In my spare time. I tend to comb the web archive of a fallen website (Freewarefiles.com), ran by the late (Ronald Winborne). Who fell ill and passed away in November of 2021. After his passing. The website took many forms. Last time I checked. It was turned into a gambling site. For shame! The man did a colossal work maintaining tens of thousands of Freewares. Many of those were games. Enjoyable games. That my potato laptop can run (although it’s keyboard is so fine, I put my mechanical keyboard in the storage room). Back when gaming was affordable and fun. I like to think of this adventure as a time capsule to see what the world-wide web was like back 15 years ago (I’m digging between 2011 – 2012). To see games that were big back in the day but faded into obscurity. Games that are lost to time, and games that you have to pirate to be able to play.

Piracy as a savior of old games?

Yes. Freeware that would require a crack to be able to run on your computer. Because the servers are down. There is no recovering from that. Keep in mind that the game in question is a single player game. Then why does it need sever access to be able to play? It goes beyond me.

Niche interests

To be frank. I enjoy this game hunt a lot more than I enjoy actual gaming. I might be a game hoarder of sorts. I collect games, archive them, test them and rarely even touch them after that! A true connoisseur of the finer things in life. Would this give me material to blog about and review? Sure, it would. I feel it would honor the memory of (Ron) and help preserve an age of gaming that is dying slowly. There is one game tho that I played once and can’t seem to remember. I looked for it everywhere and even posted to r/tipofmyjoystick to no avail. Don’t get me started with AI. ChatGPT is not helpful in scenarios like these. Often finding wrong answers and steering me into different directions.

Final words

I fully accept that some games will be lost forever and that I cannot “catch em all”! However. It’s an interesting wild goose chase.