Wayback-Eligible

How to unlock Wayback-Eligible in Cheevos, visit archive.org, home of the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine. Worth 10 XP.

The story

Partner. You went to the one place Cache treats as an equal.

Cache does not think of himself as having peers. He is a raccoon running a one-person, or one-raccoon, preservation operation out of a junkyard, and he has made his peace with being unusual. But there is one organization he speaks about differently than anything else on the internet.

Archive.org is doing what Cache does, except with servers, with funding, with a mission statement instead of a compulsion. They save pages before they disappear. They keep old software running in emulators. They hold copies of things the rest of the internet has already let go of, in a way that is official and funded and, frankly, better resourced than one raccoon in a junkyard could ever manage.

Cache has a folder in the Stash labeled THINGS THAT WOULD BE GONE WITHOUT ARCHIVE.ORG. It is one of his largest folders. You visiting the site yourself, seeing what it actually is instead of just hearing him talk about it, earns you a spot in the SECRETS section, right next to the one organization he genuinely respects.

The catalog entry

ARCHIVE.ORG Acquired: Visited archive.org, the Internet Archive. Condition: Preserved. Wayback-eligible. Rarity: SECRET. Most people do not know this place exists in the way it actually exists. Cache's Notes: The Internet Archive is the only organization on the internet that Cache considers a peer. They are doing what he does, but officially. With servers. With funding. With a mission. He has a folder in the Stash labeled THINGS THAT WOULD BE GONE WITHOUT ARCHIVE.ORG. It is one of his largest folders. This is a primary source. Into the bag. Never let go.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

This one is a straightforward visit, once you know where to go.

  1. Open a new tab in your browser.
  2. Navigate to archive.org.
  3. Let the page load. The visit itself is enough to trigger the unlock.

The Internet Archive is a real nonprofit digital library founded in 1996. It runs the Wayback Machine, which has archived hundreds of billions of web pages going back decades, letting anyone look up what a site used to look like on a given date. It also hosts scanned books, old software running in browser-based emulators, historical television clips, and audio recordings that would otherwise have no public home. Cheevos tracks the page visit and matches it against the domain, which is why simply landing on archive.org is all it takes.

Where it fits in the Stash

Everything Cache has ever managed to save exists partly thanks to a place like this one doing the same work at scale. Wayback-Eligible sits near the front of the SECRETS section, closest to the door. To meet the raccoon who considers this his one true peer, read the story.