These four early Kirby games will now have their ROMs preserved, thanks to the efforts of a group of preservationists. (credit: Frank Cifaldi / Twitter ) A group of dedicated game preservationists has obtained a set of obscure Japanese Kirby games from the Super Famicom era in order to archive them for future generations. But the uncertain fate of such early games presages a much bigger problem facing digital game preservation going forward. Even die-hard Kirby fans would be forgiven for not knowing much about Kirby’s Toy Box , a collection of six mini games that was only available through Japan’s Satellaview , an early satellite-based distribution service for the Super Famicom (the Super NES in the West). That system only let you download one game at a time to a special 8-megabit cartridge, though, and you could only download when that specific game was being broadcast across the narrow satellite feed. Thus, existing copies of most Satellaview games are available only if they happen to be the last game downloaded to individual cartridges (Satellaview broadcasts ended in the late ’90s). While some of these games have been publicly dumped and preserved as ROM files, many exist only in the hands of Japanese collectors. Sometimes, those individuals are reluctant to release the digital code widely. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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These SNES-era Kirby games were considered lost until this week
