I have restored the Humongous Entertainment site from early 1997. I have been working on it on and off since early June. One of the first things I worked on was restoring the Online Memory Match game. It’s a JavaScript game that was written way back in 1997. Unfortunately, none of the original images were archived. So, I used various images of the Humongous characters found around the site to make new images for the game. I didn’t have to modify any of the code, I just had to restore the images. The next thing I worked on was restoring the Backyard Baseball Tag ‘M Out game. This game was also written in JavaScript. Again none of the images for the game itself where archived. However, there was a graphic with instructions above the game that had the images for the game. So, I painstakingly cut the graphics out of this instructions image using Gimp. Then I had to figure out what to name each image so that the game would play properly. It took some trial and error, but I think I got it in the end. Again, I did not have to modify the code, once the images were in place, the game worked.Â
At this point I thought I had done all I could. There were pages missing, but they appeared not to be archived. I later discovered that the missing pages were within the noframes tag of the pages. So, I copied the relevant HTML code from within the noframes tag and pasted it into a new page with the correct filename. I was able to restore all the missing pages with this method. I had the pages, but most were still missing images. This included the products pages. At first, I tried to recreate the missing images as best I could. I decided to search the archives of the Humongous Entertainment site on the Wayback Machine for the missing images. I was able to find 99% of the missing images this way. That included all the original screenshots for the game product pages and most of the original box art images. I was also able to find all the images for the gallery and People of the Week pages. Interestingly, all the images seemed to have been archived on the same day, May 25th, 1998. A few missing pages were found this way as well. For the images I was not able to find this way I either had to recreate, substitute with another image from the site, or bring in from elsewhere. I also had to remove some pages or use pages from a slightly later archive of the site. This was done if a page had too many missing images that could not be found or easily recreated. This led to a more complete, functional site.
Overall, I am very happy with how the restoration turned out. It was very satisfying to see the site slowly come together. You can access the site through ProtoWeb at www.humongous.com.
