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Frank Cifaldi (Unlicensed).nes
@frankcifaldi
Founder, co-director and noisemaker and co-host of . Former ink-stained wretch. He/him.
Oakland, CAGameHistory.orgJoined March 2009

Frank Cifaldi (Unlicensed).nes’s posts

ROM sites shutting down only feels as big as it does because of the completely abysmal job the video game industry has done keeping its games available. There is no alternative BUT piracy for like 99% of video game history.
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This is even funnier with context: The game's hardest difficulty level is "Impossible," and if you choose it Lou Reed stops you on the street, murders you, and explains that impossible doesn't mean "very hard," impossible is eating the sun. The game becomes literally impossible.
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Lou Reed murders Penn & Teller in their unreleased Sega Genesis videogame from 1995
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🚨Attention video game preservation fans with money to spare🚨 There are currently TWO unreleased, one-of-a-kind, never-digitized games for the original NES on eBay right now. This has literally never happened before. Our resources are stretched thin, and we could use help.
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It's significantly cooler than "dumped," we manually reassembled the game from its source code, spread across 40ish dying floppy disks left forgotten in its programmer's basement for 30 years. Nobody has ever seen this game before, as it was never announced.
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An NES Prototype NOBODY knew about has been found, the rom has been safely dumped and, this Sunday, you'll know the story and how you can play it for yourself.
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Outer Worlds is an actual Fallout follow-up, replacing the original's dark humor about the Cold War killing us all with modern dark humor about capitalism killing us all. The actual Fallout sequels lost context years ago and are just RPGs with cartoon boy and old timey music.
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Call me a killjoy if you want but it's kinda hard to be excited about yet another garden-walled video game platform promoting AAA games built from exploitative labor practices after I just got 1,000 games in exchange for donating to social justice charities
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On my way home from Milwaukee yesterday I did a triple take when I saw an ancient used book store, IN THE AIRPORT!!! I felt like I walked through a portal to a world where everything was a little bit cooler. 🧵
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Video game industry: "Our artistic medium has elevated itself to meet, and possibly exceed, film and novels." Also video game industry: "Art doesn't actually SAY ANYTHING, it's just fun."
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Battlefield 2042 includes a climate apocalypse and refugee populations, but DICE claims they're purely for "gameplay reasons" and aren't social commentary. bit.ly/3x6vPLu
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First they made a Vanilla Ice game, then they took his name out of it, then it was canceled, then someone stole it from Nintendo in a cyber crime, then I put it on a Ukranian development cartridge and played it on a high end $250 Game Boy clone
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Most of us in the community knew it was this bad, but it wasn't until we conducted the world's first study on game availability that we could put a number on it. 87 percent. You can no longer buy 87 percent of video games sold in the U.S. prior to 2010.
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The PlayStation Classic uses an open source emulator, PCSX. Lesser educated people might see this as a cause of frustration, but here's the reality: it's an acknowledgement that an "amateur" emulator can be just as valid as an "official" one (and they're usually better!).
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"Video games are definitely art, here's a giant exhibit we're touring for four years" -The Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012 "This cowboy game sold a lot, perhaps...video games are not just for kids anymore" -The New York Times, 2018
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Emulator authors should have statues erected in public spaces. They're the heroes who put in the exhaustive free labor documenting how these old games worked. As rare as re-releases are now, we wouldn't have seen half of them without people having already done this work for free.
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If you've never been to MAGFest here is the thing you need to know: Every five minutes or so someone does the Colossus scream from the X-Men arcade game, and it causes a chain reaction that gets super loud. They had to put up signs.
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I really, really hate how gamer kids automatically assume developers are "lazy" or "stupid" if a critical bug ships. Just so darned lazy, crunching for months to meet a schedule, just incapable of doing the job they do full-time and are professionals at. Sacks of shit, all of us.
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No they didn't, Empty Clip did. It's a game dev studio that specializes in retro-style demakes, they did them for Final Fantasy XV and Dead Island too, which I think people who are interested in this might like to know? Let's all try to do a better job of crediting creators...
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Sega made a mashup of Yakuza and Streets of Rage 2 bit.ly/3k03YX9
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I'm Douglas Bowser, President of Nintendo of America. Welcome gamers from around the world to the Nintendo Direct for E3 2021. I hope you have all stayed safe during this challenging past year. Yesterday, there was a heated debate online about Batman that we felt we needed to
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Something a lot of people don't know is that every prototype game that gets submitted to WATA since late 2020 has gone through me first. As part of the process I digitize the game and write up analysis, which I'm allowed to share- starting now! (thread)
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TFW you discover there's a lost Myst porn parody game and it becomes the absolute most important thing in your life so you stay late at work desperately trying to untangle a web of Montclair, New Jersey porn companies
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The THQ Nordic promotional link to 8chan is still up, there is official PR linking you DIRECTLY to drawings of sexualized children. Surely every video game platform is ending any business association and pulling all their games, right? Anybody? No? Yay video games.
