Your own "Lost Media"

[bowserknight]

I've just been wondering if anyone else has had this experience:

 

In the past (either as a kid, teenager or whatever) you created something just as a little fun project for yourself, you never really shared it online (maybe because you didn't know how to back then) and now after you've become much older, you don't have access to it anymore and wished you could go back in time to play, watch, listen to it again, depending on what you've made. 

 

 

 

I've had this happen a little over 15 years ago, twice.

Back then, I wanted to try out what it's like to make your own game and levels, so I downloaded the old RPG Maker. Both me and my brother made our own game about our cat called "Stupsi". The game my brother made was a short story about a day in the life of our cat, inside our old home we used to live in. It had all of our family as characters in it, with references to everyday things we used to say, our hobbies and stuff like that. It was only like 5 minutes long but it would still be nice to play it again today, especially since this cat died 2 years ago... I can't even remember what its name was, I think "Stupsi's Story" or "Stupsi's House", something like that.

 

Then I myself, made a more arcade-like game about our cat. Back then, I found a game on a CD from a videogaming magazine called "Chocobo Panic" where you basically just have to run around small levels and trying not to get caught by any enemies for as long as you can. I liked the idea of this game and made my own game in this style, again starring our cat. The first level of the game was inside the living room from my brother's game and you basically just had to complete mini-tasks in each level to proceed to the next one, like catching a certain character, collecting items or simply just reaching the exit, while trying not to get caught by any enemies. It also was a very short game, maybe 15 minutes and it wasn't overly difficult, just 10 fun levels to go through. I simply called it "Stupsi Panic" in reference to the Chocobo game.

 

 

Lastly, there's an old jump'n run game called "Pekka Kana 2" which is one of my favourite games ever. You control a weirdly shaped rooster and have to go through a bunch of levels, with your only means of attacking enemies being a megaphon that allows you to scream at them, or by laying eggs on them. The game had really cool music and visuals and I could recommend everyone to try this game out some time.

Anyways, after beating the game twice I decided to try out its own level editor and I made my own series of levels for this game. The levels were quite tough and I even included custom textures that could only be found in a secret room, showing the main antagonist watching some stripper chickens on TV (nothing explicit), as well as some other ones. As far as I remember I made 4 levels, the first one being a haunted forest, then some sort of canyon, followed by a factory-type level and for the finale, a long chase sequence where you gotta run away from the final boss, without any weapons to fight back until the very end. I wouldn't call my levels 5-star quality or anything, but you could see that they were made with love and thought put into them. There was even a theme of a long pipeline that could be seen all over the first 2 levels, leading the factory at the end.

 

Unfortunately none of these things are available anymore. We used to have them burned on a CD, or maybe even a USB stick but those are long gone now. It would be so nostalgic seeing some of this old stuff again...

 

But what about you, does anybody have a similiar situation?

[Jayextee]

Oh man, I've got a ton. Old games made in AMOS on Commodore Amiga (plus Acorn Archimedes stuff made back at school) as well as music and art made on computers I no longer have.

DOOMwise; Murderous Intent 2 (although a demo version I distributed privately has made its way back to me), a Quake-textured mapset I started when burned out, plus the beginnings of a very promising Exhumed/Powerslave TC for an old, old version of EDGE.

I've got some stuff now that's not likely to be released in any form, some I can't talk about, as well. And then there's my DOOM 30th Anniversary project which I couldn't care less if it mysteriously vanished off my HDD after I pulled RC1. Fucking cursed.

[Plerb]

A lot of stuff I made in my childhood is very likely gone, due to my parents being very irresponsible with preserving them. :/

In particular, most of my creations (a lot of MS Paint drawings, text files, projects made with really obscure multimedia programs) on what was the family computer as a kid. No one seems to know where the hard drive of that computer went. Even before my parents got rid of that computer 7 years ago, it had a couple hard drive crashes which caused some data to get lost, so even if it was found, it could've died in that time...

[CrispyMarble]

Lost hours of translation work for a rather obscure game on the PS2 when cleaning out some folders.

Also by accident corrupted some files for a DBZ BT3 mod I made.

 

My cat once jumped on the paint while I was finalizing the finishing touches on some artwork, just like that *poof* hours of work wasted.

While she just stared and purred. Laughed a bit but needed a long walk to shake that one off.

