I talked with a friend about Pangya and they gave me an interesting hint about preserving installers and the like: Old gaming magazines.
Especially in the early-mid 2000s gaming magazines often distributed the installers of free online games for promotional purposes (and it’s quicker to install rather than download the 150-something MB).
This can now become handy to us as we can search for archived versions of magazines and their cover discs and unearth Pangya client versions that we possibly don’t have saved in the archive yet.
As an example, I found the patch version 239 of Albatross18, the now oldest version we have, on a cover disc of the magazine PC Zone, right here:
If you remember getting Pangya from an old magazine CD, drop the name and a rough timeframe, that might help us finding an archived copy somewhere. If you found an archived version yourself, feel free to link that too!
You can also always reach out to me here if you have files relevant for the archive:
I did a quick check of the Famitsu Wave DVDs; they all contain only videos. However, they have extensive coverage of the Tokyo Game Show (TGS) from 2007 to 2010, which GameSpot and Ntreev attended to promote Pangya, among other games. It would be interesting to find videos of their booths from these events.
I have extracted the ISO, it contains PangYa_Setup_208a1_JPN.exe which we don’t have in the archive, and also in this case it’s the earliest installer we have now for the JP server. @pixeldesu I have uploaded it in the Inventory.
Gemini mentions that it was included in NetGames Mania and Online Game Magazine, too, I’m checking for any installer in those magazines too.
Just to reference this here as it already is in the archive, but Pangya was also included in an issue of the french gaming magazine PC Jeux Hors-Série N° 13 (Juillet/Août 2006).
Yes, it would be a nice idea to start a wiki page with all these mentions. There are lots of magazines where they had articles about the game, having a table with an indication wherever the installer has been recovered from the included CD/DVD would be handy too.
I have checked the other LOGiN ISOs listed on RetroMags but they don’t have any other installer.
According to Gemini (so this information has to be taken with a pinch of salt), the following magazines had an installer too:
LOGiN Magazine – May 2006: 2nd-anniversary celebratory wallpapers featuring the cast were included
LOGiN Magazine – November 2006: it included a promotional desktop layout pack, high-resolution Season 3 artwork files, and an exclusive Gamepot campaign serial code for readers to redeem special items in-game.
I think we should set some ground rules here, especially in terms of finding AI-aided results based on “whatever estimation” for timeframes and the like.
Please include a link to a magazine scan or listing that makes it verifiable that
the magazine and that issue do exist
Pangya was mentioned in it
I know it becomes increasingly hard especially with magazines from Asia as archives on those are sparse, but we need to treat anything that isn’t link-verifiable as “doesn’t even exist” to us.
Indeed, AI can be helpful to find where to search, but you still have to verify each result. I agree that we only list verified results.
I cannot check this now, but it seems that the polish magazine CD-Action issues 131 and 132 have the installer inside the MMP or Sieciowe folders. Also the Click! magazine seems to have it, the 07/2006 and 08/2006 issues, in the Bonus or Freeware folders.
As a confirmation of the fact that Gemini can’t be always trusted, I have found no traces of any Pangya/Albatross18 client in any of those 4 DVDs. Maybe it was included in those two magazines, but not in those issues. The search continues.
