The impermanence of data is about to get a lot worse.
Myrient, the leading retrogaming archive for about the past 6 years, is shutting down in March 2026, which will affect people's ability to preserve videogaming history without resorting to sketchy ROM sites. The reasons given for closure surprisingly have nothing to do with cease-and-desist orders from corporate feudal monoliths, but more in how the site was accessed and also the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about: AI training.
First, traffic to the site had been on a steady increase, something which is attributable to 3 major factors.
1. The unbridled greed of Nintendo, Sony, Valve, Epic, and Microsoft, as these entities gather all retrogaming IP unto them and then hide it behind a succession of paywalls. At the urging of sites like this one, people have begun to look for free alternatives to the corporate subscription models and hit upon mostly sketchy ROM sites that probably would give you a virus if you downloaded anything from them, and of course Myrient.
2. The Internet Archive's perplexing decision to purge retrogaming content from their servers. In some futile attempt to look better for the corporate feudal state in the face of a chain of lawsuits, beginning with the Recording Industry Associates of America and, most recently, a temporary alliance of publishing companies, led by Hachette and Penguin Random House. "Perplexing" in that the corporate feudal state will never accept the Internet Archive existing next to their "pay to use" model, so any attempt by the curators to make it "compatible" with corporate interests is nothing more than a waste of time.
3. Startup software pirates tumbling down the cliffs of Mt. Stupid. My personal motto as an archivist is "Loose lips sink ships". This World War II era phrase was initially intended to describe the dangerous business of discussing pirate databases at open ports. Videogame publishers all regard archiving and piracy as one and the same, therefore discussing strictly archive-focussed sites like Myrient is dangerous on that score. However, as it turns out, it also has another meaning: it's possible to overload a ship such that it sinks. So many people going to Myrient on a regular basis, loading site elements, and downloading things caused bandwidth to balloon basically out of control. As more people told each other where they could go to get game ROMs without needing to worry about ads or malware, bandwidth got worse and worse. Costs got higher as a result, which we will return to in a moment. But first...
The second problem was in relation to commercial download managers. In order to download large swathes of games at a time, certain people began to turn to for-profit download managers. The main issue the site's maintainer had with this was, their free-access website was being used to make money for fly-by-night software developers. This allowed users to bypass the site altogether, downloading directly from the CDN, also avoiding donation messages and nullifying download protections. Maybe certain people either never knew this or need reminding of this point: we do not pirate from independent developers. It's OK to bypass Youtube through the use of frontends and access the CDN directly, because Youtube is a 1st-party property of Google, the single-wealthiest entity in the tech sector. Losing a couple thousand in advert revenue here and there won't make a difference. However, Myrient never advertised, never collected data about its users, and was on better behaviour than any given corporate website ever was. There was no reason to access the CDN without the website.
The third issue is the big one that no one ever wants to acknowledge. Why do you think the price of enterprise servers is so high? AI training. All these AI techbros need huge amounts of physical storage and as much processing power as they can get in order to not only train but also operate their own proprietary generative and analytical AI processes. As a result, the cost of these on a consumer level has gone up exponentially, which has affected Myrient badly. Don't let's kid ourselves on this: Myrient needed, essentially, its own datacentre in order to accomodate all those huge files. It wasn't one of those huge corporate places that takes up warehouses stacked 10 high, but it was bigger than your standard pro-datahoarding rigs. Having these in constant operation all the time costs a lot in terms of power use, but it also necessitates frequent maintenance in order to avert disaster. THat means new servers and more RAM, in amongst various other esoteric things. With AI training and generation causing the price of computer parts to skyrocket, Myrient couldn't afford to carry on with operation anymore. So, the next time you use ChatGPT to write an essay for you, or the next time you use some specialised fetish porn generator to animate a still image of a guy with a big schlong, think of Myrient and how you're partially responsible for driving them off the internet.
This isn't a shame post, though; this is merely the facts of the case. Eventually, another datahoard will emerge that can take over for Myrient as a retrogaming archive, and it too will suffer the same fate unless we, as its potential userbase, do a few crucial things...
1. Keep your mouth shut. Don't just tell random people how to get to the site. Keep that information restricted to piracy and datahoarding posts on forums. Only share that information on a personal level, if you share it at all.
2. Access the site through the site. Myrient's eventual replacement will not be a corporate outfit. There is no need to access the CDN through a back door. I mean, unless they start behaving capitalistic (like putting adverts in, requiring a proprietary installer, charging a subscription fee, anti-consumer shit like that).
3. STOP USING AI. This is the big one. We're all providing a demand for this useless service because thinking and creating are hard for some reason. There's no way to stop the huge corporate outfits doing their AI research and training, but it's actually pretty easy to ignore the consumer-facing prompts, like Midjourney, ChatGPT, Mistral, and that lot. Just go the extra mile and do the work yourself. You'll feel better about yourself afterward and you won't be contributing to the downfall of the independent internet.
In the meantime however, only Myrient will be affected. Fortunately, hShop will remain in operation. I would ordinarily recommend that you descend upon the website and do all the downloading you can, but not this time. A huge spike in bandwidth is not what the site needs right now. So, if you haven't heard of the site before or you're good on game archiving right now, leave it be. However, those of us with pro-datahoarding rigs and VPNs, it's time to return all that content to the Internet Archive, under different names. We've already discussed this.