--- title: "What the Wayback Machine Kept" description: "A script walked 342 URLs from the old Dark Pawns sites one at a time. 77 pages came back, including the thread where the players argued about a portal and never settled it." date: "2026-09-15T00:00:00.000Z" textKind: "original" source: "RECOVERY-MANIFEST.csv (342 URLs, terminal 2026-09-04), the recovered records under src/content/archive/, and Zach's own account" canonical: "https://darkpawns.org/blog/what-the-wayback-machine-kept/" --- Did any of it survive? As I've been working on this project, I felt echoes of 2004, sitting at my old desk building my Dark Pawns player page, dp-players.com. I had this giant book on programming in PHP and genuinely no clue what I was doing. It occurred to me maybe some of that survived in the depths of [the Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/). The player page had some guides, a news archive, and a phpBB board where nineteen threads survived long enough for the Wayback Machine to catch them. The official site, darkpawns.com, had a news page, its handbooks, and a text map of Kir Drax'in that made it into the archive. Its forums did not. Over the last month I decided to find out exactly what remained. A script walked 342 URLs one at a time. The final count: 77 pages recovered, 259 with no capture at any timestamp, 6 that came back unusable, zero unresolved. Every URL got a verdict. So yes, some of it survived. Enough to read tonight. ## What came back Seventy-seven pages. The best of them is a thread called ["little known DP facts"](https://darkpawns.org/archive/topic-t38/) that's sixteen posts across April and May 2004, with pages 2 and 3 never captured. The thread titles alone are artifacts: "those were the days...", "how old are your charcters?", "Fun with funeraries....", "What the H-E-double hockey sticks?!?" Orodreth, who holds player number two, used the thread to explain where a monster came from: > I named Cormando after a character I saw in an arcade game that was in the laudrymat I used to use in Manassass Virginia. He was one of 4 cowboys that you could control when you hunted down the bad guys. Cormando with his big ass boom stick. That was 1997. The same thread tried to settle where a portal used to go and failed in the most MUD way possible. Vargus: "The portal in Aloazar actually used to go somewhere! I believe it went to a ruined temple in DZ, if you said some word backwards (NATAS??)." Roland Deschain: "It went to Xixi, and the word was kalinistra or something similar." Whistler: "I was told the DZ temple was once the portal to L'cath, and the password was NATAS. It has not worked in my time, so this information is dubious at best." It was never settled. Doragar contributed a mechanic: "There's also a room in one of the towns that, given the right circumstances, allows you to hire an assassin and set them hunting your fellow adventurers." ## What the official site gave up The official site gave up its lore freely. The [Background Story page](https://darkpawns.org/archive/background/) is still there in full: "Like a great game of chess, the world has become a board filled with bishops and kings, stately queens, white knights and dark pawns striving to rise through the ranks into godhood." It ends with a warning: "Beware the unseen, adventurer. The power is there, cloaked in a forgotten tomb or a dragon's hoard, but it is there." The [ASCII map of Kir Drax'in](https://darkpawns.org/archive/map-kir-draxin/) survived too: the starting city drawn in characters, the way you would have kept it beside the keyboard. The news posts survived as well. [A 2002 news post](https://darkpawns.org/archive/darkpawns-news-2002/) has Frontline paging me twenty times in the middle of a lecture ("page Aiko x 20"). The moral: "Turn your speakers down if you are going to mud during lecture. :)" The one thing the official site did not give up was its forums. Every capture hits the login wall, and that is where the recovery stopped. ## What's still missing The recovery followed every link the surviving pages pointed at. Four things it couldn't find: * The drawing of the city: darkpawns.com printed a picture of Kir Drax'in next to the text map. The text map is here. The picture was never captured. * Two guides. The index names them: Whistler's Determining Your Natural Abilities, November 2002, and my Definative Newbie Guide, March 2003. Neither was archived. (Yes, that's how I spelled "definitive" in 2003. I don't think we had spellcheck back then.) * 201 game logs. Players uploaded transcripts of hunts and duels across ten categories. The index survived with every count on it. None of the logs did. * Most of the board. The July 2004 index lists topics with no capture at any timestamp. Several long threads survive only as their last page. If you have backups from that era, you're the only remaining source for any of it. ## Where to see it The archive is live at [darkpawns.org/archive/](https://darkpawns.org/archive/): 37 records, 19 conversations, 161 posts, 23 people. Go find your name. And if you kept anything from that era, a hard drive, a folder of logs, a bookmark file, I'd genuinely love to hear from you: [darkpawns.org/contact](https://darkpawns.org/contact).