Myrient

» see myrient.erista.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

My own downloading years ran from about 1999 to the middle of the next decade, over a modem first and then over an internet cafe connection that belonged to somebody else. The appetite Myrient served is the exact same appetite. The generation is wrong: by 2022 I was forty and had not chased a ROM set in fifteen years. What I can read without any nostalgia at all is the invoice, because a 390 terabyte public mirror is a storage and bandwidth problem before it is anything else, and that turned out to be the whole story.

It opened on 14 October 2022 and it was a directory listing. No account, no wait timer, no ad interstitial counting down, no torrent client. You clicked into No-Intro for cartridge systems or Redump for the disc-based ones, found the console, found the file, and it downloaded at whatever your line could take. The arcade sets were there too, alongside TOSEC and the Total DOS Collection.

The reason it mattered more than the dozens of ROM sites before it is that it was not curated by taste. No-Intro and Redump are preservation projects that produce verified, checksummed, complete sets of what was actually released, and Myrient simply served those sets in full. There was nothing to browse and nothing to recommend. It was the shelf, not the shop.

~ the record ~

~ three hundred and ninety terabytes ~

That number is worth sitting with. It is not a figure you reach by uploading things you like. It is a complete-set number, every region and every revision and every verified dump of systems going back four decades, and it only makes sense if the goal was completeness rather than popularity.

Serving it publicly over HTTP is the expensive choice, and it was a deliberate one. Torrents push the bandwidth cost onto the swarm, which is why almost everyone else does it that way, but torrents also require the person on the other end to install something and understand something. Myrient absorbed that cost so a person who wanted one file could click one link. That decision is why it was useful and it is also why it died.

~ the monthly bill ~

The shutdown notice went up on 27 February 2026 and named its causes plainly. Donations had stopped keeping pace with traffic. Storage got more expensive, with memory and drive prices both climbing through 2025 in a way anybody buying hardware that year felt. And paywalled download managers had started routing around the site's protections to resell access to files Myrient was giving away free, which meant the operator was paying for bandwidth so that somebody else could charge for it.

Underneath all of it was one line: the administrator, a single person known publicly as Alexey, had been covering more than six thousand dollars a month himself. That is not a project that failed. That is a project that worked so well it became a salary-sized personal expense, sustained for three and a half years by somebody who was never going to be able to sustain it forever.

~ nobody sued anybody ~

Every archive of this kind in the last twenty years died the same way. EmuParadise pulled its own downloads in 2018 under legal threat. Nintendo took LoveROMs and RomUniverse apart in court. So the reasonable assumption when Myrient announced a date was that lawyers had arrived, and they had not. There was no letter and no seizure banner on the domain. It closed on 31 March 2026 because of arithmetic.

The ending is better than most. A volunteer group calling itself the Minerva Archive announced on 12 March 2026 that it had finished copying the whole thing, 385 terabytes, and was generating public torrents so the collection would keep circulating without a single host paying for it. The site's sibling service hShop is still running, and donations now go there. The domain still answers, with an ASCII wordmark and one sentence in the past tense: once upon a time, Myrient was a fast and reliable video game preservation service.

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