archaeology

Man, the web sucks. For the second time in my life, I've wasted almost an hour looking for a copy of the omicron quake bot.

What remains of the once glorious world of quake websites is truly pathetic. Strangely enough, a lot of pages with download links for the bot are still up, but (almost) without exception their links point to:

• Pages that have disappeared off the face of the earth, replacing the entire site with a big 404 or whose domains have expired (as indicated by a "helpful" "search engine" page ("search for books about obots102.zip")).
  
• Sites that have been bought up and turned into portals dedicated to maximising the number of flash-loaded popups and "free registration"s per second, and whose owners have no interest in keeping a file archive for, or acknowledging the existence of, any game older than six months.
  
• FTP servers that have reorganised their directory structure twenty times since the link was written, and that dropped all the games content when somebody in charge noticed what the techies had been putting on their server that was supposed to be generating revenue dammit.
  
• Occasional tragi-comic efforts like this
  

Even the wayback machine is no use, as they don't seem to archive zip files.

Anyway, eventually found the sumbitch here and mirrored it there. And so, another piece of priceless cultural heritage is preserved. All in a day's work.