idk if covers count all that much but there used to be a LOOOOOOOOOT more Leon covers and stuff on youtube in the early 2010s that are just GONE now
Apparently i heard that there used to be a user by the name of NoNeed4Cosplay that had a lot of Leon stuff on their acc but they deleted before i came back to the fandom in 2013
But that's just the tip of the iceberg, apparently.
I sometimes browse the backlogs on Niconico, and sometimes i like to look at the old Vocarankings to see what was popular at the time.
One time i found this:
Apparently this video is CHOCK FULL of old Engloid uploads that you can't find on the website anymore. And there's lots of other vocarankings like this on the site. (i reaallly wish i could see the full version of the video in the thumbnail T_T)
But thats NOTHING compared to this other thing i found....
Seeing as i am a crazy person who has the unfortunate circumstance of having a very obscure Vocaloid as their favourite, I occasionally
scrape the bottom of the barrel do advanced Google searches to find any content i've never seen before. And one day a long time ago i found a V1-era Vocaloid forum (endorsed by Zero-G no doubt!), that looked a little defunct at the time. (i think this was around 2014 or 2015 i first stumbled upon this site) Sadly, this website is now officially dead.
vocaloid-user.net - This website is for sale! - vocaloid user Resources and Information. (Clicking this link just takes you to a domain placeholder thingy i dont know what its called)
But at one time, a few years ago, you could view the old forums and hear old people from 2004-05 hilariously trash-talk Leon and other V1s (i remember there was an April Fools thread someone made that said that Disney was going to decide to use either Leon or Lola as Donald Duck's new voice, this place was just as entertaining to read as it sounds)
But why is this old, defunct forum related to the thread discussion, you ask? Well...
One day i was curious to see what the website looked like back in the mid 2000s, so I put it through the Wayback Machine, and well,
316 files. 315.20 GIGABYTES WORTH OF CONTENT. ALL OF IT FROM THE PRE-MIKU ERA.
This screenshot was taken from the June 17th, 2007 capture of the website, which you can view
here.
This was taken a little over a week before Sweet Ann came out. And seeing this is an English-based website,
that means that this is over 315.20 gigabytes of almost EXCLUSIVELY LEON, LOLA, AND MIRIAM CONTENT.
But alas, alas.....
When you click on one of the links for one of these song files you either get an Access Denied error, (you would've needed to login to access that part of the site) or a "Got an HTTP 302 response at crawl time" error on Wayback Machine's end (the same happens if you happen to get on the actual song page, and try to click Download Now, unfortunately)
So close, and yet, so far.......
Im honestly baffled that there was that many people on the website uploading SO MUCH CONTENT for the V1s and yet.... all of it is gone now. This was before YouTube got really popular and was used by everybody, so bear in mind that most old creative content what was made on the Internet at the time was scattered all over various websites just like this one, and much like this website, a lot of it is
nowhere to be found anymore.
There could've been a whole minor scene for the V1s that we'll just never know about because it got lost to time.
And you better believe it bugs me. :))))))))))))
So basically, yeah. If there's any possible way of getting at least SOME of this content back, i'd love to know. So yeah. That's all i gotta say for now.