller Games.
These Links Have been Depreciated
HPS Civil War Campaigns
HPS' Stalingrad '42
Squad Battles: Eagles Strike
Squad Battles: Tour of Duty
Squad Battles: The Proud and the Few
Squad Battles: Vietnam
HPS Middle East '67
Miscellaneous Flight Sims, etc
Stealth Fighter Series (F-19/F-117) by Microprose
EA's Fighter's Anthology Series (USNF/USNF'97/ATF/Fighters Anthology)
Gunship Series (Gunship/Gunship 2000) by Microprose
Falcon 3.0 Series (Falcon, Hornet and MiG-29)
Lock-On: Modern Air Combat
IL-2 Sturmovik (100% Lost)
Misc Naval Combat
Wooden Ships & Iron Men
Age of Sail (100% Lost)
Fifth Fleet
New World Computing
Empire Deluxe
Empire II
Heroes of Might & Magic Series
Miscellaneous Games, etc
The Perfect General
Space Empires Series
Great Battles Series
ISI's Medieval 2
Take Command: 2nd Manassas
Starcraft (100% Lost)
Horse & Musket
Combat Command II
Company of Heroes 1
Russo-German War '41-'45
HistWar: Les Grognard
Man of War II by Strategy First
Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business
Interactive Magic's Semper Fi (100% Lost)
Warhammer 40K: Final Liberation (100% Lost)
Conquest: Frontier Wars (100% Lost)
Battalia
Axis & Allies by Hasbro
Age of Empires Series
====Miscellaneous Wargame Archive SiteRips====
Steve Strayer's Armory Site Rip
Zerstorer's Site Rip
PEGWW2 Site Rip
People's General.de Site Rip
The Blitz Site Rip (May 2021)
Wargamer SiteRip via Internet Archive (28 APR 2021)
