The Digital Press forum went dark in April. Founded in the late 1990s and active for over 24 years, it was one of the oldest gaming communities on the internet — a place where collectors, developers, and enthusiasts had built up an enormous archive of information about classic games, hardware, obscure releases, and preservation techniques. The kind of forum where you’d find a detailed thread about AV output on a Japanese-only peripheral from 1988, written by someone who actually owned one.
It was deleted by Digital Press founder Joe Santulli to save $42 a month in hosting costs. That’s roughly £33.
The story of how it happened is as painful as the outcome. Santulli sent an email to Digital Press webmaster Sean Robinson on 2nd April warning him of the decision. Robinson, dealing with ongoing health issues that had limited his ability to respond to correspondence, didn’t see it until 10th April — five days after the forum’s server had already been destroyed. Everything was gone before anyone could act.
What Was Lost
The Digital Press forum was a working archive. Not just a social space — a repository of knowledge that people returned to repeatedly for practical information. How to identify regional variants of specific carts. Which third-party controllers were actually any good. Which games were worth more than their prices suggested. Preservation discussions that went back to the early days of emulation. Collector communities that had never moved to other platforms.
Robinson’s own statement on the matter captures the combination of loss and resignation: “Everything was already destroyed. All that was online-only was lost.”
He says options are being investigated for recovering or archiving what remains, “whether continuing as an active online community with fresh threads and replies or at least as an archive of posts preserved on the Web somewhere, preferably mirrored across several sites.” Whether anything can be recovered — from backups, from the Wayback Machine, from individual users who had cached threads — remains unclear.
The Broader Problem
Digital Press is not an isolated case. Gaming history on the internet is fragile in ways that aren’t obvious until something disappears. Forums, wikis, and community sites run on volunteer labour and personal finances. They don’t have institutional backing or preservation mandates. When the person or people keeping them alive run out of money, energy, or time, the work of years can vanish in the time it takes to cancel a direct debit.
This matters more for gaming than most fields because so much of what we know about classic games lives in community knowledge rather than formal documentation. The people who discovered that a certain batch of PAL SNES carts had a manufacturing defect, or worked out how to back up save data from a dying battery without losing it — they posted that on forums. Not in books. Not in archives. On forums that are now, in many cases, gone.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine captures some of this. Projects like Archive Team do important work. But they’re reactive, and they can’t save everything. The Digital Press forum was active for 24 years. It was also apparently worth less to its owner, in 2026, than a monthly subscription to a streaming service.
What You Can Do
If you run a gaming community, or participate in one that matters to you, it’s worth taking a look at the infrastructure it runs on. Who’s paying for the hosting? What happens if that person can’t or won’t any more? Has anyone taken a backup recently?
The Wayback Machine allows you to nominate URLs for archiving at archive.org/web. If there are forums, wikis, or community sites with irreplaceable information that haven’t been archived, do it now rather than when it’s too late.
Digital Press was one of the originals. It deserved better than a $42 bill.
For more on gaming preservation, see our pieces on Atari’s retro emulation operation and The Great Gaming Mystery: What’s in the Vaults?