[Laocoön]

I once recorded a tracker tune I had just made on the Amiga on to cassette tape and then somehow closed the programme without saving. I only realised much later what I'd done. 

 

Now, ironically, the tracks I recorded to tape are the only ones that survive. I still have all the floppy discs, but they're irrecoverably corrupted. I can't find the tape with that one tune on it though. I think it was the best song I made on OctaMed back in the 1990s, but I can't remember how it went, only that it had breakbeats and a distorted riff.

 

Maybe, were I to find it again, I would be disappointed, but I don’t think I ever will 

Edited March 11 by Laocoön

[bobstremglav]

Very oldest artwork for my universe "ACCESS DENIED" is mostly lost because I literally throw it away in garbage, I found artwork bad because I had zero art skill at that time

Weird Dirom (card strategy game) had one of prototypes with different background (green hills with black tower and day sky, instead of night landscape with grey tower). I don't have this prototype anymore

One of my early Doom 2 map sets, Haunted Home (or House, I don't remember) clearly had version with 7th level finished and 8th level started. Hovewer, I somehow lost this version, and now we have only version with unfinished 7th level. Maybe I still have sketches for it, one of it featured manufacture furnace and sideway pipe

One time I was making games on RGM (RaycastGameMaker) constructor, and at least one of such games is lost. It was pretty colorful shooter with illusion of "skybox" and distant world given by landscape wall textures like in Wolfenstein 3D, and one of features is that your weapon wasn't shown directly, only icon of it (like in early shooters or rpgs), also you would exit level by entering armored van

[spineapple tea]

[This post ended up being pretty much my entire childhood and I ramble more than is socially acceptable. This is a very long post so you won't hurt my feelings if you don't read it. It also means that my sleep-deprived ass is not going to proofread it for typos. If something is incomprehensible, that's a you problem.]

 

From January 27th of 2017 to roughly the end of 2020, my YouTube channel primarily consisted of Pivot animations. Keep in mind that I wasn't even 11 when I had started uploading and by the time I began to lose interest I had sort of developed a conscience and rational thought. I never counted how many animations I had uploaded (which likely wasn't much less than the amount of animations I made in total considering I uploaded nearly everything I made), but from how active I was in those ~4 years I'd estimate it was in the hundreds.

 

It's a bit of a strange pipeline but my interest in animation and the art of "film making" was born when I was maybe 10 years old and I went down this rabbit-hole of 3D animations (both digital and stop-motion) on YouTube. There's actually a piece of lost media tied into my personal piece of lost media because to this day I'll still search for one of these videos every once in a while but never with any luck. The animation was just called 'Bowl' or something similar and was likely made around ~2005. It was made with amateur 3D software of the time and had something to do with a monster in a dimly-lit facility that, when a button was pressed, would eat/drink(?) the soup that was dispensed into the bowl into the room. It was only about a minute long and that was basically all that happened. I've never been able to find it or any mention of it in all my life since then. Aside from that, there were also videos like 'TF2 90's Games', 'DE dust2 HD', 'Alarm', so on and so forth (this is a very small sample but I'd easily double the length of this post if I made a cohesive list of everything I remember watching). Eventually my dad had found me watching what I think was that lost 'Bowl' animation and recommended that I watched the music video for Sober. This was probably one of the most influential moments of my life looking back on it as this ended up inspiring most of the art I still do today, my tastes in music and so on. Cutting a bit ahead, I was now wanting to animate anything I could and was looking for any way to do so. Eventually I found this shitty knock-off(?) of Pivot Animator called "Stykz" which I promptly downloaded and messed around with. By the end of the day I had animated this fight between a red and a blue stick figure set to the Mortal Kombat theme that eventually became an ongoing series on my channel, which I creatively called Red Vs. Blue. This was never uploaded and in fact I didn't even know how to save files yet so this marks the first piece of lost media in this story.

