RPG Maker and the New Dark Age of Information: How the Internet Is Losing Its Memory

If you have spent any real amount of time on the internet – and if you are reading this, I am going to assume you have – you have probably experienced the following at least once: you are trying to solve a specific problem. Not a general one, but the frustrating, niche one that no YouTube video or help center article is covering.

You search for it, and somehow, buried in the results, there it is. A forum post from 2011. Some stranger, clearly just as frustrated as you are right now, who wrote up exactly what was happening to them and exactly how they fixed it. You feel a small but genuine wave of gratitude for this person you will never meet. The problem gets solved. You close the tab and move on.

Now, imagine that post simply does not exist anymore. It has been deleted, along with every reply, every follow-up thread, every tutorial, plugin, and workaround that was posted. Gone, because a company decided it was easier to start fresh than to carry the history forward. That is exactly what is happening to the RPG Maker forums, and people are rightfully angry about it.

What We Are Losing

Gotcha Gotcha Games, the developer behind RPG Maker, recently announced that its official forums are closing. A new community platform is taking its place – RPG Maker Guild – which sounds fine in principle. Communities migrate. Platforms age. A newer one is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem, however, is that this is not a migration. There will be no archive or backup. On December 11, 2026, the forums are deleted, and 1.4 million posts go with them.

To put that in concrete terms: the Legacy Engine Support forum alone contains over 280,000 posts across 45,600 threads. The JavaScript Plugins forum has 276,000 messages across nearly 35,000 threads. These are not casual conversations. They are years of accumulated developer knowledge – engine-specific fixes, plugin documentation, tutorials written by people who had already spent hours diagnosing a problem so that the next person would not have to. That is the stuff that makes a tool like RPG Maker actually usable for developers who are not already experts.

RPG Maker, to be clear, is the engine that produced Omori, To the Moon, Lisa the Painful, Yume Nikki, and Corpse Party, among many others. Especially its horror titles are usually quite acclaimed. They are genuinely beloved games that exist in part because people in those forums shared what they knew. The forums are not peripheral to RPG Maker's history. They are foundational to it.

New account registrations are already disabled. On June 18th, the forum goes read-only. Gotcha Gotcha Games is encouraging users to save whatever they want to keep personally, which is a recommendation so inadequate as to be almost insulting, given the scale of what is being asked.

There are community-led archival efforts underway. Jason Scott, who is as close as the internet has to a professional archivist, has strongly implied the Internet Archive intends to help. Those are real glimmers of hope. They do not change the core situation, which is that a company is choosing to delete a body of knowledge it accumulated over fourteen years and framing the consequences as the community's problem to manage.

This Is Not a New Pattern

The RPG Maker situation is unusually visible, but the thing it represents has been happening for a long time. I think about the BioWare forums, which EA closed and did not archive. I think about the Flash game era, which effectively disappeared almost entirely when Adobe ended Flash support – decades of creative work, gone or scattered, preserved only by the heroic efforts of projects like Flashpoint. I think about the countless fan wikis, community databases, and independent guides that have evaporated when a hosting payment lapsed or the person maintaining them simply stopped having the time.

And I also think about the Final Fantasy IX Brady Games strategy guide, which is a useful artefact for understanding just how long we have been bad at this. Released in 2000, it was built around Square's PlayOnline web portal, a service they seemingly wanted to drive traffic to. The result was a strategy guide where virtually every page deferred to PlayOnline for the actual content. Bosses, sidequests, secret items – vague descriptions in the book, real information online.

In 2000, when dial-up was the norm and getting online meant occupying the phone line, this was genuinely maddening. It became infamous almost immediately as the worst strategy guide ever printed. PlayOnline is gone, and the information it was supposed to host is gone with it. What remains is a physical book pointing at nothing, and a reminder that even in the internet's earliest days, we were already treating digital resources as permanent when they were never guaranteed to be.

The 87% Problem

In 2023, the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network published a study that should have caused considerably more alarm than it did. Their finding was that 87% of classic video games – games released before 2010 – are critically endangered: inaccessible through any legitimate means. Not available digitally, not available physically through official channels, not something you can easily borrow from a library.

For accessing nearly nine in ten classic games, the realistic options are: find and maintain vintage hardware and physical copies, travel to one of the few specialist archives that hold them, or piracy. As VGHF co-director Kelsey Lewin put it, none of those options are particularly desirable, which means most video games are effectively inaccessible to anyone who is not already deeply committed to seeking them out.

The VGHF explained it like this: imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape and maintain your own player to watch it on – and even the Library of Congress could not help you, because it could preserve the tape but not share it with you digitally. That comparison works because most people understand film preservation as a cultural priority. Game preservation still does not have the same status, despite games being at least as culturally significant as cinema at this point.

Copyright law is a significant part of why. Libraries and archives can digitally preserve games, but they cannot digitally share them. They can provide on-premises access only, which is functionally useless for most people. The Entertainment Software Association has consistently lobbied against expanding those rights, arguing that the industry already handles its own preservation sufficiently. The 87% figure is a fairly direct response to that argument.

The Bigger Picture

There is a version of this conversation that stays focused on individual cases – the RPG Maker forums, the BioWare forums, the 87% study – and treats each one as its own contained problem. I think that misses what is actually happening, which is that the internet's relationship with its own memory is structurally broken, and has been for a while.

Google, which once functioned as something close to humanity's external hard drive, increasingly functions as a gatekeeper that decides what is worth surfacing. Its algorithm prioritizes recency and engagement over accuracy or longevity. A forum post from 2013 that contains the only documented solution to a specific niche problem is, from an algorithmic perspective, less interesting than a freshly generated article summarizing what those solutions might look like. The old post sinks. Eventually, even if it still technically exists, it might as well not.

The Internet Archive – the closest thing the web has to an institutional answer to this – has itself been under pressure. DOGE cut its federal funding in early 2025 while it was midway through a grant. It has faced cyberattacks and ongoing legal battles with publishers over digital lending. It is a non-profit attempting to do the work of an institution that should, by any reasonable measure, have the sustained backing of governments and major cultural organizations. It largely does not.

This is the situation. The companies and platforms that hold digital knowledge have no particular obligation to preserve it and have limited commercial incentive to do so. The institution that does care about preservation is underfunded, legally constrained, and operating under constant threat. And the rest of us notice only when we search for something and find nothing – when a link goes dead, when a forum that helped us build something we care about turns out to have been running on borrowed time the whole while.

Why This Sucks For Us

What the RPG Maker closure puts into sharp focus is that this is not some abstract philosophical problem about the nature of digital permanence. It is a practical one with practical consequences. Developers using RPG Maker right now – people making games today – will hit technical problems that used to have documented solutions. They will search for those solutions and find nothing. Some of those problems will remain unsolved, or take significantly longer to solve, because the knowledge that existed has been deleted.

What irks me the most is that this is entirely avoidable. Gotcha Gotcha Games is not shutting the forums down because preserving them is technically impossible. Archiving a forum is not a monumental challenge. The Wayback Machine does it constantly, often without being asked. The decision not to archive is a choice, and it is worth being clear about what kind of choice that is: it is a choice to treat the community's accumulated knowledge as a liability to be cleared rather than an asset worth maintaining.

The internet was sold to us as a solution to information loss. Permanent, searchable, universal. What it actually is, as it turns out, is a series of things that someone else is paying to keep online. When the payment stops, the information goes. When the algorithm changes, the information sinks. When the company restructures, the forum closes. We are not building a permanent archive of human knowledge. We are writing on water, and the tide is moving faster than we think.