The Video Game History Foundation has officially opened up digital access to a large portion of its massive archives today, offering fans and researchers unprecedented access to information and ephemera surrounding the past 50 years of the game industry.
Today’s launch of the VGHF Library comprises more than 30,000 indexed and curated files, including high-quality artwork, promotional material, and searchable full-text archives over 1,500 video game magazine issues. This initial dump of digital materials also contains never-before-seen game development and production archival material stored by the VGHF, such as over 100 hours of raw production files from the creation of the Myst series or Sonic the Hedgehog concept art and design files contributed by artist Tom Payne.
A labor of love
In a blog post and accompanying launch video, VGHF head librarian Phil Salvador explains how today’s launch is the culmination of a dream the organization has had since its launch in 2017. But it’s also just the start of an ongoing process to digitize the VGHF’s mountains of unprocessed physical material into a cataloged digital form, so people can access it “without having to fly to California.”
The VGHF doesn’t require any special credentials or even a free account to access its archives, a fact that might be contributing to overloaded servers on this launch day. Despite those server issues, amateur researchers online are already sharing crucial library-derived information about the history of describing games as “immersive” or that one time Garfield ranked games in GamePro, for instance.
“Anyone studying video game history is a researcher,” Salvador writes. “Our library is for anyone who wants to study video game history—whether you’re a scholar who wants to supplement your academic resources, or a YouTuber making a video about the story of your favorite game.”
In the intro video, Salvador talks about looking through their archives and stumbling on the existence of Pretzel Pete, a little-remembered early 3D driving/platform game. Despite its extreme obscurity, the game is nonetheless mentioned in the 1999 E3 catalog and an old issue of PC Gamer, both of which are now memorialized forever in the VGHF digital archives.
Getting this kind of obscure information into a digitized, easily searchable form was “a lot harder than it sounds,” Salvador said. Beyond getting archival-quality scans of the magazines themselves (a process aided by community efforts like RetroMags and Out of Print Archive), extracting the text from those pages proved difficult for OCR software designed for the high-contrast, black-text-on-white-background world of business documents. “If you’ve ever read a ’90s video game magazine, you know how crazy those magazine layouts get,” Salvador said.
To get around that problem, Salvador said VGHF Director of Technology Travis Brown spent months developing a specially designed text-recognition tool that “handles even the toughest magazine pages with no problem” and represents “a significant leap in quality over what we had before.” That means it’s easier than ever to find 81 separate mentions of Clu Clu Land from across dozens of different issues with a single search.
Unfortunately, the vast wealth of video game information on offer here does not include direct, playable access to retail video games, which libraries can’t share digitally due to the limitations of the DMCA. But the VGHF and other organizations “continue to challenge those copyright rules every three years,” leaving some hope that digital libraries like this may soon include access to the source material being discussed.