Recovering deleted Gamespot videos

Hi! So, I've been looking for prerelease content for Spyro: Year of the Dragon for a while now and I noticed that earlier versions of the site featured five different videos of a prototype version of the game. The video files themselves were not archived and cannot be recovered using the wayback machine. Nowadays, there is only one video still available on the site and it cannot be viewed without downloading the video file directly due to an issue with the video player.

I was wondering if there's any way to recover the lost videos? I'm assuming there's nothing I can personally do about it as the video files were not archived and unlike the one remaining video it seems as though the files for the videos have been removed from the servers as well as their corresponding pages. Would it be possible that content from the site is archived by the moderators in some format? I'm really hoping this little piece of gaming history isn't lost.

Thanks in advance!

@hwd405: We have a project in the works to recover as many of the old site videos as we can, but unfortunately I can't give an ETA at the moment. @Willy105 I'm afraid we do not have the old user videos. : (

Yeah, it would also be great if we could recover the Gamespot User Videos that used to be hosted on this site. I can't seem to find a way to find them.

@wemmick: Thanks for the reply! Just to clear up, does this mean recovering videos that have been deleted from the site or just fixing the old videos currently on the site that don't play? Regardless I'm really looking forwards to seeing where this project goes, and I hope it goes well! I'll be keeping an eye on the website.

@hwd405: Honestly, I'm not sure. I know we'll try to restore any that are on the site that don't work. If there are others "lying around" not tied to pages on the site currently, we'll try to get those back in circulation as well.

@wemmick: Ahh, I see what you mean. I think I've heard that there's a number of videos on the servers that aren't currently tied to pages / had their pages removed but not their video files. By the looks of it the missing Spyro videos aren't referenced at all in the api and there doesn't seem to be a direct download link to the file (e.g. editing the download link to "Movie 2" to something like https://gamespot-pdl.akamaized.net/d3/gsc//spyro3_3_700.flv just brings up a file not found error) so it seems as though they've been deleted from the server side and so they're probably not just lying around unfortunately, so I doubt they'll be recovered unless they happen to have been stored by Gamespot somewhere other than on the site. A big shame, but I hope that the project goes well regardless and I wish you luck!

@wemmick: What happened to them?

@Willy105: It was some time ago, but I believe they were deleted. When we moved to the new platform in 2013, we had no way to host the videos, there were very few to begin with, and there wasn't much user interest in them, so I think they were removed and deleted.