Noclip saved a decade of lost video game history
It’s a great time for video game history buffs. Just last week, we saw unreleased footage of the GameCube’s first reveal. Today, we learned that Noclip, a Youtube channel famous for video game development documentaries, has just salvaged an entire decade of lost video game history.
The findings consist of dozens of boxes filled with video tapes. Why tapes? Because the internet was very slow back in the day. Even in the early ’00s, most video game reporting took place on TV, and only a select number of big tech and gaming websites ever got to do such coverage. Thus, most of the good stuff like trailers, gameplay captures, and interviews showed up on TV once and then disappeared forever. The few things that made their way onto the Internet featured absolutely abhorrent image and sound quality.
Noclip claims that this massive amount of footage was days away from getting dumped into a landfill, meaning it nearly shared the same fate as the infamous E.T. The Extraterrestrial Atari cartridges.
Noclip acquired so many tapes that they can’t even pinpoint how much quality footage they now own. It’s one of those rare “good” problems! The team is now going through all the tapes to find anything they deem to be of historical value, and will subsequently upload all of their findings in high resolution on a new video gaming history-dedicated Youtube channel (as well as Archive.org and some other methods). As for the already existing Noclip channel, the team is naturally planning on using the footage to create new documentaries.
Sadly, tapes degrade over time. A few of these have already sustained so much damage that either show nothing or seemingly preview an unknown video game adaptation of The Ring. There’s a ticking clock hanging
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