Original story, June 5, 2020: We at Ars Technica are proud to be members of video game archiving history today.
Whether that will remain on the site in the weeks to come remains to be seen. It'll be back.' As of press time, that guess has borne out, with at least one SimRefinery file upload appearing once again at the site. In a follow-up tweet, Scott opined, 'Don't worry. I get it. I have found that people who worked or work for very long-lived companies tend to get a random panic attack after these sorts of altruistic efforts and convince themselves of terrible, terrible ramifications. Until then, we'll have to console ourselves with the 20,000 downloads. This is not out of the ordinary when something blows up like this-not everyone is comfortable in their place of work or has a family they want to protect, and this amount of attention could potentially be detrimental to them and the engineer who let them make a copy.
The anonymous uploader who put SimRefinery up on Archive got cold feet, asked his stuff to be taken down, and will either track down if someone lays claim to it or not. As site administrator Jason Scott announced: Update, June 9, 2020: In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the original upload for this recovered copy of SimRefinery's prototype was taken down from.
