Unseen64 Survived for Another Year: Thank You for Your Help! What to Do in 2017?

Unseen64 Survived for Another Year: Thank You for Your Help! What to Do in 2017?

The last couple of years were really hard for Unseen64: we had to keep updating our site to add more unseen games, while at the same time working on our book dedicated to games we will never play, that was finally published in September 2016. As most of you known, we work on Unseen64 in our own free time, after a long day of our day-jobs, taking away this extra time from our sleep, friends and family just to read Unseen64 related emails, reply to messages on social networks, resolve technical issues on the site, search info on lost games, save media, contact developers and write articles.

It could be difficult to understand when you only see a few articles or videos published every month, but to keep the site alive as it is, it takes dozens and dozens of hours of work every week. To also working on a book along with the site, it meant to take even more hours away from our daily lives, and the last few months before the book was published were really crazy.

video games you will never play book

Unseen64 is not our main job and sometimes all the effort and time needed to keep it alive is really overwhelming, but we always do the best we can. One of the reasons why we keep doing this, is the support of our awesome readers: your kind words and your donations on Patreon mean a lot for us, and you prompt us to keep up doing this, even during the hardest times.

Thanks to your support we were able to remain an independent website, to rise enough donations from Patreon to fully pay the Unseen64 server, to do multiple backups of files so we don’t lose screens, info or video, and to create a Preservation Fund to be able to save enough money for future needs.

Having more than 3.000 unseen games in our online archive and by covering games till the 7th generation of consoles (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360), it means that the most interesting titles are already covered, there are already good articles in here or in other websites to remember them. While there are still some previously unknown, interesting lost games we will cover in the following months on Unseen64, most of future site updates will probably be about obscure cancelled games that not many will care about.

When everyone already know about such unseen games as Zelda URA, Resident Evil 1.5, Fallout: Van Buren, Bio Force Ape, Tengai Makyou III, Akira 16bit, Mario Takes America, Sonic Mars, Sonic X-Treme, Lufia 3, Conker 64, Agharta, B.C., Game Zero, Maximo 3, Elder Scrolls Travels, Kid Icarus Wii, Final Fantasy Fortress or Kameo 2, there’s not much left to discover: only less popular / important lost games (that still deserve to be remembered) or previously unknown and intriguing projects that can only be covered by luck or months of time-consuming researches.

You can easily see how it became harder and harder to surprise and satisfy readers with interesting lost games they would have loved to play. You can also easily see how unsatisfied readers could drop their support on Patreon, leaving us with less funds to cover Unseen64 needs.

How to keep up our mission to remember unseen games till the 7th generation of consoles, while still engaging readers and secure steady support on Patreon for Unseen64?

We discussed about this with our patrons during the last year, and thanks to their feedback we organized a possible plan for 2017:

  1. Continue covering lost games on Unseen64, even the less impressive ones: every single cancelled game deserve to not be forgotten, because each one could have been a favorite game for someone. Some of these less-impressive unseen games still have an historical importance, an interesting connection with developers that later created a different masterpiece and even if some of these canned projects could have became bad games if only released, we still care to remember them for curiosity and historical preservation.
  2. Expanding old articles for some of the more interesting unseen games that are not already covered somewhere else: even when an unseen game is widely known, there could still be many details that are missing about its development, plot, gameplay mechanics and other random memories about its conception. We’d like to dedicate some time to deeply research more info about some of our favorite games we’ll never play, those lost games that also have a wide appeal and could be interesting for all kind of readers.
  3. More video articles: as we wrote many times before, we know that today most people don’t read gaming reviews on websites anymore and just rely on video reviews from Youtube. For “historical” websites like Unseen64 is just the same: there are many more people that would watch a 10 minutes video about a cancelled game, rather than to fully read a 1.000 words article on the same topic, as proven by the Unseen64 video series created by Tamaki and hosted on Did You Know Gaming. Just like in the past gaming magazines have been replaced by gaming websites, now youtubers are taking the mass-market lead for videogames reviews, news and historical researches. While it would require more time to create more video articles (especially as the main Unseen64 is italian and Tamaki is already full of work with his videos), this kind of coverage would reach many more users than 3 or 4 written articles and it would help to keep patrons to donate for Unseen64. As we have seen, people are more incline to donate for video content than for website articles.
  4. A new Unseen64 English Podcast: if everything will go as planned, in a few weeks we’ll upload a new episode of our Podcast dedicated to our patrons, thanks to some friends and collaborators that are currently organizing and recording the episode. If this new podcast will be appreciated by patrons, we’ll keep doing them in the following months as a “thank you!” for their donations.