 

At some point I discovered Pivot Animator and soon discovered it was basically just Stykz but better in every single way. After downloading the most recent version 4, I made a series of skits inspired by the Random Stick Figureness series. It was about 40 seconds long and full of basically whatever came to my mind after finishing the last skit. Unlike the first Red Vs. Blue, I spent some time looking for a way to export the animation (a simple feature I wouldn't figure out for at least a year and something so monumental that I remember making a video specifically to celebrate me figuring out) and settled on instead recording a playback of it through OBS. After testing the software by recording myself playing Slither.io for about a minute and uploading that to my channel, I recorded and then uploaded my first actual video which I called 'The Random' (I stunk at coming up with names back then). I'm not going to lie to you all and pretend I was some famous animator at any point my life. My channel today only has 217 subscribers at the time of writing and my most viewed video has 41k views which I believe is a fluke of the algorithm. The Random, if I remember correctly, peaked at about 150 views (which were usually my own whenever I felt like rewatching it) and it was by far the most viewed video on my channel before the eventual climax of this whole tale. Either way, I was having fun animating every day for that period of my life. Soon after those first two uploads, I remade that first Red Vs. Blue video and it along with The Random became the two dominant series on my channel with both receiving four installments if I remember correctly -- each one longer and more 'sophisticated' than the last.

 

During this time I also began learning a bit about 3D software like Blender and Endorphin (inspired by Joel's nearly decade old stream of it). Looking back, a LOT of Joel's content defined a lot about myself with the most relevant example being how his Doombuilder streams inspired me to start mapping. I was pretty much downloading any sort of program I thought was cool or could make something interesting with which meant I probably had more viruses on my computer than there are stars in the night sky. Anyways, one viewer of my channel commented on one of my videos around this early phase inviting me to his Discord server (mind you I turn 18 this May so all of this was happening not so long ago). I made my current account on the 6th of October, 2017, and this was when my work wasn't completely locked in my echo-chamber of a channel. I met many friends and fellow animators at this time and the inspiration I gained in that server and servers that branched off from it only served to exponentially increase my workload. Now I wasn't only uploading several animations a day, but I was also working with other animators on 'joints' (basically a community project for animations). The Pivot and amateur animation community as a whole has always been inspired by Dragon Ball and similar anime and this meant that even if I wasn't all to into the show at first, working on these joints that used characters from the show fighting each other sort of got me into it and anime in general for a short bit.

 

This is likely the longest post I've ever typed up at this point so I'll cut ahead to the lost media part of all this. It's around the end of 2020 now. I started this all when I was in 3th grade (I think?) and now I'm in 7th. I've changed a lot as a person and now other things have started to take more priority in my life and my interests have changed. I saw these old animations as relics of the stupid-ages and I couldn't believe that there was a point in time when I honestly wanted to be a professional animator when I grew up. This was also when I was wanting to upload new videos that weren't constrained to the confines of an animation channel as you can see in the earliest surviving uploads on my channel, so I just started deleting it all. Yes, I was aware that you can mark a video as unlisted or even private, I had done that before in the past already. To this day I have no idea why, but my solution for cleaning up my channel was to delete my entire childhood. Along with this, I also deleted every post on my Twitter account in order to keep the account followers and whatnot which meant any art I did in that time. On top of all of that, my personal Discord server with me and a few "friends" (backstabbing whores and people I refuse to make eye-contact with to this day) had been dormant after a falling out we had (I will never be the same) and in a moment of "oh well, it is what it is", I deleted the server along with tens of thousands of messages documenting my life at this time. It's really difficult to describe the scale of deletion that went on at this time. There I was in 7th grade looking back on my childhood with embarrassment while here I am now only a few months away from being an adult and graduating high school telling 13 year old me that he just fucked up on a scale he wouldn't be able to comprehend for several years. Life is funny.

[Stupid Bunny]

I've actually been pretty lucky/fastidious with backups such that I haven't lost that much.  That said, there's a few things that I know are gone:

