We all have our favorites that we go-to overtime to meet our pirating needs. We’ve also watched a lot of big names in this year alone, go down in a blaze of glory and others in a whimper. I’m awfully curious what, to you, is the biggest loss to date?
For me it’s Uloz, first thing that came to mind. Uloz has served me very well in acquiring music albums through them, for a good 6 years I recall that I used them for getting albums. When they decided to switch the way in how they do their service, that to me felt like a sucker punch. No longer can I just collect album names, find a sacrificial wi-fi network and go to work.
I also remember missing ISOHunt, EmuAsylum, EmuParadise, OG Pirate Bay, AnimeSuge (soon HiAnime once the piss-ants of ACE get their way soon) and I really hope we don’t lose Internet Archive. But with the way it’s been hammered by shitty people and court lawsuits, I predict that it doesn’t really have much time on it’s side in the near future.
All I can say is just thank you to all of those sources and of course the ones everyone is familiar with. Helped save me a lot of money, helped me increase my interests and eh, can’t argue against free shit.
TorrentDB. First tracker I participated. Good layout, nice rules. Sad to see it go
Maybe not the actual biggest, but the loss of pirated material that i feel the most sad about is The Trove. The Trove was a website with a huge list of downloadable PDFs of source books for tabletop RPGs. I got the pdfs for everything DND, and also tried a bunch of other games I’d never heard of with a few friends. It also had downloads for other books and documents but I only used it for RPGs. I think it went down in 2019 or so.
This is a good time to introduce the concept of backups. Remember to backup both to local storage and to have a copy that is remote, in case of natural disaster.
Oink, Demonoid, AsianDVDclub… Various private Hotline sites circa 90s. Sadly missed
Demonoid, absolutely! Warez-bb, and many oldschool GeoCities blogs. I remember one that had portable cracks of any programs you could imagine.
DC++ It was just sharing stuff. No search. You connect to someone’s computer, they have a shared folder. You download what you want and move on. Instead of searching for stuff, you discovered it.
Newzbin.
Napster
Taringa, it was the go-to place for everything, especially content in spanish
Nzbmatrix
You and another have already said it, but Emuparadise. It was…truly a shame. :'(
Demonoid. They had a community that put together a lot of high-quality torrents.
This and I believe it was called TvTorrents. Private tracker that was amazing for TV shows.
Definitely Vimm’s Lair for me. I still play a lot of GameCube and N64 games and Vimm’s was always my go-to place for finding roms. They got hit with a lot of DMCAs and take down notices, and had to remove the vast majority of their Nintendo library along with anything related to Sega and Lego. The site is still up, but it’s like visiting a graveyard now
This one hurt me really bad. I was just getting started with retro gaming and then all of this shit happened.
Could you give an example of a game no longer available? Just checked and was able to dl Luigi’s Mansion just fine
On GameCube, I can see that Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, Mario Party 6, Smash Bros Melee are all unavailable. On N64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Pokemon Stadium are also unavailable
Deeeefonitely what.cd for me. RIP WCD. We have two great music trackers now, but nothing comes close to WCD.
Absolutely agreed
What.cd and BitGamer were the two private trackers where I really put in effort not just to seed but to contribute unique uploads.
I stepped away from torrenting for awhile and when I returned both were ashes.
Edit- what are the two good music trackers you’re referencing?
Losing what.cd was like having a Music Library of Alexandria burn down. Such an amazing resource for rare, out of print, obscure, and or otherwise unobtainable media.
Opheus and REDacted are the two! RED has more and interview signups. I’m only on OPH because they welcomed WCD refugees and it’s been very good.
RED and the defunct Apollo both welcomed WCD refuguees at first, but they filled up fast.
Apollo is still doing awesome! It’s called Orpheus now.
I had no idea Apollo got resurrected. I gave up hope after a few months when it went down many years ago.
Oh yeah! They weren’t down for long before they renamed hahaha
figures lmao
Easily the biggest loss imo. RIP WCD.
TheTrove was a collection of tabletop RPG books and magazines going back decades that has never had a decent replacement yet. It was fairly well organized and quite complete with tons of obscure games and out of print books. It had a different name or two before that but the collection always migrated somewhere until The Trove was finally shut down. I really miss that collection, even though I’ve managed to track down most of what I needed, it has been much more difficult since the shutdown.
It continues marching on as The Eye.
If I understand, that collection is missing a lot from the original. I could be wrong though.
At least part of it survives. Better some than none.
I agree and thanks for putting me on!
Haven’t quite filled the void from 9anime/aniwave going down, hard to replace the king.