All of these activities will require a lot of time, efforts and collaboration between people who help the Unseen64 collective, but we really want to keep Unseen64 alive for as much as possible. We will also update our Patreon’s goals to align them with our 2017 plan and to secure funds to cover the time needed to implement it.

As always big gaming networks such as IGN or Kotaku have the resources to own powerful servers and to pay a team to work full-time on their websites, keeping them online and publishing daily updates. We don’t have their resources, but we think we have something better: we have you, a community of gamers that know why it’s important to remember beta and cancelled games.

There are many ways to help Unseen64 and thanks to all the other websites, gamers and youtubers that also use their time to remember beta, unreleased and unused gaming documents, together we can save as many unseen games as possible.

unseen64-patreon-2016

Remember: Unseen64 is still online thanks to all the awesome people who made one-off donations and pledges on Patreon: together, we can do it!

We’d like to thank all of you (in random order) who are helping U64 with your donations and support:

Daan Koopman, Sentinator of Team Haruhi, joef0x, Liam Robertson, Mark J. Lang, Thomas Whitehead, David Galindo, Tiago Pereira dos Santos silva  From Porto, Portugal, Mason “SoberDwarf” M., Ryan Jessee, Peter Lomax, Frans Aymes, Emiliano Rosales, Paul Benson, Faisal AlKubaisi, Julian Lord, Shane Gill, Conrad A Fursa, Lukas Steinman, Vitor Takayanagi de Oliveira, Red , Nick Fancher, allan paxton, Pete Imbesi, Robert Dyson, tydaze , Justin Moor, Kristian Binder, Chris Chapman, Anders Moberg, Gabe Canada, Tim Lawrence, Tommy Wimmer, Michael Benkovich, Amy , Oliver Rennie, Hugo Guerra, Thomas.nunn, That Black Guy, Mauro Labate, Olivier Cahagne, Corentin, Andrew Eleneski, Alex MacIntyre, Henry Branch, Matthew , Anders “Captain N” Iversen, Coldi , Dan Berends, Joe Brookes, Austin Murphy, James Jackson, netsabes , Aaron Sharratt, James Champane, Jonathan Pena, Jacob Walker, Jonathan Cooper, Paul Stedman, Viraj , Jrg McJrg, Brice Onken, Alex Stutzman, Guilherme Killingsworth, Pablo Bueno Navarro, Paul , Levi Wyatt, Josh Mann, Brice Dirden, Dan Thomas, Adrian , Ben Cowling, Alex Wawro, Niels Thomassen, Lou , Matthew Gyure, PtoPOnline , Jesus Tovar, Jacob , Brandon , Lisa , Akspa , Martin , Irvin , James Steel, Tony, DJ Gillard, Christopher Cornwell, Goffredo, and everyone else! (did we forget someone?)

We <3 you


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6 thoughts on “Unseen64 Survived for Another Year: Thank You for Your Help! What to Do in 2017?

      1. Maik

        Uh? Tell me, I am on ur side for any help and glad to contribute usefull stuff for this amazing site I use so often! :)

  1. ALANNA EVANS

    I just want to take a moment and say that many of us love this website because of its lack of videos. I read this when I need something to pass the time, something videos are often not appropriate to watch. So thank you for all the text, it’s what keeps people like me around. Loved the book too, by the way. Just wish it had been in color!

    1. monokoma

      Thanks a lot for your words Alanna! I’m really happy to know that there are still people that read websites, it means a lot for us :) As i’m Italian it takes much more to write a decent article in english for me, so it’s good that all the time i put into this is still useful :)
      There is a color version of the book, but unfortunately as it is almost 500 pages it costs a lot more and we earn little from it, the black / white version is luckily cheaper and we can earn a bit more.. thanks for the support!

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