• Back in middle and high school I played the shit out of Speedy Eggbert (you may know it as Speedy Blupi).  I made probably 40 levels for it with the very friendly level editor built into it.  One was just a smorgasbord of random ideas, the other was a sort of 20-level episode where Eggbert climbed a skyscraper into space, explores some space stations, mining colonies on asteroids, visits all the planets (the one where he dives into Neptune's atmosphere and has to fly and navigate lots of wind and floating rocks and random buildings and shit was probably the most interesting), and then returns to Earth to then face a final battle with his arch nemesis who was an egg named Bobrick or something.  All of those are probably now gone.
• A Commander Keen graphics skin that I drew almost entirely in one weekend or so, all in a surreal/vaguely cyberpunk style although I was unfamiliar with the style by name at the time.  Also in middle school.  I did all of it on my mom's work laptop for some reason so all of it is long gone.
• The first story I ever drew called Mr. Bee's Tea Party, at age like 4 or 5 or something.  Think I brought it over to a friend's house as a kid and then it was gone after that.
• A few midis that I was proud of that didn't survive a hard disk failure.
• A breakout-style game including some kinda neat pixel art graphics of blocks (all in industrial or tech style) and a really janky platforming engine written in Visual Basic that are probably lost.
• A short flash animation where a tree sprouts the heads of notable communist leaders/writers and start singing the Internationale, and a grumpy old farmer is like "con surnit not again".  Also a guy goes to squish a beetle and his head explodes for no reason.  Pretty par for the course mid-2000s Flash animation.  Don't think that's survived anywhere.
• A bunch of programs written in Liberty BASIC back in the day, mostly probably pretty uninteresting joke programs or graphics demos but would still be neat to find them for posterity's sake.
• A terrible and hilarious 38-second "demo tape" that my friend and I recorded in high school, with me on keyboard and him on guitar.  Totally cobbled together from musical ideas that didn't fit together whatsoever and neither of us knew what we were doing.  God I wish I still had that
• There is a shitty half finished TNT map I made early on that seems to have disappeared long ago.  Also the one my friend and I made with one sector full of 120,000 WolfSS (yes this was a collaboration somehow).  Probably thankful I don't have either of those anymore

Edited March 11 by Stupid Bunny

[IHave10Shells]

I remember in 5th grade I made a comic which had a "plot" involving aliens making dragons on prehistoric earth as a testing ground and a bunch of cavemen managed to kill them. Then the aliens got upset and then I planned to make it a series where the aliens sent random entities throughout human history to try and restore their project and kill the humans and it would culminate in a totally very epic final battle where the aliens got beaten and signed a treaty.... (I made the final battle part on a notebook page which has been lost to time.) I forgot about it all and never completed it.

 

Yeah...I threw way too many ideas, along with trash drawing skills and zero story writing experience. Then again, I was in 5th grade. I did somewhat improve later on and made 2 other books which actually weren't as bad as this (and which I still have). I remember they were kept some kind of box in my house, until the box no longer had them. Despite how nonsensical they were, it does make me sad that I will probably never get to see them again. After all, not all cringe is bad cringe!

Edited March 11 by IHave10Shells

[DoomGuy999]

Only a year ago, I lost this game I was coding when I cleared my browser history. That game is gone forever - it was supposed to be a 25 level game called "The Final War" where a human built in a lab took over the world and replaced his blood and brain with circuitry and computer parts. Your goal was to take a rocket to mars after killing all the mech soldiers on earth, and then on mars take a space teleporter to one of the moons of Saturn, Titan. From there you would fight the final boss, but you had saved some mech parts and built your own. After a challenging battle, you take this advanced space beam back down to earth, saving the world.

[ApprihensivSoul]

I recently deleted all my work on a megawad I was building when I ran into a nodebuilder glitch that cost me a week or so of work. My reasons for doing so had less to do with anger at the situation, and more taking it as a sign, however. I simply felt I was letting too much emotion ride on the approval of others, and the project had crossed into vanity.

I still think of the layouts I had planned sometimes, but I'm glad I did it. Now my only goal is to finish reworks of the main doom levels for personal use, too many other projects outside doom that were getting neglected. 

[Inky_]

ive lost a ton of old art due to hard drives breaking and getting rid of devices

[Scoutdy]

My first ever doom wad i made was called Nazi and demons.

 

The idea was the Nazis in hell teamed up with the demons to invade earth and it's up to doom guy, dependent of bj blazkowits from Wolfenstein 3d, to stop them.

 

It's about as good as a kid in middle school who just got into retro fps games in the mid 2010s who hasn't even beaten knee deep in the dead to be. Not at all lol. I think It was like 6 levels. Missing textures.

 

Still if I still have it on an old laptop or something I might try to recover and post it.

