GameBanana

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GameBanana
GameBanana logo
Gamebanana-screenshot.png
URL https://gamebanana.com/
Status Online!
Archiving status Not saved yet
Archiving type Unknown
IRC channel #archiveteam-bs (on hackint)

GameBanana is a service for hosting game mods, maps, and other files, especially in the Valve communities (Team Fortress, Counter-Strike). It's not showing any imminent signs of distress but the most popular games on it are aging quite a bit.

Most of the URL structure for the webpages is self-explanatory, mostly /games/<game-ID> or /<item-type>/games/<game-ID> or /<item-type>/cats/<category-ID>, for example https://gamebanana.com/games/2 or https://gamebanana.com/mods/cats/5535.

The actual data on the website is dynamically loaded from an API, which also contains data that is not displayed on the website. Look for network requests to URLs beginning with https://gamebanana.com/apiv11/. Warning: the downloads API includes an md5 checksum field, but the field appears to be empty for most records.

A basic script to download an entire category exists here https://archive.org/download/cssmaps/yank-gamebanana-maps.sh, adjust the "/apiv11/Mod/Index" URL to grab a different hierarchy. (All of the Counter-Strike: Source maps have been uploaded to archive.org in https://archive.org/details/cssmaps/)