DCJY welcomes Nick Thorpe

In episode 126 of our podcast, the DreamPod, Kev and I welcome Nick Thorpe - the features editor for the excellent Retro Gamer magazine - to chat all about his career and the brand new issue 254, a Dreamcast special of the mag that releases today on the 21st of December. 

We also dig deep into Nick's long-time passion for the Dreamcast, touch on his meetings with the likes of Yu Suzuki, Yuji Naka and Kenji Kanno, and also take a trip down memory lane as Nick recalls his earlier days of writing for his own Dreamcast fan site!

It was an absolute pleasure to talk to Nick, and his burning passion for the Dreamcast is clear. I for one am very excited to get my hands on the latest issue of Retro Gamer!

Retro Gamer magazine issue 254 is available to purchase from a wide selection of brick-and-mortar stores that sell magazines in the UK and other countries, but is also available to purchase online as a single issue from Magazines Direct.

You can listen to this episode of the DreamPod and all of our previous episodes on Buzzsprout, along with all great podcatchers.

Dreamcast Graveyard: Websites We Miss from the Post-Sega Era

While logging into Phantasy Star Online the other night, with my GD-ROM screeching away under the immense pressure of having to load a lobby with three other players, it struck me that my character is now 18 years old. That’s a bloody long lifespan in gaming terms, and in fact, means that this morsel of code stored on my VMU is now quite a bit older than I was when I first brought it into existence. 

Flicking through the guild cards (effectively virtual business cards) my character has amassed, and especially the early ones, I was presented with a snapshot of the Dreamcast scene of yesteryear. In the notes of these cards, aside from the frequent appeals for cannabis legalisation made by idealistic teenage stoners, the URLs of a multitude of Dreamcast fan websites cropped up - the majority of which are sadly now ceased or in a moth-eaten state.

The Grubensau of 18 years ago would be pleased to hear how his dream has now turned into a reality in some parts of the world.

So, instead of tackling one of the many unfinished D.I.Y. jobs that are strewn though my house, I’m scribbling this post and inviting you to celebrate the good times that these fallen virtual-comrades-in-arms gave us. A blog post that contains a list based on nostalgia might be a worn out trope, but that's what I'm serving up, so strap in. In no particular order...

Dreamcast-Scene.com (2002-2018)

The final Dreamcast-Scene website header image.

The project of Max Scharl and a close knit team of associates, Dreamcast-Scene was a bit of a powerhouse back in the day. As their initial moniker of ‘Dreamcast-Petition’ would suggest, their roots lie in directing campaigns for GD-ROM production to continue, and for Dreamcast ports of late-stage Naomi arcade games to be made. How influential these campaigns were is hard to gauge, but the demonstration of consumer demand certainly can’t have hurt, and the subsequent flow of shmup releases on the Dreamcast between 2003 and 2007 no doubt exceeded expectations. 

The DCS crew sticking up for the Dreamcast alongside now defunct import store, Lik-Sang.com, at a gaming conference in 2003. Image courtesy of jeuxvideo.com.

Rapidly expanding beyond their founding purpose, the website morphed into a place for Dreamcast news to be reported at a time when mainstream outlets had halted their coverage, and to act as a kind of life-raft for those who didn’t wish to give up on the console after Sega pulled the plug. With in-person events, contests, press releases, t-shirts, and the rest, Dreamcast-Scene was a flame that burned brightly; the website is still online, but has not been updated for five years. Founder Max Scharl would go on to establish indie publisher RedSpotGames that delivered several top quality indie games, including Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles and Sturmwind, which, alas, has also since bit the dust.

The original Rez website has been fully restored

We love a story with a happy ending here at the Junkyard, and this one fits right in with that philosophy. Remember Rez? Of course you do. It's that psychedelic shooter with the wireframes and the flashing lights and the thumping soundtrack. You know the one. It's quite good too, apparently. Anyway, in the name of digital preservation and the fight to stop the internet simply becoming a portal to Facebook and YouTube, one man has taken it upon himself to resurrect the original Rez website. Well, the 2001 iteration, anyway.

That man is Brian Hargrove, and as described in his semi-viral tweet on the matter, he somehow managed to acquire the United Game Artists domain and restore the site to its former glory, with all of the content intact:

After many years, United Game Artists domain was finally released by it's skincare products owner. I was able to pick it up and I restored the original Rez website back to it's 2001 glory. 😅

Enjoy.https://t.co/NdzUCaVxJn pic.twitter.com/FF615nURDh

— Brian Hargrove (@turfmasta) February 8, 2021

Naturally, wanting to know more we reached out to Brian to ask what the story was here - skin care products? What's all that about then? Brian explained in his own words:

"I don't think the domain was held captive or anything, just never really used since 2003. After UGA was transferred to Sonic Team in late 2003, the site went down. I have no way of telling if registry ownership changed over the years, but there was an attempt at one point to make a WordPress blog, then it turned into some kind of skin care information site. 

"I knew I had always wanted to pick up the domain and at least restore the Rez homepage. I would check every few years, taking note of the domain expiration date on a Whois lookup. Every time it expired, I was never able to purchase it. Until 2020.

"Early in 2020 I checked the Whois and did see that it was expected to expire in November. So I made a note in my calendar to check back. November rolls around and this time I try Godaddy's expired domain auctions, and it was actually there! The owner finally let it expire and I knew it would probably be my only chance save it. I won the auction and collected all the site backups from Archive.org

"With a Linux utility, I was able to bulk download multiple years of the backup directly from Archive. The majority of the files were recoverable, with only a few images missing. I was able to restore it to what it was right before the site went down."

- Brian Hargrove

It's a pretty cool story, and definitely qualifies as what we like to call a labour of love. So what can you do with the Rez website? Well, you can read upcoming 2001 news, look at screenshots, download assets and do pretty much anything you could with a website from 2001. 

It's worth noting that the site predominantly features the later PlayStation 2 release of Rez along with the Trance Vibrator (and it's curious that the Dreamcast release of Rez is seemingly absent), but seeing as Tetsuya Mizuguchi's masterpiece is a game that's more synonymous with the Dreamcast, we thought it was worth sharing Brain's work here.

If you would like to see first hand how the superb Rez holds up on more modern systems, be sure to check out the official Rez Infinite site too.