Every title recordin this archive,and how to read one

This is the index of every title record the archive holds. Each record covers one game, the server branches that ran it, and the window of dated material the archive holds for it.

What a title record contains

Four things, consistently. What the game was and who published it, so a reader with no prior knowledge can follow the rest. How its unlicensed servers operated: what they offered, in what currency, at what rates. How the branches related to one another, which for some titles is a sequence of rebrandings and for others a set of servers running in parallel. And when the dated announcements stop, which is what a shutdown looks like in a record made of advertising.

What a record does not contain is anything about operators, player counts, revenue or uptime. None of it was published, the servers gave no legal address, and every figure quoted in these entries is an advertised offer, not a measurement.

Why the records vary so much in length

Because the surviving material does. Gunny and Kiem The generated dozens of dated announcements across several months and support long entries; Naruto generated one. Padding the short records to match the long ones would erase the difference, and the difference is the most reliable evidence in the archive about which titles the scene actually cared about.

Where a record is thin, the entry says so and names what the sources cannot establish. Those paragraphs are doing work and not apologising: a reader needs to know whether a claim is grounded in twenty announcements or in one.

How the era labels work

Each record carries the window of DATED material this archive holds for that title, to the month, derived from the inherited paths, not from the game’s own release and shutdown dates. A record labelled November 2014 to April 2015 means the archive holds dated announcements across those months and nothing outside them. It does not mean the game launched or closed then.

Most records therefore cover a few months, not several years, which is a fact about how much survives, not about how long anything ran. The earliest recoverable page in the whole archive is from March 2014 and the densest run of announcements falls between September 2014 and April 2015; a label outside that span means the material for that title sits at the edge of what is recoverable.

That distinction matters when comparing records. Two titles with the same label left dated traces across the same months, which is a claim about the record and not about the games.

Reading the index instead of a single record

Individually most of these records are short. Read together they describe something the individual entries cannot: a market in which a dozen titles were offered on near-identical terms, by operators competing on how much of their own currency they would give away, until the offers stopped meaning anything.

The mechanism behind that is set out at the private-server record, which is the entry point if you want the explanation before the catalogue. The general games archive holds the material that sits outside it.

What is missing from the index, and why

Several titles appear in the recovered material without enough behind them to justify a record of their own. Silkroad shows up once, late. A handful of wuxia titles appear in a single listing each and are documented together at the wuxia hub, not separately, because eleven near-empty records would misrepresent the material as eleven subjects.

That grouping decision is the main editorial judgement in the index and it is worth stating plainly. Titles get their own record when the surviving material supports one; they get folded into a cluster when it does not. The alternative (a record per name) would produce an index that looks comprehensive and says almost nothing.

Ordering

By weight of surviving material and not alphabetically or by date. The titles with the most recoverable announcements come first, which puts the Gunny family at the top and the single-listing titles at the bottom. That ordering is a claim about the record, not about which games were best or most popular. Those are questions the material cannot answer.

Reading a record against the index

The useful move is to read one record and then the ordering. A single entry tells you what a title was; its position in this index tells you how much of the scene bothered to write about it, which is the closest thing the archive has to a measure of reach. A title near the top was discussed constantly by people with no obligation to discuss it.