Video games: YouTube channel NoClip rescues tapes from landfill
As a keen gamer, Danny O’Dwyer’s no stranger to quests.
But the documentary maker’s just embarked on a different type of mission.
He’s rescued thousands of tapes containing rare video game footage – demo reels, interviews and behind-the-scenes clips – from being sent to landfill and lost forever.
Danny reckons he’s managed to save hundreds of hours of gaming history. But now the real challenge – logging and preserving all of it – begins.
You might recognise California-based Danny from his YouTube channel NoClip, which has produced making-of documentaries about top games including Final Fantasy, Rocket League, Horizon: Zero Dawn, The Last of Us and God of War.
His latest project began when a contact got in touch to tip him off about a media company in San Francisco sitting on a huge collection of tapes that he’d definitely want to see.
It was about to throw them all out, but Danny had other ideas.
So he rented a truck, and was soon driving boxes and boxes of tapes back to his studio. And that got him thinking.
“Sure enough, there were more and more of these collections that were just kind of sitting in these buildings, and were eventually going to end up in their own landfills or were just going to rot away.”
After contacting those others, Danny’s now got stacks of cardboard containers stuffed with tapes of different shapes and sizes, including some super-rare professional formats.
On each tape is a nugget of video game history from the late 90s up to about 2010 – and it’s very unlikely that you’ll have seen it before.
“A lot of this stuff was before YouTube,” says Danny. “So it was before any of us had high-speed internet.
“There’s stuff like videotapes that were sent to video game websites or TV channels that were never meant to be shown.”
From just a few tapes pulled from a “couple of random boxes”, he’s already uncovered an interview with Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima and a tour of Call of Duty studio Infinity Ward featuring two developers who were later fired and went on to launch multiplayer shooter Apex Legends.
Since then he’s found other gems.
“A couple of days ago, I found a tape that had ‘Nintendo Tour’ written on it,” he says.
When he loaded it up, he found footage of an employee-only museum inside Nintendo’s old USA headquarters.
“It’s like 30 minutes of this room that none of us have ever seen, and doesn’t exist any more,” he says.
Danny and the NoClip team plan to go through all the tapes and digitise them, turning the footage into files that can be uploaded online.
But to do that they’ve had to level up their equipment inventory, as some of the tech needed to actually play some of the specialist tapes is rare and pretty ancient by today’s standards.
“Finding ones that work today is incredibly difficult,” says Danny. “They cost a lot of money to buy and then shipping them is a nightmare because they weigh a ton.”
It’s a challenge for a crowdfunded company that relies on donations to keep going, but Danny says dealing with different machines, cables and monitors is “tough work”, but worth it.
“When you get the tape in these things and see it looking as good as it does, you can’t buy that feeling,” he says.
“Hidden in that collection, I know is going to be some stuff that’s really going to shock and excite the larger video game world.
“So I’m excited for those big moments.”
And Danny, who’s originally from Waterford, Ireland, says he’s “equally excited” about smaller moments and awakening people’s memories.
“Somebody’s going to stumble across one of these videos, and it’s going to be an old game they loved or they used to play with their cousin that they forgot about, right?
“If that person has that moment, where they watch that video, and they send the YouTube link to their cousin and go, ‘do you remember when we used to play this?’
“That’s why we do it.”
NoClip’s putting all the footage on a dedicated YouTube channel and internet library archive.org.
It’s available to anyone, and he hopes other creators, documentarians and historians will use it in their projects.
“We hope that people interact with this stuff,” says Danny.
“We’ve already seen people starting their own Twitch streams, where they watch a bunch of the videos or make their own YouTube video essays using this footage.
“But to me having a living, breathing archive, it’s like a museum, there’s no point having a museum if people aren’t walking around it and interacting with the history that’s there.
“We want people to check out the videos, share the videos, make their own art out of these videos and try and breathe new life into them.”
