Sometimes an old company website survives not because the company kept it alive, but because somebody else decided it was worth rescuing.
Visit the preserved Ratbag archive
The surviving landing page is minimal and carries a 2001–2002 Ratbag Pty Ltd copyright. That tiny fragment matters because Ratbag Games itself is long gone.
The Adelaide studio began in 1993 as Emergent Software, later became Ratbag, and built a reputation around racing games. Its titles included Powerslide, Dirt Track Racing, Dirt Track Racing: Sprint Cars, Leadfoot, Dirt Track Racing 2, Saturday Night Speedway, and World of Outlaws: Sprint Cars 2002.
Ratbag’s games used the company’s own Difference Engine and leaned hard into vehicle physics and dirt-track racing at a time when that was still a fairly specialized PC niche.
The company was acquired by Midway in 2005 and shut down not long afterward.
That is where the archive becomes more than a dead corporate page.
Corporate websites are historical documents too
Old company websites are often treated as disposable because they were promotional. But promotional pages preserve details that can disappear elsewhere: screenshots, product descriptions, staff credits, technical claims, logos, downloadable material, release-era language, and the way a company presented itself while it still existed.
Once a studio closes, that material tends to evaporate quickly.
A preserved Ratbag site therefore helps document Australian game development from the late 1990s and early 2000s. It also captures a period when independent and midsize studios commonly maintained their own small corporate sites rather than funneling everything through social platforms and publisher storefronts.
Even the bare copyright line is useful. It anchors the preserved page to the exact period when Ratbag was releasing some of its best-known racing titles.
This is one reason digital preservation cannot focus only on famous homepages and major institutions. The Web’s historical record is full of ordinary commercial sites that nobody expected to become artifacts.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many pages like this: small corporate fossils whose companies, products, and technologies have moved on.
The Ratbag archive is not glamorous. It does not need to be. It keeps one more piece of the old games industry from becoming a sentence with no supporting evidence.