The 404 Archive

How to unlock The 404 Archive in Cheevos, land on a page that returns a 404 Not Found error. Worth 10 XP.

The story

Partner. You found a page that is not there.

Most people treat a 404 error as a dead end and click back immediately. Cache treats it as an arrival. Somewhere, a link broke, or a page moved, or something was taken down entirely, and instead of nothing, you landed on a page a company or a person built specifically to greet you when that happens.

Cache has archived over two thousand of these. He considers them portraits, small and specific, of whoever built the site. A company had to make a decision about what to say when someone shows up at nothing, and that decision, whether it is a joke, a drawing, an apology, or a barebones error message, tells Cache more about them than their homepage ever does.

Every 404 is a record of something lost, or something that never existed at that address, or something that quietly moved without telling anyone. Cache finds all three equally interesting, and yours is now filed alongside the rest.

The catalog entry

404 PAGE Acquired: Navigated to a URL that returned a 404 Not Found error. Condition: Absent. Gone. Or never there. Rarity: SECRET. Cache treats these as primary sources. Cache's Notes: Cache has archived over 2,000 custom 404 pages. He considers them portraits. A company made a decision about what to say when someone arrives at nothing. That decision is a kind of art. Yours is now in the collection. Every 404 is a record of something that was lost, or that never existed, or that moved without telling anyone. Cache finds all three equally interesting. Into the bag.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

This one just requires landing on a broken or missing page, on any site the extension can see.

  1. Follow an old bookmark, a dead search result, or a typo'd URL that no longer resolves to a real page.
  2. Or, on the Cheevos website itself, visit /404 directly to see its own not-found page.
  3. Land on the resulting page. The unlock is based on the URL, so simply arriving there is enough.

A 404 status code is the standard HTTP response a web server sends when a requested page does not exist, whether because it was deleted, renamed, or never existed at that address in the first place. Most sites route all of their broken links to a single not-found page, often at a path containing /404, which is what Cheevos checks for when tracking page visits. Some companies use the moment to be genuinely creative, since it is one of the few pages on a site where visitors expect something a little unexpected.

Where it fits in the Stash

Cache's 404 archive sits near the front of his collection of digital ephemera, right alongside the Under Construction GIFs and the custom error pages he calls portraits. The 404 Archive is your entry into that same folder. To meet the raccoon who keeps the broken links, read the story.