Myrient Closure Gets Stunning Preservation Win Before Shutdown

When the announcement of Myrient shutting down was made, many were shocked by the news. But when the official reasoning was offered by the site owner, it suddenly made sense.

As stated in our article last week, it was not just one reason for Myrient to shut down. It was a combination of factors that made it basically financially impossible to stay open. The owner revealed they were spending $6,000 out of pocket to keep it running after donations had stopped coming in.

This was made even worse because some people were using predatory download managers, which we talked about in the earlier article, to bypass the site’s software and ignore its safeguards and donation request messages. It also did not help that we are still dealing with RAM shortages along with storage shortages, which have been linked to AI and prevented many necessary upgrades to the site’s infrastructure and caching. So the expenses became too heavy for one person to take on alone.

“In short, I can no longer afford to run the site,” they wrote in a Discord message.

Fans Rushed To Help

In the days that followed, waves of gamers tried to save the site through either donations or by backing up its collection of titles, ranging from the SNES to the PlayStation.

A group even took it to Reddit and created a subreddit called r/SaveMyrient. This became a dedicated group of archivists who were working in tandem to back up the site in its entirety.

Minerva Archive Reaches Completion

Myrient mirror has reached 100% completion!
byu/aesvelgr insavemyrient

Today, that effort is now called the Minerva Archive, and it has reached full mirror completion. The group has managed to mirror a whopping 385 terabytes of the data that Myrient has.

That is a major step forward for preserving the site’s contents after Myrient goes offline on March 31.

But not all is safe just yet.

Now comes the tedious and laborious task of organizing files into downloadable torrents that can basically last for as long as seeders exist. There is also the process of validating checksums to ensure that every file is complete, so there is still a long road ahead for the Minerva Archive before it reaches 100% completion.

Still, the official Minerva Archive mirror is completed, so that should free up some bandwidth for people to grab files they specifically want or need before the Myrient shutdown. Since that difficult announcement, download speeds have reportedly been abysmal.

Community Support Grows

The owner also wrote on Reddit and gave the group support, saying:

“Thanks to everyone for all the support. Everybody has been commenting supportive comments in this thread and other subreddits, and blowing up my phone. It makes me really happy to see the community coming together to save a common good. So, from the bottom of my heart, thanks to everybody for the support. Let’s spread the word.”

Video Game History Lives On

While it is unfortunate that the Myrient site will still be shutting down on March 31, the team is working quickly ahead of that date to preserve the content and make it to 100% completion.

Now, thanks to the efforts of like-minded people and preservationists, the history of video games will still be available for years to come.