Desperately seeking Ogre
Posted on April 24, 2002 @ 17:33 in Research
I've been on another somewhat silly search. There's this really cool search tool that will let you search a humongous amount of library data, called Picarta. I'm not sure if you can search in it if you're not logged in through one of the Dutch universities, but the point of the story is that at some point someone has been putting loads of online sources into one of those databases. I found an intriguing reference to a long gone website, and the description reads:
Features information on Firepower, a video tank game that can be played over the Internet by up to 32 players. Notes that Firepower has no relation to any other tank game and is currently available for UNIX machines running X only. Offers a profile of the game's developer, a mailing list for reporting bugs, and playing instructions. Provides access to the Bolo tank game Web site and to the FTP site of the X Consortium for downloading Firepower.
Well, with the website gone, why not search for the author of that page, Joe Rumsey. No results searching on the name in combination with firepower. There's a realtor name Joe Rumsey, but I recon there's more luck trying a game-programmer last seen working for Activision. A search on the Activision site turns up a bunch of answers by one Joe Rumsey about Civilization - Scenarios, but no contact information.
Wait, what is the webarchive for? Okay, input the URL mentioned above... tadaa! results! The page found actually has a "This page has moved" message on it, but the very old new location of Joe "Ogre" Rumsey's website has been indexed as well, here.
Ogre? Ogre? Could that be the Ogre quoted by Troy Whitlock in his famous "ruthlessly pillaged" MOO.Terrorism: Fuck Art, Let's Kill!: Towards a Post Modern Community piece on pmc-moo? It seems about right time-wise...
Anyway, the Firepower page that sparked the whole excercise is archived as well. Not really relevant to my research after all... or maybe it will be one day. Who knows. A fun excercise for the reader... follow the link from Ogre's page to the also archived page of Tatsuya Murase, then check out her picture, then find her phone number. Hmm, yeah, right, take another look at that picture. Link-rot? Archive.org spillage? A good sense of humor?
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