Video game preservation has become a hot topic of late thanks to the efforts of the Video Game History Foundation, which highlighted the fact that almost 90% of all 'classic' video games are no longer readily available to the consumer.
Some of these oversights will be down to licensing or the fact that companies simply aren't making their older titles available digitally, but, in some cases, games are off the table because they've been effectively deleted from history or simply cannot be played for technical reasons.
Titles that require online access are a prime example of this; in the 2000s, there was an explosion of MMOs, many of which didn't last more than a few years. SEGA SPLASH! GOLF from 2008 is one such example. It lasted less than ten months before Sega pulled the plug, removing access to it forever – until now, that is.
A talented individual by the name of Ninji has managed to resurrect this lost game with a fair amount of tinkering. Like a great many other online games, SEGA SPLASH! GOLF came with several layers of security to prevent hackers and cheaters – these naturally had to be overcome by Ninji in order to play the game in 2023. There was also the small matter of getting it to work on a non-Japanese computer, as it was never released worldwide.
However, as insurmountable as these issues might appear to the layperson, Ninji has successfully managed to get the game's practice mode working, recover its in-game shop (it had microtransactions, of course), and get the character customisation mode up and running.
You can learn more about the whole process here and here, but the big takeaway is that thanks to the efforts of the fan community, another piece of gaming history has been preserved.