We met Don, the owner of Console Variations, last year for an episode of The Retroad Show, not only to shake hands with the owner of our favourite preservation website, but to witness his mighty retro gaming collection in person.
Mighty was an understatement, featuring one of one consoles, an MTV collection of GameCubes, ridiculously rare accessories and a Nintendo DS handheld that costs more than my down payment on my house.
Don had these consoles for a very important reason: he was the owner of ConsoleVariations.com, a free resource to discover and document every variant of gaming consoles ever released into the wild, and not into the wild.
Don founded ConsoleVariations in 2018 to document and preserve video game history, with data, images and videos of some of the world's rarest game consoles, which we had the opportunity of witnessing in person.
However, recently, Don's creation was hacked. A user uploaded a PHP script behind multiple images uploaded onto his free resource, with a likely goal of extracting data and/or damaging the website entirely.
Unfortunately, it worked, and the website has been forced to go back to basics, removing some very vital features that make preservation easy and open to the public. Features such as image uploads, account creation, and searching have now been officially removed.
We spoke with Don to ask about the future of Console Variations, and although it's certainly taking a step back and will likely do so for a while, it's clear that Don is determined to continue his work and get to work on fixing the hack's mess alongside bringing back some of the features that were removed, such as "uploading images by the end of the month".
It's upsetting to see this free resource being forced to downgrade itself, and even more so, thinking about the cretin that would do this to such a great, free, friendly resource that I know has helped thousands of gamers and collectors since its founding.
Don's community are already stepping in offering donations and help to get this back up and working again. Don's focus is on working with his developers to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we, too, hope that he can. We highly recommend following ConsoleVariations on socials to keep updated with the progress.
