Udvarnoky Posted August 8, 2020 Share Posted August 8, 2020 Eighteen months ago I unveiled the first phase of an ongoing undertaking to bring old Mojo articles back online. To make a long story short*, the various redesigns of Mojo over the years, and the not-always-diligent efforts to port previous features over during these transitions, would cause articles from the sunsetted version of Mojo to simply get left behind in the process. The cumulative effect was that well over fifty percent of Mojo's content ended up missing. For years I've been keen on addressing that travesty, but the more I dug into it the more I came to understand why prior staffers gave up on the challenge. Mojo backups are woefully limited when it comes to the really old stuff, and though the backups have come to my aid many times on an individual basis, generally speaking the only strategy you really have when you want to recover an old article is to turn to the Wayback Machine and extract the content of a snapshot/crawl (hopefully, one even exists) by hand. This at least gets you the text if not always the media -- and without the media, many articles are borderline pointless, such as the Gold Guy Exposed article, which I only recently got the images for with the help of Jake. Not all articles have such a happy ending, though. Aside from the major issue of lost media, the other problem is that modern Mojo is way more restrictive on the presentation of features in terms of layout and available markup tags. This lockdown was deliberate and undoubtedly a good thing going forward, but it makes for an absolute nightmare when trying to adapt old articles, which were written with a laissez faire attitude toward handwritten HTML, to MojoEx. (Gabez in particular seemed to love to make his articles as bespoke as possible, and I'm going to die five years sooner than I otherwise would have died due to my traumatic experiences in trying to recreate them with any accuracy.) The end result is that it's often impossible to replicate the appearance of older articles even when you are lucky enough to have all the actual materials on hand. Sidebars, for example, once used regularly in Mojo, are simply not a thing in MojoEx. The compromises pile up. I'm still committed to getting everything back in whatever form possible for posterity's sake, and I've made a point of linking to Wayback Machine snapshots at the end of the retrofitted articles for reference. I also make a point of putting a link to the original news posts at the end of the resurrections, though hopefully Zaarin will at some point be able to associate the articles with their originating news posts the "real" way that modern features do. Similarly, we need to get the old articles properly backdated in the system. I have to say I consider what has been achieved even now to be a minor miracle, but there's plenty to be done. The reason I've made this thread is because I need the readership's help. I think/hope we're at a point where every legacy article is at least in the system now, in variable states of restoration. But I've pretty much taken this as far as I can bring it by myself. Now that the forums have returned and the community has a place to gather again, I am relying on any readers who share an interest in getting the old stuff back to help me fill in the remaining gaps -- by pointing out missing, incomplete or faulty articles, and maybe even helping me track down some of the stuff I could not. So if you spot something funky, point it out here, and I'll see if I can address it. With multiple sets of eyes on this, it'll be a lot easier to bring this insane excavation to the next level of polish. And then we'll really be cooking with Spaff grease. *Sorry for lying 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Remi Posted August 8, 2020 Share Posted August 8, 2020 I will put out a promise right now. Two in fact: Sidebars will return in MojoHEX. MojoHEX will arrive in 2020. And that's a Remi PromiseTM. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted October 3, 2020 Author Share Posted October 3, 2020 Some stuff was found squirreled away in an ancient MojoArt backup, which may enable me to restore some long lost media to a few old articles. There have been two beneficiaries already: Cooking with Spaff #2 EMI PS2 Release Party Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted October 6, 2020 Author Share Posted October 6, 2020 More improbable resurrections: E3 2001 Trip to LucasArts, 2001 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted October 24, 2020 Author Share Posted October 24, 2020 Just restored the media to the PC Format Collectors Series feature, and it's a good thing too, because this "article" is really just a gallery with a preamble. Those old scans are woefully crunched down, but the text is legible, which I suppose is the cardinal point. Apparently the scans were originally supplied to Mojo by Calimonk...wonder if he still has the original files? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted October 24, 2020 Author Share Posted October 24, 2020 Images restored to The Wilmunder Memoirs. If you've never read this one before, you should really check it out; it's one of the best articles Mojo ever published. This can be said without ego because, well, Mojo didn't write it. Aric Wilmunder did. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted October 25, 2020 Author Share Posted October 25, 2020 A few more articles where missing media was restored: Fun with Editor's Day '02 LucasArts Summer Press Day '03 The Old Days The following were missing altogether and have been added: E3 2003: Wrath Unleased Preview E3 2003: Embarrassing Photo Gallery This recent activity is due to some long-thought-lost media being recovered by Top Men™. More updates to follow. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Laserschwert Posted October 25, 2020 Share Posted October 25, 2020 I remember a photo of the original MI1 box art painting (or a print), framed, from one of Mojo's LucasArts visits articles. Any chance that might resurface at the full original resolution? