On February 26, Alexey, the founder of Myrient, one of the most complete and well-organized video game preservation archives on the internet, announced the site would be permanently shutting down on March 31.
The reasons were straightforward: monthly operating costs had climbed above $6,000 out of pocket, donations had flatlined despite growing traffic, and abusive third-party download managers were bypassing the site’s protections and donation prompts entirely.
On top of that, the ongoing AI datacenter boom had driven up the price of RAM, SSDs, and hard drives dramatically, making the infrastructure needed to keep nearly 390 terabytes of data online unsustainable for a single person running an ad-free, donation-only service.
The news spread fast. Vimm’s Lair, another well-known preservation site, shared Alexey’s announcement on X with a caption that summed up the community’s frustration perfectly: “This is what AI and greed does.” The post pulled millions of views and triggered an immediate outpouring of support, and action, across gaming forums and social media.
Myrient had been operating quietly since October 2022, offering fast, unrestricted access to ROMs and ISOs spanning dozens of platforms, from classic Atari ST titles to PS3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii U games. No ads, no paywalls, no account required. Every file on the site was verified against known-good checksums to ensure authenticity. For the retro gaming and emulation community, it was simply the best resource available, and the idea of losing all 385 terabytes of it overnight was genuinely alarming.
A community races to back up 385TB before the deadline
Within days of the announcement, a Reddit community called r/SaveMyrient formed with one clear goal: mirror the entire archive before the March 31 shutdown. The effort was organized under a project called the Minerva Archive, which distributed download tasks across hundreds of volunteers worldwide.
Each volunteer ran scripts to pull files from Myrient and upload them to Minerva’s archival servers, then validate checksums to confirm data integrity. The site is rate-limited, so the more hands helping, the faster the work could get done.
On March 12, user Pirat_Nation posted on X confirming what everyone had been waiting to hear: the community had successfully completed a full copy of the archive. Not a single file was lost in the process.
Shortly after, SaveMyrient mod Ill-Economist-5285 made it official on Reddit: “We’ve been kicking major ass in the background getting downloads completed and validated. We can now announce that the Myrient mirror is now 100% COMPLETE!!” The post spread quickly across Reddit, Discord, and X, with the community celebrating what had just been pulled off in under three weeks.
With the backup complete, the team shifted focus to the next phase: making the archive accessible to the public. Work began immediately on generating torrent files for the entire 385TB collection, allowing the data to be distributed in a decentralized way, kept alive as long as community members continue to seed the files. A second SaveMyrient moderator did note that “torrents is only a temporary solution as of now,” signaling the team is working on longer-term hosting strategies beyond the initial torrent release.
What was saved, and why it matters
The scale of what this community backed up in under three weeks is hard to wrap your head around. To put it in perspective, a dual-layer Blu-ray disc holds about 50 gigabytes, meaning you would need roughly 7,700 of them to store what these volunteers mirrored. And they did it for free, coordinating across time zones, donating bandwidth and hard drive space, with no institutional backing whatsoever.
The archive contains ROM sets and disc images spanning decades of gaming history, from early cartridge-based systems all the way up to PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii U. ROM files live in a legal gray area, and archives like Myrient have always operated in a complicated space between copyright law and cultural conservation.
But the practical reality is that without efforts like these, large portions of gaming history simply disappear, publishers abandon old titles, physical media degrades, and servers go dark. Once those games are gone, they rarely come back.
The Myrient story has also reignited a broader conversation about how fragile digital preservation efforts are when they depend entirely on the goodwill and finances of individual operators rather than institutions. Alexey spent years paying $6,000 a month out of his own pocket to keep that archive alive. When the costs finally became too much, it took a Reddit community to step in and do what publishers, museums, and government institutions haven’t done, save the record.
The original Myrient site remains accessible at myrient.erista.me until March 31, so there is still time to download anything important directly. After the shutdown, the Discord and Telegram channels will remain open for the community to coordinate the next steps in distribution and long-term hosting.
What the SaveMyrient volunteers accomplished in under three weeks, backing up 385 terabytes without losing a single file, entirely on a volunteer basis, is one of the more remarkable community efforts the gaming world has seen in recent memory. The data is now scattered across hundreds of hard drives worldwide, seeded by people who simply love the history of the medium too much to let it vanish.
The score: fans 1, digital oblivion 0.
What do you think about what this community pulled off? Do you think efforts like SaveMyrient should exist, or should official institutions be stepping up instead? Drop your opinion in the comments!