If you spend any time searching for Fudge material on the Internet you will certainly have found many dead links and forgotten projects. Sometimes the Wayback Machine holds an archive, although often some of the pages are missing, but in other cases there seems to be nothing left but a few mentions here and there.
Very few of these projects appear to have been deliberately taken down, usually falling victim to simple neglect or the hosting site going out of business. Is there a case to be made for trying to rescue and reconstruct these fragments of Fudge and find somewhere to host them? It's surprising what may still be lurking in forgotten folders on hard drives, so it seems possible that many of the settings, articles etc could potentially be found.
Thoughts?
‘If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone.
A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.’
- Samuel Johnson
I had one such site. I used it to host my little Fudge game Mutant Bikers of the Atomic Wastelands. Over time the site was left increasingly neglected and eventually went when I switched internet provider. The story would have ended there had not the Mutant Bikers kept reappearing on random, "unofficial" sites and getting the occasional mention on various forums.
That finally moved me to reissue the game properly, having redone the layout and touched up the artwork. I slapped a "20th Anniversary Edition" to the Mutant Bikers of the Atomic Wastelands title for a laugh.
It's just a drop in the ocean, but saying, there is a way back for old Fudge material.
Indeed. Mutant Bikers was something I had saved on my computer for years, a very fragmentary series of files and screenshots I never quite got around to tidying up but the best I could find at the time.
It strikes me that a great deal of the history of Fudge is being lost, since so much was done on an amateur basis relatively early in the Internet age. I may start to properly catalogue what I've found and put a list together, see if others are interested in trying to preserve the stuff. Maybe a community project could help to inject a little life into the forums, too.
‘If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone.
A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.’
- Samuel Johnson
If you ever wanted a pdf for the Mutant Bikers that is more than collection of screenshot, it is here:
https://ukrpdc.wordpress.com/2016/05/21 … astelands/ with a new cover and all.
Downloaded it practically the moment it was released
‘If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone.
A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.’
- Samuel Johnson