Forest of Illusion, a video game preservation site that has been running for six years, has just announced that it’s shutting down. It shared the news earlier today on Twitter to its over 49,000 followers with an attached statement hosted on the Internet Archive.“We’ve come to the decision that we can no longer keep the site running,” the announcement reads. “This is for a few reasons, but is primarily due to not being able to provide the necessary time and energy needed to maintain our cherished platform. We express our sincerest gratitude to our supporters and followers. Thank you for being part of this extraordinary adventure, and thank you to all past and present patrons who helped us get to where we are.“RELATED:GOG Is Preserving PC Gaming’s History, But Consoles Need To Catch UpEverything has been transferred toarchive.org, so you’re able to still find things like the Super Mario Collection Screen Saver and the New Super Luigi U prototype. And while Forest of Illusion specialised in preservingNintendo’shistory, even taking its name from Super Mario World, it extended that mission goal to all games, so you can find things like the Zoo Tycoon beta, the Dungeon Siege beta, and aSpider-Man 4prototype on the archive.
Fans were understandably upset to see a site dedicated to preservation shut down, especially in the wake of industry-wide failures to preserve gaming history with thePS3, Wii U, and3DS storefront closures, but Forest of Illusion clarified in a follow-up tweet what the exact reasons behind this decision were.
“Unfortunately the donations just aren’t able to keep up with insane server costs and I’m unable to keep paying out of pocket and working on everything 20+ hours a week,” it said in reply to a commenter asking for further clarification. “The site was only run by a total of three people so it just wasn’t really enough to keep it afloat longterm.”
In the meantime, Forest of Illusion has suggested other accounts to support and follow if you’re interested in keeping gaming’s history intact. These include The Hidden Place, “a community dedicated to the preservation of retro video game development”, Hard4Games, who make “videos on development prototypes [and] rare systems”, and The Cutting Room Floor, “A wiki home for digital archaeology, discovering and examining unused, cut, and debugging content in video games”.
