I know we're mostly about PC-related matters here, but I really dig cool game preservation stories and feel like this kind of thing is worth sharing.

In brief: The Broadcast Satellaview was an add-on device for the Japanese Super Famicom that allowed subscribers to download games via satellite and save them on a form of flash media. Most of this data would be overwritten or otherwise lost before the ROM data could be dumped. This includes the specific subject here, BS F-Zero Grand Prix, specifically its second iteration, which is so almost certainly lost that the F-Zero community has a $5000 bounty on a working, dumpable cartridge of GP2.

But you can't stop a determined group from figuring out something, and something was figured out. Japanese console players have a history of recording gameplay that long predates the existence of services like YouTube and Twitch, and one such player happened to still have their VHS recordings of this game. They were uploaded to YT about five years ago. Someone eventually created tools that could do something with these recordings with a high level of accuracy, and the work started.

It is now as restored as it will ever be without the original ROM data, and it is fully playable.

And I just think that's neat.

A more detailed video on this game's history and the process of restoring its content can be found here.

Yeah it's pretty sad that there is content, even entire games that are completely lost. I recently found out about a part of Silent Hill Play Novel, the GBA visual novel version of the PS1 original, It had two paths on the cartridge itself, Harry Mason's being a retelling of the original game, and Cybil Bennett's a new viewpoint on those events, and available through a cellphone connected download was "A boy's story" that is mostly unknown other than it was split into four parts, corresponding to the seasons.