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted October 25, 2020 Author Share Posted October 25, 2020 You might mean these from the complete Trip to LEC gallery: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Laserschwert Posted October 25, 2020 Share Posted October 25, 2020 (edited) Exactly. Anything bigger than that? Or was that just the usual resolution of digital photos back then? Also: That would probably be enough for Disney to make a great digital backup of the artwork (I assume that's a print). Edited October 25, 2020 by Laserschwert Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted October 25, 2020 Author Share Posted October 25, 2020 My assumption is that's the resolution produced by whatever digital camera Mojo used for those trips. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jake Posted October 27, 2020 Share Posted October 27, 2020 It was not a good camera. If I ever come across anything higher res I’ll let you know, but I doubt it. The novelty of that camera was that it took photos at all, not that it took particularly high res ones. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Laserschwert Posted October 27, 2020 Share Posted October 27, 2020 Ah well, it's not like something at "only slightly higher" resolution would be of any help here. Plus it's not the complete artwork anyway, since it's at least missing the palmtree at the top. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted October 27, 2020 Author Share Posted October 27, 2020 Mojo's interview with Gary Winnick is another-timer in my book. It was until now missing not only its images but some of its actual content as well. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted October 28, 2020 Author Share Posted October 28, 2020 Now with media: Trip to the Barbican Museum: The Art of Star Wars Escape from Monkey Island Demo Review EMI: A Random Rant EMI PS2 Review Super Bombad Racing Review 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted January 6, 2021 Author Share Posted January 6, 2021 The photographs for the Mojo Does Cardiff article have been mysteriously missing in action for something like ten years. Fortunately, @s-island was able to correctly interpret the glyphs faintly etched upon a series of windswept runestones in order to divine the secret location of a backup of the article's complete photo gallery, and now one of Mojo's most irrelevant articles is once again an honest to Pete multimedia experience. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Huz Posted February 14, 2021 Share Posted February 14, 2021 On 1/6/2021 at 3:21 AM, Udvarnoky said: The photographs for the Mojo Does Cardiff article have been mysteriously missing in action for something like ten years. Fortunately, @s-island was able to correctly interpret the glyphs faintly etched upon a series of windswept runestones in order to divine the secret location of a backup of the article's complete photo gallery, and now one of Mojo's most irrelevant articles is once again an honest to Pete multimedia experience. This is great, but who are the humans in these photos? There's the one with the face, and the other one with the hair and also a face, and then there's Gabez. I know that one. How do I know what Gabez looks like? I don't know. And there might be a fourth human form faintly visible on the boundary between this dimension and the next, I'm not sure, I can't be bothered double checking even though it would have taken less time than writing this bit. And then there's a picture of a train ticket. Train tickets! I remember those. I even remember the ones like in your picture where they said "Rail Settlement Plan" over and over in the background like some demented government spokesman stuck in a groove. Is this a security measure? Were they expecting would-be ticket forgers to fall asleep before they could manage to copy and paste these boring words enough times to fill an entire fake ticket? Still, I can't help but think that something has been lost with the move away from "Rail Settlement Plan". Something comforting. Like a warm blanket enveloping you, dry and not drenched in a tramp's piss, a stark contrast to the interior of the train you are about to enter. Oh look, it's cancelled. And so are all the other trains for the rest of the day. And now my rail replacement bus is on fire. Never mind. Rail settlement plan. Rail settlement plan. Rail settlement plan. ...is the sort of thing I would have posted if I hadn't eventually spotted that the first link explains who everyone is, it's only if you click the second link by itself like a big buffoon that you get confused by the lack of context. Good job I didn't do that then. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scummbuddy Posted February 21, 2021 Share Posted February 21, 2021 There's a minor error on the Mojo: Curse of MI Concept art page. The image of Murray floating on the plank (page image 42 of 55) is linked to a larger version of the cannon mini-game and not a larger version of the concept art of Murray floating about and cursing Wally. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted September 3, 2021 Author Share Posted September 3, 2021 I fixed all the broken links in the Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix article caused by the fact that Aric Wilmunder, who hosted the design documents, let his domain expire. I've noticed that this snapshot of his site seems to have functional PDF links to all the docs he'd uploaded before abandoning the effort: https://web.archive.org/web/20171216013851/http://www.wilmunder.com/Arics_World/Games.html 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CaliMonk Posted September 13, 2021 Share Posted September 13, 2021 On 10/24/2020 at 6:48 PM, Udvarnoky said: Just restored the media to the PC Format Collectors Series feature, and it's a good thing too, because this "article" is really just a gallery with a preamble. Those old scans are woefully crunched down, but the text is legible, which I suppose is the cardinal point. Apparently the scans were originally supplied to Mojo by Calimonk...wonder if he still has the original files? I definitively have the original magazine laying around _somewhere_, if wanted still? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Udvarnoky Posted September 13, 2021 Author Share Posted September 13, 2021 Won't say no to that! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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