The Video Game History Foundation built a video game digital library for the public to access and study. (Image Credit: Video Game History Foundation)
There are tens of thousands of video game industry ephemera files that video game enthusiasts can’t wait to look at for free! Now, the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) has made them available in a digital library---made from VGHF’s physical collection. The early access library launch features never-before-seen game development assets, over 1,500 full-text searchable out-of-print video game magazines, promotional materials, artwork, and gaming relics.
VGHF mentioned documents from Mark Flitman, a retired video game producer, production materials from Myst developers Cyan, press assets in digitized CDs from GamePro, and a collection of FromSoftware promotional materials.
Members of the gaming community helped with this project by scanning video game magazines over the years and donating or digitizing the items for the digital library. Groups like Retromags and Out-of-Print Archive provided hundreds of magazine scans. Meanwhile, private collectors loaned an early electronic game commercial and a rare educational game catalog to the VGHF.
With the digital video game library, the gaming community can study the video game production process with access to its raw materials. The nonprofit organization collects and preserves historical source code and assets, like development tools, raw art, and documentation. They have even used those collections to restore lost games.
VGHF also invested in new infrastructure to perform high-quality magazine scans in-house if they receive an extra copy. They unbind and feed each page through an extremely powerful scanner that scans close to 50 pages per minute at archival quality.
Additionally, VGHF wanted to make this a good resource for researchers by making the magazines fully tech-searchable. This is more difficult than it sounds. The software that searches through a magazine scan works on plain documents. That means high-contrast text and dark fonts on light backgrounds. In some cases, scans may look like the mess we see on backgrounds from ’90s magazines. So the director of technology developed a next-gen text recognition tool that can handle the toughest pages---a big leap in quality. The organization also developed a digital archive portal with powerful search and navigation features.
According to Phil Salvador, the library director, this is the “first wave of open access content” being made available to the public. VGHF expects to build and add more material to the library “over the next coming years.” They have a storage room full of material they plan to keep processing. “We've been building those for a long time and think this will change how people study video game history.”
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