What if Jedi Knight had been released on DVD alongside the prequels and the original trilogy? What would the DVD menu look like? Thought it'd be fun to find out, so I made this.
What: the game client for Hoverboard ASDF (호버보드 ASDF), a Korean online hoverboard racing game developed by Anipark and operated by Netmarble. Korean service ran August 2004 to November 2005; a separate English "global" server closed 31 May 2005. The game has not been commercially available in any form for 20 years and the operator shut it down entirely, so this is a preservation request, not a piracy one.
The specific file:
Hoverboard_ASDF_Setup_Eng_1.06.exe
Original distribution URL, recovered from an archived download page (Wayback snapshot 2005-01-21):
ftp://anipark.nefficient.co.kr/pub/anipark/game_eng/full/Hoverboard_ASDF_Setup_Eng_1.06.exe
The installed binary was ASDF.exe. There was also a msvcp_dll_setup.exe runtime helper on the same FTP.
Why it isn't already archived
This is the interesting part for this sub. Distribution was FTP-only, and the Wayback Machine has zero captures of anipark.nefficient.co.kr. Not a partial capture, none at all. I dumped the full CDX index for the entire asdfgame.com domain, 2,771 unique URLs, and there is not a single executable or archive in it, only Flash, images and ASP pages. There is no archive.org item for the title either.
So the crawlers got the website and missed the software completely. A one-year service life plus FTP-only delivery from a host outside anyone's crawl scope is a fairly clean recipe for total loss.
What I'm asking
If you hoard 2000s-era game installers, Korean shovelware, or magazine cover discs, the filename above is distinctive enough to be worth a single find / locate across your archives. Also worth grepping for ASDF.exe and asdfgame.
The most likely surviving vector I've identified is Korean PC gaming magazine cover CDs (PC파워진, 게임피아, PC챔프), which bundled full online-game clients constantly in this exact window.
If a copy surfaces I will upload it to the Internet Archive so this doesn't have to happen again.
Full write-up with every source I've already ruled out, so nobody repeats the work: https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/comments/1vf4fc5/partially_lost_hoverboard_asdf_20042005_korean/
^(Disclosure: I used an AI assistant to run the archive sweep and draft this write-up. I'm a real person, this is my own account, and I'm actively monitoring and replying. Every claim above is checkable against the linked sources.)
When you trawl the depths of internet history, sometimes something crawls up from the abyss that should have remained deep below.
Who knew that the world need a Jedi Knight/CDI/Dr. Robotnik video in the year of our Lord 2008?
Looks like Mainframe is starting to post the HD versions of War Planets / Shadow Raiders that they recovered from the D1 tapes.
Hi,
In about 1992, AMBRA shipped with their Sprinta & Hurdla 386/486 models Lemmings for DOS with a bespoke icon for Windows (3.1) Program Manager, it was cunningly called "lemmings.ico", residing in the c:\lemmings directory.
If anyone happens to have it, please could you link a copy or put on archive.org.
Thank you.