Help finding the original source of old Xenosaga story leak from 2002 posted by an employee

Xenogears/Xenosaga/Xenoblade Xenogears and Xenosaga Preservation
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Heyo! So I’ve been working on a pretty massive Xeno Series Analysis as a big loveletter to all the Xeno games for over 2 years now, and one of the things I’m working on is a pretty close examination of early Xenosaga material and the development history of it. So I would love to ask for some help with tracking down the source of one piece of information as closely as possible.

One of these old pieces of material was a supposed document that was leaked by a Monolith Soft employee in 2002, which had short summaries about characters and story elements in Xenosaga.

Here is a repost of it on the Xenogears-Xenosaga studyguide site:

https://xenogearsxenosagastudyguide.blogspot.com/p/1.html

The oldest repost of it I was able to find dates back to at least May 18th 2002 (found the link reposted on a Japanese Xeno forum), and has been archived on the Waybackmachine. The blog seems to be from english speaking Xeno fan who reposted it on their geocities blog, and I’d say it’s very likely that whichever Xeno fan sites were most popular durning May 18th 2002 would have this link also reposted there, and might even have the person who created the Geocities blog talk about where they found it.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.geocities.co.jp/CollegeLife-Lounge/6906*

So the 3 things I’d like help with is firstly finding a copy of the original developer leak document in its original japanese writing if anyone knows where to find it so that it can be archived fully in its original writing, if possible track down the various locations this leak was reposted by learning more about which Xeno fansites were popular back then and look at any archives of them in the Waybackmachine, and lastly even find the original location and thread where this developer was posting.

Another thing for fun I’d love to hear is your own personal thoughts on the leak as a Xeno fan. I just like to hear the history of old Xeno fan sites and discussion so if you were in any old Xeno fandoms and have seen this leak before, tell me any memories or thoughts you have of that time! I’d love to hear it!

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One site that I stumbled upon that seems to have been the biggest of its time was Zenosaga.com, however all of its forum/bbs links are broken on the Waybackmachine so if anyone knows someone who has a local backup of the site please let me know!

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This is a very interesting topic! Thanks for sharing. I tried to run a big search against old 2chan and BBS threads. Nothing really cropped up for me there, but I did remember this board exists: https://xenoonline.com/

They were known as EWIGKEIT back in the day (wayback https://web.archive.org/web/20010805000305/http://www.tiara.cc/\~eldridge/xenogears/ ) and have been around since 98. The forums seem to go back to about 2004 but maybe there’s a lead burried in there.

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Ooo thank you so much for your help searching! I’ve been trying to find the old URLs for xenoonline for a while with no luck so you’ve definitely helped a bunch already to find more leads! It seems to me that the "xenoonline URL only started being in use in 2004, and before that they were under some different names.

I managed to find an old BBS link where they seem to be discussing moving URLs ( ŒfŽ¦” ), so hopefully we’re able to track down what the URL link was before 2001, and inbetween 2001 and 2004.