As I'm posting this thread, Sprites inc, one of the oldest, best-known and most complete resources for sprites of the Mega Man and Castlevania series, is down.
![[Image: lNzFJbV.png]](https://i.imgur.com/lNzFJbV.png)
I can only hope this is a temporary situation, but it brings to mind an issue I've been thinking about for some time now. The policy for submitting material to this site forbids one from posting resources for someone else. Essentially, to prevent someone from taking credit for someone else's ripping, or going on their site, taking it, and uploading it as one's own. This completely makes sense in one way. Even the simplest resource rip is a time consuming job that requires a lot of effort, and some people rip the graphics and audio resource of entire games, and they would like to see their work rewarded with the most basic of things: recognition. This is something that's been common across the sprite ripping community for as long as I've been aware of it. Many sprite sheets have little logos or cute avatars with the ripper's name and "do not steal/give credit if used/ripped for such and such site" tags. From the perspective of a sprite sheet as a creative work, extracting and organizing the graphics of old games, this is totally justified.
But I'm looking at things more from an archival/preservation perspective and there's... issues. A lot of graphics and audio from popular games that aren't on this site are missing simply because they've already been ripped elsewhere. Very few people see the benefit in the duplication of effort of ripping an entire game's graphics to post here when it already exists elsewhere and can be found with a simple google search. But the problem is that a lot of the smaller sites that used to host sprites back in the day have been inactive for years, sometimes decades. And sometimes they go down, permanently. And if that happens, sprite sheets (or other game elements) that have been taken for granted for years are suddenly inaccessible to anyone who wants to use them for their projects.
Under the current rules, if I were to download every sprite sheet from Sprites Inc (assuming it comes back up) and submit them here for any sections that are missing sprites, they would get rejected because I didn't rip them. So if my goal is to see those graphics preserved, I'd have to put in the work of ripping them all myself, and then resubmitting them here, even though they are freely available elsewhere and the work has already been done. Or, even dumber, I would download them and reorganize the graphics to disguise that I've taken them from another sheet, and submit them. Either way a massive and completely unnecessary effort is involved.
I guess what I'm driving at is that I primarily view this site as a great place to archive things, and one that's stood the test of time where many, many others haven't. I don't know if vgresource will be around in 20 years, but I do know a lot of other sites and communities won't. And I'd hate for complete, long-existing rips to vanish off the net for years every time one of those other site goes down. And I think a lot of people on here would prefer to see the resources they've submitted here live on on another site if this one were to vanish someday.
Other than the custom sections, the vast majority of the resources on this site are the work of artists who were not asked how they felt about us extracting and archiving their work out of the context of the original games they appear in. I understand the reasons for the etiquette rippers show each other, but it feels like our adherence to it is seriously hampering our archival efforts in the long run.
I can only hope this is a temporary situation, but it brings to mind an issue I've been thinking about for some time now. The policy for submitting material to this site forbids one from posting resources for someone else. Essentially, to prevent someone from taking credit for someone else's ripping, or going on their site, taking it, and uploading it as one's own. This completely makes sense in one way. Even the simplest resource rip is a time consuming job that requires a lot of effort, and some people rip the graphics and audio resource of entire games, and they would like to see their work rewarded with the most basic of things: recognition. This is something that's been common across the sprite ripping community for as long as I've been aware of it. Many sprite sheets have little logos or cute avatars with the ripper's name and "do not steal/give credit if used/ripped for such and such site" tags. From the perspective of a sprite sheet as a creative work, extracting and organizing the graphics of old games, this is totally justified.
But I'm looking at things more from an archival/preservation perspective and there's... issues. A lot of graphics and audio from popular games that aren't on this site are missing simply because they've already been ripped elsewhere. Very few people see the benefit in the duplication of effort of ripping an entire game's graphics to post here when it already exists elsewhere and can be found with a simple google search. But the problem is that a lot of the smaller sites that used to host sprites back in the day have been inactive for years, sometimes decades. And sometimes they go down, permanently. And if that happens, sprite sheets (or other game elements) that have been taken for granted for years are suddenly inaccessible to anyone who wants to use them for their projects.
Under the current rules, if I were to download every sprite sheet from Sprites Inc (assuming it comes back up) and submit them here for any sections that are missing sprites, they would get rejected because I didn't rip them. So if my goal is to see those graphics preserved, I'd have to put in the work of ripping them all myself, and then resubmitting them here, even though they are freely available elsewhere and the work has already been done. Or, even dumber, I would download them and reorganize the graphics to disguise that I've taken them from another sheet, and submit them. Either way a massive and completely unnecessary effort is involved.
I guess what I'm driving at is that I primarily view this site as a great place to archive things, and one that's stood the test of time where many, many others haven't. I don't know if vgresource will be around in 20 years, but I do know a lot of other sites and communities won't. And I'd hate for complete, long-existing rips to vanish off the net for years every time one of those other site goes down. And I think a lot of people on here would prefer to see the resources they've submitted here live on on another site if this one were to vanish someday.
Other than the custom sections, the vast majority of the resources on this site are the work of artists who were not asked how they felt about us extracting and archiving their work out of the context of the original games they appear in. I understand the reasons for the etiquette rippers show each other, but it feels like our adherence to it is seriously hampering our archival efforts in the long run.