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Disney Animation's delivery of the run cycle for "Disney's Aladdin" on the Sega Genesis. Unfortunately a lot of the original frames are probably lost, but Mike Dietz was smart enough to take a giant pile of photocopies home from work, so we have some!
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We've been representing the Game Boy incorrectly IMO. Our traditional grayscale palette has pure white on one end and pure black on the other, but a real Game Boy has a low amount of contrast. Here's the palette Nintendo used internally. Black and white is too high contrast.
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As you're watching this gorgeous animation, also note the voice casting, the character design, even the sound foley (Clayface's squishes and the security footsteps in particular). And then realize this was a WEEKDAY CARTOON with a 65-episode season. This show makes no sense.
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30 years ago today, this moment aired on television "Feat of Clay" part 2 #BTAS30th
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You don't have to watch The Game Awards You don't have to watch The Game Awards You don't have to watch The Game Awards You don't have to watch The Game Awards You don't have to watch The Game Awards You don't have to watch The Game Awards You don't have to watch The Game A
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The Game Awards won't take sides on Activision fallout to focus on reveals: bit.ly/2ZSJ1IV
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There's rare and there's "the guy who has been archiving Master System games for over 22 years discovered a new one"
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Game preservation-nerd time: we unearthed a 33 years old extremely rare Master System educational game about traffic safety, made by Sega in 1987, that previously had almost no info available. We're releasing it today along with a full JP>EN translation: smspower.org/forums/17882
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This is an amazing artifact. The final build of Sega's Propeller Arena - a game heavily rumored to have been cancelled because of 9/11 sensitivity - with writing clearly showing a build date of 9/11/2001.
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断捨離:これも捨てられない奴。恐らく国内版のfinalROM候補。日付わかるかな…年/月/日です…
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There are two paths to playing most classic games: 1. Maintain antique hardware and expensive secondhand software 2. Piracy This means we are forever gatekeeping video game history. It's only for collectors and for those with software literacy. They can't inspire new players
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I can't stress enough how incredible this is. People figured out from the Gigaleak what sound files Nintendo originally used for samples in the Super Mario World soundtrack, tracked them down, and started restoring it. Hearing them uncompressed is WILD.
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Replying to @lebrickster
You may check out the playlist here: youtube.com/playlist?list= As songs are done, they will be added to this playlist.
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Those of us already "in the know" are set for life. My ROMs are never going away. But I love video game history and I want it to be for everyone, not just the software-literate nerds. I want to see old games inspiring the weird artists of the future.
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If your response to this is "just emulate them," then I need you to consider what your priorities are. I want the next generation to have easy access to the past. Ask any parent right now if their kid knows how to install desktop executables, or knows what a "torrent" is.
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Here's something I guarantee you've never seen before. Street Fighter 1...on the NES! This screenshot was buried deep in a Capcom marketing archive, undiscovered for decades. The game was cancelled, and this is the first time that the public has ever seen what it looked like.
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You think literally any arcade game downloads (yes, even ours) exist without being able to reference the documentation work done by MAME Team? The amount of work that goes into that only happens because of passionate people, it's not commercially feasible to start from scratch.
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I think we should all take a moment to appreciate and give props to Sega for being the only old game company of note that literally pays people to not only archive its historical material but SHARE it, pretty much daily? They're ahead of the curve, others will follow suit someday
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From the archives: Early artwork for X-Perts on the SEGA Genesis, used at the CES show. While similar to the final art, this features more characters, with different designs. #SEGAForever
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Today was a HUGE day for NES game preservation. Konami's ultra rare Space School series was completely undumped yesterday. Today, we have four of the seven ROMs playable on emulators. Listen to that unmistakable, PREVIOUSLY UNHEARD Konami-created music!
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Heads up: We're trying to digitally preserve SEVENTY prototype cartridges for the Neo Geo Pocket, including at least two unreleased games, but I don't think our very generous sniper bid is going to cut it. Tweeting to see if any big NGP fans with deep pockets want to throw down.
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I am NOT. ADVOCATING. CASUAL. PIRACY. I especially am not a fan of websites generating ad revenue by offering downloads of other people's work without permission. In fact I doubt any of these shutdowns would be happening if money was not involved.
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