This Page covers the 2002 crash.
For other variations, please refer to Hard Drive Crash.
The Hard Drive Crash of 2002 was a data loss event incurred by corrupt operating system files in Windows 95 on the IBM Aptiva computer system used by Ted and Nick Phillips. The event occurred some time before August 17, 2002, according to file modified times and a blog post at Thingamabob.com2 by Ted on August 18:
The following projects were completely lost:
Significant development progress for the following video game projects was lost:
These projects were partially saved by backups, but the most recent backups were made between March 3-9, 2002, at least four months prior to the crash.
For many years, it was believed that the following games were completely lost in this crash:
However, in 2022, data recovery of an unreadable CD called "RM2K Backups" also restored development progress as of early March 2002, at least four months prior to the crash.
Ted Phillips said:
The following projects were completely lost:
Significant development progress for the following video game projects was lost:
These projects were partially saved by backups, but the most recent backups were made between March 3-9, 2002, at least four months prior to the crash.
For many years, it was believed that the following games were completely lost in this crash:
However, in 2022, data recovery of an unreadable CD called "RM2K Backups" also restored development progress as of early March 2002, at least four months prior to the crash.