Vintage gaming community.
Rules:
If you see these please report them.
Well if you know of a better way to make AI Becky videos of even fatter women collapsing water slides, I'd love to hear it.
AI is vitally important to advanced economies. People doom scrolling cats playing fiddles and obese hillbillies on dirt bikes is a big industry.
There's a concerted effort across many dataholders (at least /r/dataholders for sure) to make a full site wide backup across at least 3 copies across volunteers machines before it shuts down.
Alongside the backup team, another team is working on the best way to distribute to others after that (magnet links, archive.org, etc.).
390TB?! That's almost enough to install CoD!
Blaming it all on AI seems misleading given the owner explicitly blames leechers in the community. Selfish chuds were routinely bypassing download limits and then had the gall to add their own paywalls without contributing anything back.
Selfish chuds were routinely bypassing download limits
Huh?
RTFA
In the past several months, many specialized download managers were created that completely bypassed the site, donation messages, and download protections. Some of these download managers locked certain features behind a paywall that required users to pay in order to gain access. The use of Myrient for commercial, for-profit purposes has always been strictly forbidden. Such egregious and abusive usage of the site cannot be tolerated anymore.
AI datacenters buying up the hardware is why their hosting costs increased. Worsening the problem significantly.
Not myrient! I literally don't know of an alternative that's this good. Myrient was relatively fast and felt pretty safe. Metric-fuck ton of games too.
Vimm's Lair is still around, you just need to run a browser script that puts the download buttons back
What happened to the download buttons?
If you go to Vimm's Lair right now, you'll see, in the place of download buttons, text that says something to the effect of "This download has been removed at the request of the copyright holder"
The files are still hosted on the site, but they removed the download buttons to appease our bourgeoisie overlords. You can install a browser script that puts them back though
This is the most stupid bypass, I’m surprised this works and no one noticed. Lol
What? How?
Like, fuck AI resource hogging, but the archive already existed on servers that are already built. It was already running on ram and drives that aren't built into the specialist hardware required to run an AI data centre.
From the announcement on the Discord:
Information about the closure of Myrient
Hello everyone,
I have decided to shut down Myrient on 31 March 2026. Until then, the site will continue to remain available in its current state. Please download any content you find important, as you have around one month to do so.
There are several reasons for the closure:
- Insufficient funding As traffic continued to increase last year, the amount of funding from donations remained the same. I have been paying more than $6000 out of pocket every month in order to cover the difference which is not sustainable.
- Paywalled download managers In the past several months, many specialized download managers were created that completely bypassed the site, donation messages, and download protections. Some of these download managers locked certain features behind a paywall that required users to pay in order to gain access. The use of Myrient for commercial, for-profit purposes has always been strictly forbidden. Such egregious and abusive usage of the site cannot be tolerated anymore.
- Rising RAM, SSD, and HDD prices Since last September, RAM, SSD, and HDD prices have surged dramatically and continue to rise due to the ongoing extreme demand for AI datacenters. This has caused Myrient's hosting expenses to go up as well. Necessary upgrades to the storage and caching infrastructure only exacerbated the problem. With a large number of servers and the aforementioned existing monthly deficit in excess of $6000 out of pocket, there is no way to pay for the increased hosting and hardware upgrade costs.
There are still many other smaller reasons, I could go on and on about them, but nobody would want to read it.
In short, I can no longer afford to run the site.
If you have any comments, you can send them to support@erista.me (I will read all of them and might respond to a few).
Thanks for using Myrient over the years.
From the article:
Aside from that, RAM, SSD, and HDD prices have been steadily rising due to the AI infrastructure build-out, resulting in higher hosting expenses for Myrient as well. We’ve actually seen this with German data center giant Hetzner, which is hiking prices up to 37% starting April 1. The archiving site said it needed “necessary upgrades to the storage and caching infrastructure,” which it cannot afford due to memory chip and storage shortages.
The creator also complained about abusive users who were monetizing Myrient content. Not only did they bypass the donation messages and the site's built-in download protections, but they also added a paywall that defeated the site’s policy against paywalls.
But it'll be safe somewhere, right? Maybe one day, when/if the world is back to normal, it could come back...
Honestly , I didn't even know about this site till today! So if enough donors hit the site to pick up at least $6K, will that site stay online? ..cause I will definitely donate...no questions....just not all of $6K/month...that is crazy...
Too late now. There is a subreddits trying to archive it all though. Owner of Internet Archive doesn't seem thrilled about it though.
I never used this, hadn't even really heard of it.
But I use gazelle games for my needs. I'm surprised myriant didn't have torrents for its collection.
That might be a quick an dirty way of archiving the whole site for people. This seems like a perfect use of distributed peer to peer storage and networking to reduce costs.
Everything was direct download on Myrient. It was also pretty fast for a free site.
Fuuuuuuuuck, I knew Myrient was too good to be long for this world.
Yeeeeaaahhhh this one hits hard
Out of curiosity, what games take up so much space? I’m assuming modern ones.
You can easily downloaded a torrent of all games before the CD era and it’ll fit nicely in a few TB.
Shit, you could probably fit everything before the DVD era on a single drive.
They have every available variant of every game, so there are anywhere between 2-10 copies of the same game for each console it was released on.
Plus all the original Xbox games I've seen there are raw disk dumps, they have to be converted to xiso and that shaves off several GB per disk when completed.
My PS2 archive is around 2,9TB compressed, so "modern" is relative. PS3/XboxOne is a multitude of that.
Holy fuck, this sucks.
Does anyone know of a way I could download the entire English N64 library? I don’t remember there being a bulk download option on Myrient
Look at their FAQ. If you're on Linux wget on the folder works a treat.
If you're on windows, wget also works a treat. Mac too.
I've often had a lot of luck with finding things like this on archive.org
Jdownloader also very good with filtering options
Bittorrent