A lazy GameMaker game archival project
instance_archive is a ragtag collection of freely available games programmed in the GameMaker platform pre-Studio era (between original release and 8.1). These games are becoming unplayable on modern systems via traditional means the older they get; games made in anything pre 6.1 is a crapshoot, with attempts at running them (and earlier versions of GameMaker itself, funnily enough) on a modern 64-bit Windows 10 machine resulting in them instantly crashing.
instance_archive is a collection of GameMaker games, ready to be run with a launcher. The games included have been converted with the official GameMaker 6.1 conversion tool to run on higher versions of Windows than XP, and everything should, hopefully, just work. (Original EXEs are included alongside the modified ones for posterity.)
While the organizing and testing is mainly a solo effort, thanks need to go out to Dri0m, who helped me unpack the ArchiveTeam's efforts to backup the YoYo Games Sandbox, and the ArchiveTeam for doing that backup effort in the first place. Sources include that backup, GameMakerGames.com, Archive.org's automated grabs of zips, and a few other, smaller websites.
This collection is technically curated. There are a little over 880 games in here; the notable ones include a selection of the most played games on the Sandbox, all the Featured games on the Sandbox, all the highly rated games on GameMakerGames.com, the full collections of a few notable authors, and a couple of other miscellanious ones (like the old GameMaker.nl site's showcase). I don't guarantee the quality of anything here, but at the same time, they probably had to have been well liked to get in here.
At the moment, instance_archive is, I'll admit, pretty slapshod. I did originally keep small amounts of metadata on everything that was going in the collection, but after a while I just gave up on the idea, and went for a "make sure it works then throw it in" approach. If you have complaints, please, tell me when I don't have both Flashpoint and instance_archive to work on.
Last updated 15/10/2021. You can grab it from Archive.org.
More coming soon.