[Lizardcommando]

I've got a bunch of old RPG Maker 2000 and RPG Maker 2005(?) games I made that are lost due to being stored on a now dead portable hard drive. One of the RPG Maker games I made basically tied together my old Wolfenstein 3D mod Pokestein 3D and my old Doom mod Lizard War. Basically, my Lizardcommando character recruited the default RPG Maker character, Zero and some Lizard soldier called Sarge to finish the fight against Pikachu and Ash Ketchum and their army of evil Pikachus.

 

I made a mod for an old top-down shooter called Meteor that was basically my own version of Call of Duty 4. I think I made around 8 levels, including a version of that level that takes place on an airplane just like that epilogue level in COD4.

 

I also made a bunch of crappy Flash cartoons back in the mid 2000's. I uploaded most of them to my old Geocities website but those were pretty much lost forever once Geocities died. I'm kind of thankful that happened because looking back, 99% of those Flash cartoons I made were cringey and lame.

[Denzel20]

I lost my favorite socks a few weeks ago.

[Vosolokoviteh]

i lost the first map i have done

[deleted-account]

I'd count this as "semi" lost...
My first Youtube account from 2007 or so has a few privated videos that I can't reenable because the security phone number I have associated with the account is defunct.  One of the videos was a 2008 "review" of Doom 2 

Edited March 23 by Robo_Cola

[Noiser]

I have a lot of "lost medias". One in 2010 was "Doom as it was an Wolf3D clone", complete with opl sound effects (made on adlib tracker 2), obscure bobby prince songs and all that shit.
 

[taufan99]

I've been a hoarder for as long as I remember (both IRL and digitally, although the latter depends on how much storage I can have), and that includes much stuff I've made since I was little (mostly drawings). I do have some I still fondly remember, though.

• A bunch of comics inspired by shonen manga drawn on my writing notebooks (I couldn't care less about all those lines back in the days). They mostly had nothing to do with each other, but later on I experimented with a shared universe thingy that still didn't really have much. Maybe I still have those on at least one of those cardboard boxes in my house, or maybe I threw them away because they were too cringy to read. I don't remember.
• A few experimental Doom Builder maps during my early days in 2011-2012 on an old laptop that belonged to my first older sibling. I even remember making one for a Powerslave TC project for (G)ZDoom while having next to no experience back then. I think it's still at ZDoom Forums for anyone willing to dig through it, but I don't remember anymore.

[Ubik]

I started making music with trackers like Scream Tracker 3 and Impulse Tracker 2 back in 1996, and at some point I lost the first year or so worth of tracks that I did. I'm sure they'd be pretty dire, but I'd love to be able to revisit them.

 

I also lost the base samples for a few of the tracks I created in Reason in 2002-2003 due to a defective IDE controller trashing my hard drives, so I can't bounce individual tracks or release better versions of those anymore.

[DoomPlayer00]

My old LittleBigPlanet levels are officially lost media now that LBP3's servers have been permanently shut down.

 

Shame. The trilogy had a huge impact on my childhood and sparked my interest in making custom content for the games I play. Probably wouldn't be into Doom mapping if it wasn't for LBP.

[ＤΞＬＴΛ]

i made quite a few things during my time here that have since been lost to time, namely the old WADs i made when i first started mapping, stuff like voxel weapons, replay, TAOD, boomzerker pack, dead signal, and many others have been lost to time, you could still be able to find them and i still have a lot of the files but they're just kinda there with no real reason, and a lot of the old stuff i made when i first started modding has pretty much been lost to the zdoom forums at this point, also there was my old odysee channel that i deleted because i was stressing about emails and shit

 

quick last minute edit: this also applies to a thing i used to do where i get a bunch of images and slap them in a powerpoint and call them "inspiration images" which have DEFINTELY been lost to time :P

Edited April 20 by ＤΞＬＴΛ

[Skullzrawk9]

Between the ages of 13-16 I made a ton of projects on Scratch, most of which were left unfinished. Ive heard a lot of programmers and game devs trash on it, but I think Scratch is great. Unfortunately, I lost my login and password to my account, so all of my unpublished projects are pretty much gone.

