A searchable collection of GameMaker games that were available on the old games portal for YoYo Games, which launched in 2007 on yoyogames.com.
In 2011 the portal was moved to sandbox.yoyogames.com, and was shutdown in 2016. Due to the portal being moved to the sandbox sub-domain, the old YoYo Games website is often referred to as the "Sandbox".
Nearly all the games available on the site in 2014 when it was saved by the archivist group ArchiveTeam, so a bit over 100,000 games.
Some games were missing from that collection unfortunately.
ArchiveTeam scraped the Sandbox into the WARC format, which essentially captures websites quite thoroughly in how individual pages connect to one another. They are great for preserving websites as historical records, but do not preserve site features such as search.
Indeed, this archive as well as other automated scrapes of the Sandbox are what underly navigating through sandbox.yoyogames.com on the Wayback Machine. One cannot use the search box that was originally on the site however, which this website aims to restore.
A small proportion of games were headerless files i.e. raw binary streams. These files will most likely be GMK files—the project files of GameMaker—which had their filenames lost by the original Sandbox uploader.
Unfortunately the ArchiveTeam scrape only captured the low-quality thumbnails present on the Sandbox, and not the originally uploaded screenshots. The Wayback Machine did independently have screenshots saved, but only for a relatively few number of games.
I partially reconstructed the database of the Sandbox using scraped data from the ArchiveTeam WARCs, and cleaned it. I use vanilla CSS/JavaScript to enable the site functionality. The source code is available on GitHub (the games.json file is my final game's metadata store).
The games are hosted on the Internet Archive, which this site simply directly links to. I uploaded the games in multiple ~50GB ZIPs, which can be seen on my IA profile. Their uploader is handy in that it opens ZIP files and exposes access to individual files inside them.
I host this site using GitHub Pages.
They're uploaded in chunks in alphabetical order. They're in chunks because ZIP files over 50GB can be problematic to the Internet Archive's backend. Originally I was uploading each game separately to the IA, but I was told that was a bad idea because of how IA backend works and how it would pollute search queries.
Pages for games on the Sandbox had their own slugs, but I sanitized them to a limited set of characters which would prevent compatibility problems for versions of Windows.
There were duplicate slugs, which I had envisioned to be separated by their unique database IDs in the respective slugs' folder in the respective chunk. Unfortunately I messed this up somehow and only realised I had after the arduous process of uploading all the chunks, so I uploaded a supplementary item just for these games with duplicate slugs.
As the Internet Archive hosts the actual game downloads, I'd strongly encourage donating to the IA, and mention yygarchive.org. The work they do is simply amazing and does much more good for the world beyond pleasing nostalgic nerds.
Mark Overmars and the YoYo Games team for introducing game development to a generation.
Game Jolt, 64Digits and other game portals which inadvertently filled the vacuum left when the Sandbox started to whittle down.
ArchiveTeam for saving the Sandbox. chfoo led the effort, with many kind folk donating their bandwidth to get everything downloaded.
The Internet Archive for adding the ArchiveTeam save of Sandbox into their Wayback Machine. Additionally, they host the archive of extracted games I made, which I directly interface with on this site.
BlueMaxima, Spasman, and many others for their efforts in preserving GameMaker games.
Glen Chudley and Joseph Rooke for helping with initial hosting costs of yygarchive.org's original iteration.
Ilias Deros for improving search capabilities of yygarchive.org's original iteration.