As the video game industry shifts from physical media to a digital future, game preservation is an increasingly relevant topic. Saving the history of the medium is important, and one gaming historian has just successfully preserved one of the rarest video games ever made.
Video game scholar Bruno de Figueiredo has announced (via Time Extension) that he has posted the ISO online for TRIPITAKA, the sequel to Cosmology of Kyoto. The original title was released in 1993 in Japan by SoftEdge, and this non-linear adventure game was released in North America the following year where it gained a small following. The sequel is so obscure that only a single physical copy of TRIPITAKA is known to exist.
After a long search, uncertain that it even existed, I finally located the CD-ROM TRIPITAKA 玄奘三蔵求法の旅, the elusive sequel to the legendary Cosmology of Kyoto. Here is the ISO for your emulational pleasure.https://t.co/vPtRjuo0BO
— Bruno de Figueiredo (@dieubussy) May 22, 2025
The physical CD-ROM for TRIPITAKA was sold via Yahoo Japan in 2023 for just under $300. After nearly two years, Figueiredo successfully convinced the owner to allow him to share the game online for posterity.
Last year, Xbox put together a team dedicated to game preservation, while Sony set up its own game preservation team two years prior. Nintendo has taken a more dim view of game preservation, and the upcoming Switch 2 game key cards has caused some to question how the games attached to them will be saved for future generations. The U.S. Copyright Office also dealt the game preservation movement a blow when it refused to allow libraries to share their game collections online.