It all started so brightly for Polygon. Launched by Vox Media back in 2012, the site promised to "redefine games journalism" by hiring the best of the best, and even released a multi-part documentary series to promote its launch.
While people might argue that Polygon never quite fulfilled that lofty ambition (what site possibly could?), there's no denying that it was once a goldmine for quality, long-form games journalism – and nowhere was this more evident than in Matt Leone's excellent Street Fighter 2 and Final Fantasy VII oral histories.
These mammoth deep-dives into the stories behind two of the industry's most famous games still qualify as some of the best games journalism ever published online – but, as noted by Leone himself, they clearly weren't seen as valuable enough to Polygon's new owner, Valnet, which purchased the site from Vox earlier this year.
As Leone states, both articles now return a 404 error. This was, according to the author, "probably inevitable since those stories were on custom pages that existed separately from the rest of the site."
The good news is that fans are making sure these pieces aren't lost forever. Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine – a digital archive of the World Wide Web – Leone's two oral histories have been preserved for future generations.
It's also worth noting that Polygon's Executive Editor, Matt Patches, has expressed a desire to get both features back online in some capacity – something Leone is grateful for:
Leone's initial post on the topic also suggests he's looking into ways of getting his work online in another capacity, in the form of Design Room, "a new website dedicated to video game oral histories."
Thankfully, it seems that some of Polygon's oral histories – those which are slightly less expansive in scope – have escaped the cull. These include X-Men: Children of the Atom and Panzer Dragoon Saga.
Valnet also owns TheGamer, Collider, Comic Book Resources, Screen Rant and Game Rant. Its founders Hassan and Sam Youssef started out in the world of online pornography, and Valnet has been accused in recent years of low pay, poor working conditions and the production of low-quality clickbait content.