While 1UP.com is technically still online, very little of the content is. That’s not by design or intention; the site always ran on a jury-rigged backend, and unfortunately no one remaining at IGN understands its arcane and proprietary workings. So when they migrated the site away from its unreliable old servers, none of the content survived. It’s probably still in a database somewhere, but the ability of the site to translate that database into readable content no longer exists.
So: I’ve begun archiving some of my better work here. If IGN ever gets 1UP running again, I’ll be happy to take this all offline. But otherwise, none of this material will be available online, or at all, and some of it’s worth preserving. I realized this over the weekend as I went to do some research on Akitoshi Kawazu for the Final Fantasy Legend entry at Game Boy World and discovered that very nearly the entire Wikipedia entry was based on an interview I conducted with Kawazu a few years back. So, here’s some of the stuff I’ve done over the years. Please let me know if there are any others I should dig up from the archives! I actually have done so many interviews over the years I’ve forgotten a bunch of them, but I know they’ll sometimes stick in your collective memory.
- Akitoshi Kawazu (SaGa series)
- Hidenori Maezawa (Konami composer)
- Hideo Yoshizawa (Klonoa producer)
- Koichi Nakamura (Chunsoft boss)
- Hiroyuki Ito (Final Fantasy V designer)
- Go Shiina (Namco sound team)
- Michiru Yamane (Konami composer)
- Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy composer)
All of this stuff is ©Ziff Davis, by the way. I’m not making any claim to it, or scratch off it. This is strictly to preserve some information until 1UP starts working again.
Fantastic. I particularly love the Hiroyuki Ito piece. It’s great to see it preserved.
Thanks, Jeremy.
I was just in a conversation about Chrono Trigger over at AV Club, and when someone brought up the broad cast of characters in Cross I went looking for The Rise of Squaresoft Localization, only to find it’s not available on the site anymore. Luckily, the text is on archive.org (though the images aren’t).
You and your team put together some pretty special stuff during the last couple of years there, and it would be a shame to lose it all. Thanks for doing your part to preserve what you can.
Hmm… the two I didn’t save appear to be the same two the Wayback Machine doesn’t have, either. Can’t believe that to be a coincidence; I just don’t understand why those two are so problematic.
(The Many Versions, Ports, and Re-Releases of Super Mario Bros. and The Many Versions, Ports, and Re-Releases of Mega Man, in case anyone is curious.)
I’m not sure if this counts but I wanted to read the Essential 50 (I can’t remember the exact title), but it wasn’t available.