The internet is a great tool when it comes to preserving and documenting all parts of human culture and history, but there's still a lot that isn't available online.
In the realm of video games, that's certainly very true; plenty of footage, artwork and code remains offline purely because it wasn't created at a time when it wasn't as easy to upload gigabytes of data to the internet.
Thankfully, the excellent Noclip YouTube channel – run by the equally excellent Danny O'Dwyer – is taking steps to remedy this problem, at least in relation to video games. As O'Dwyer notes on this Twitter account, Noclip recently saved a large collection of "lost gaming history" – boxes and boxes of video tapes, many of which contain footage which has never been seen previously, and certainly isn't preserved anywhere online.
"We spent a year expanding this collection and buying capture equipment," continues O'Dwyer. "I am now logging and digitizing anything with historical value on both The Internet Archive and YouTube." It's a noble venture, for sure, made all the more appealing when you consider O'Dwyer isn't adding any horrible watermarks to the footage.
"This project is going to take us years," says O'Dwyer. "But [holy] shit are we gonna find some cool stuff."
He's not wrong. Here's some of the amazing stuff that has been uploaded so far: