November 1, 2025
Raiders of the Lost ROM
Frank Gasking on preserving «lost» games
Gamers hail a digital Indiana Jones while others rage at vanishing online worlds
TLDR: Frank Gasking’s archive saves unreleased games and early builds, earning big love from preservation fans. The comments explode over online worlds that vanish when servers shut down, a fight about what “lost” even means, and a juicy rumor hunt for a missing handheld game — history meets hype.
Frank Gasking’s decades-long hunt for “games that weren’t” has the retro crowd swooning — he’s the archivist behind Games That Weren’t, a passion project saving unreleased and unfinished titles from slipping into the void. The vibe? Huge respect for preserving game history, with gxd calling it “cultural work,” while fans cheer the museum-like mission of rescuing old work disks, early builds, and forgotten art. Think attic cleanout meets treasure map. But the top drama comes from modern pain: kator’s fiery take that the bigger crisis is online games dying when companies flip off the servers. Imagine buying a thing, then poof — your world disappears. Their team is literally resurrecting a 2011 MMO (massively multiplayer online game) from network recordings because “everything official got nuked.” The comments dubbed them “server necromancers,” half hero, half outlaw. Then came a spicy semantics brawl: quuxplusone argues GTW is about “unfinished/unreleased” more than truly “lost,” sparking a mini war over labels. Meanwhile, 1313ed01 drops a chilling film-stat bomb, warning we could repeat cinema’s fate where 75% of silent films vanished. And TechSquidTV adds reality-TV energy, chasing a rumored GBA “Static Shock” ROM — the community chanting “release the cart!” while memeing Gasking as Raiders of the Lost ROM.
Key Points
- •Frank Gasking founded Games That Weren’t (GTW) after a 1993 Commodore Force article on unreleased C64 games inspired his search.
- •GTW launched as a website in 1999 and has operated for over 25 years, expanding from C64 to multiple platforms.
- •GTW is a non-profit archive preserving unreleased, unfinished, and lost games, including assets like work disks and early builds.
- •The project collaborates with developers, collectors, and enthusiasts, and provides a database-driven website for access.
- •GTW has produced a book, contributed to magazines, participated in exhibitions, and includes community contributions such as discoveries by spillhistorie.no.