The feature phone preservation community has launched a new website dedicated to its ongoing efforts to save old and endangered Japanese mobile games from becoming lost media.
RockmanCosmo, a prominent member of the community online, announced the new website, Keitai Archive, last week, sharing some of the goals of the new website in a thread posted on social media.
According to RockmanCosmo, the main goal of this new site is to make its tools and resources "as accessible as possible" to those who have taken an interest in preservation of Keitai games.
The website, for instance, features a searchable database of applications, as well as links to the Keitai World Launcher (an easy-to-use tool for emulating feature phone games), a GitHub repository for the tools used in feature phone preservation (such as file system extraction/file conversion tools), and a quarterly updated archive.org repository featuring abandonware titles and other previously lost media.
Notably, as part of this effort, the group have decided not to distribute any titles that are already commercially available elsewhere, such as those that already have a G-Mode Archives release.
The reason for this is to encourage users to financially support those who are rereleasing Japanese feature phone games commercially (and of course, as a way of minimizing the risk of potential litigation from publishers).
The goal for the website is to live alongside the pre-existing Keitai Wiki — a wiki dedicated to "cataloging games from Japanese Feature Phones" — with the Keitai Wiki discord being renamed to "Keitai World" to encompass the two sites.
Japanese feature phone games, in case you're unaware, were titles released throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, exclusively in Japan, and were primarily developed for platforms created by the following mobile carriers: NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode, Softbank's Yahoo! Keitai, and Au's EZ Web.
They were available to purchase from dedicated portals online, and notably received games from some of Japan's most important and influential developers, including Capcom, Square Enix, Namco, Sega, and Konami.
Over the last decade, as you'll likely already know, these games have increasingly become in danger of disappearing forever, with the storefronts used to distribute these titles being shut down one by one.
This means that the only way to actually play these titles in the past has traditionally been to have them already pre-downloaded on a handset, or hope that the Japanese company G-Mode might dedicate its resources to remaking and reissuing them. This is where the preservation community has stepped in.
Over the last few years, it has gone to the effort to track down a ton of these games, including in-demand titles like Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII and Rockman DASH: Great Adventure on 5 Islands, and has developed a bunch of incredible resources to successfully free these games from the aging hardware they were previously trapped on.
This has given players a chance to experience some of the rarer titles in their favourite series's, and (in some cases) has represented our first real look at these games beyond a handful of screenshots sent out to Japanese press outlets at the time.
You can visit the new website here, to take a look at some of the work that has already been posted.