[chomorkuz]

i made a bunch of silly and cringy minecraft let's plays videos back in 2013-2014. i deleted them all a few years ago and i don't think i uploaded anywhere else and the phone (because my old laptop was too terrible for video recorders and probably would've been too tech illiterate to figure out how to set up one) i recorded them with died a long time ago so i think they are 100% lost

Edited May 23 by chomorkuz

[ALilGrayBoi]

When I was in elementary I would partner up with my friends to make a comic library in the playground. I would make the comics and kids who stopped by would read them. The comics are where most of my OC’s originate from but I lost every single one of them. I was only able to recover one comic but it was made way after I shut down the library. I also lost Minecraft worlds that were around when it was still called pocket edition 

[Bucket]

i have plenty of art and music that i've lost over the years. mostly because i have a bad habit of not saving my source files, especially if it was quick and low effort. several times i've found old projects cleaning out my parents' house or running undelete programs on old drives and it feels like getting part of my soul back.

 

the one that hurts the most is from catholic school, where i had only one friend (who wouldn't admit he was my friend to anyone else). at the end of fifth grade, before i transferred to a different school, i gave him a notebook that was filled cover to cover with my artwork. it was something to remember me by, very important to me, i had spent literally the entire school year on it. a week into summer vacation i called him up and asked if he had a chance to look through it. he said his mom threw it out.

 

this is the same "friend" who had asked to borrow my copy of super mario 3. i was one of the poorest kids at that school but my mom worked at a toy store so i managed to get the game a couple days early. yeah, it made a few of them jealous and it made me feel pretty good to have something the other kids didn't. after a while i asked for it back and he said his dog ate it. one angry phone call from my mom to his mom later, the video game magically materialized. it had a few dents in it like someone tried to make it look like a dog chewed on it. it still worked, though.

[The_MártonJános]

The first two map attempts I've committed in Doom Builder back then in late June 2009. First one I didn't save at all, second one I wanted but I somehow overwrote the file. The latter I especially regret because it was an actually extensive attempt at an E1M6 style map which I could expand on once I got the basics of layout and placement 101 down. But oh well.

[Danfun64]

My upbringing caused... interesting things to happen.

 

I had a couple Sonic videos recorded that were long deleted because my mother didn't like Sonic.

 

I once deleted my Google account (and by extension YouTube) because I bought into conspiracy theories when I was younger. That stuff's long gone.

 

Not related to any of that was that some Star Wars First Strike stuff I uploaded on Filefront a long time ago is long gone including a couple videos. One video once existed in 720p but now only exists as a DVD rip. I think I still have the DVD somewhere.....

[Immorpher]

Yes! I can think of 4 lost media off my head.

1) My very first original MIDI. It wasn't great, but it was heavy and moody. It was metal with like timpani and choir. My style hasn't really changed all that much in fact haha. But it was rough and I wish I still had it to show people, so people can hear my very rough beginning. I shared it around like over 20 years ago via messengers of the time to friends. It may exist on someone's dead computer perhaps, who knows!

2) My first website called "The Terra X". I would have it hosted on Geocities, Tripod, and other places, all depending on how much space and how few ads they would do. It had all kinds of weird red and black giger-esque imagery with plenty of flame bars. I even had some original characters in some sort of hellish universe on it too. Plus it had other things I was into like video game stuff and wrestling. I spinned it off into a "Terranity" site with weird cultish stuff on it; I cant even remember what I was thinking of at the time. I had it backed up on a CD, but I havent seen that CD in over a decade, so I have no clue where it has gone. I did some internet searches of it but I didnt even see it in the internet archive.

3) My first map was an age of empires 2 4-player deathmatch map. The map design was very basic and symmetrical, so nothing cool about that. But I was proud of the scripting I put on it. I only tested it online like once or twice.

4) When I was a young teen I had a notebook, and in it I was creating a universe for a future game. Most of it was a knock off of Super Metroid but with some doom weapons and such in it. I spent a few years drawing in it and there's a few photos of me with it. But alas I havent seen that notebook in over a decade either.

Edited May 24 by Immorpher

[Votterbin]

A ton of music I made in high school when I wanted to pursue music production as a career. Most painful is the track Hyperfocus, which I'm still the most proud of even if I've lost the files for it. It was the first track where I'd gone all-in on production. I had dabbled before, but for Hyperfocus I was using apps on my phone for some backing melodies, I was spending a whole bunch of my weekly paychecks on synths, and then I had spent hours into the night trying to make it all work. Thus the name.

 

I remember enough about it that I could make a rough recreation of the first minute or so, if I really sat down and set my mind to it.