As some of you may already know, archive.org is an excellent site for looking at websites from the past, and seeing how the internet has changed over the years.
How does this relate to BeForU? I frequently dig around archive.org to look for BeForU related things. Mostly orimen stuff, since enough of us were around by the NEXT era that that hasn't been forgotten. But honestly, very few of us have been around since the very beginning, and it's interesting to look for things you've never seen before.
The great thing is, every time I look I find something new. Today I discovered
this page, with blog entries from the orimen from September 2001. It would be extremely interesting to look at translated versions of these. (archive.org seems to take kind of an issue with Japanese text, you may have to manually change the character encoding to view these correctly. In Firefox it's View -> Character Encoding -> Japanese (Shift_JIS), it's probably something similar in IE.)
The main reason I'm making a thread about this is, I know on my part I'll spend all night digging up random BeForU stuff on archive.org, think "oh my gosh this is all so interesting," never save any of it, and then when I want to find it later I can't. I think it would be good to keep a record of all of this BeForU history in a place where we can all access it. I'm also issuing a challenge -- I challenge those of you with some free time to follow me in digging through archived BeForU pages and posting whatever interesting tidbits you find! I would also recommend uploading any photos to the sadly-neglected
BeForU Gallery.
Good starting points:
-BeForU's and Riyu's pages have been variously hosted on Konami Arcade-Fan and Konami Music Wave over the years. Also, sometimes something will come up on archive.org under konami.jp, while sometimes it will come up under konami.co.jp. Thus, looking at
http://www.konami.jp/am/am/beforu,
http://www.konami.jp/am/musicwave/beforu,
http://www.konami.co.jp/am/am/beforu, and
http://www.konami.co.jp/am/musicwave/beforu may each bring up different results.
-Try searching for other stuff on konami's website from the era you're interested in. I googled the
DDR 5th Mix homepage and found a link to a BeForU page that existed at the time. if you just click on the link now it redirects to something else, BUT if you plug the address it gives you into archive.org it gives you a site with the blogs I just discovered today! So try stuff like that.
Sorry if this is incredibly long-winded, but as most of you know I usually am long-winded. XP I just think all this random orimen stuff is really cool, and I'm hoping that some of you will join me in my search.
EDIT to avoid double-posting:
this section of one of BeForU's former homepages mentions some sort of huuuuge fan-run DDR tournament, from what I can tell. (The page also has a super-cute picture of Noria with what looks like a Playstation controller.) It gives a link to
http://homepage1.nifty.com/kyala/festa/ , which luckily enough is still online with the vast majority of images intact. I've found a whole bunch of Riyu pics
here, and I'm still checking through this site. I love archive.org so hard!
