Every year, more of gaming history is lost. Basements flood, papers dissolve, and the video games industry titans sadly pass away. The Video Game History Foundation is offering what is now the most comprehensive and searchable library of video game documentation. If you’re like me, it’s only when you dig through the mountains of old mags and design docs that you truly comprehend how meaningful physical media was to an entire generation of gamers.
Magazines were my everything. It started when my mother started to drag me to the supermarket every week for several hours of anxiety-ridden shopping. My mother was obsessive about getting everything we could require for a family of five, even if it would sit on the shelf for years, uneaten. I would push one shopping cart, and my mother would push another. I needed an escape. I would run to the magazine aisle every week and grab that month’s copy of Game Informer or EGM. I would push my nose into the magazines as if I could fall into them.
I didn’t comprehend it until years later, but those publications helped keep me sane. When print media slid, when GameStop officially discontinued Game Informer in August last year after 33 years, and when game companies quit including booklets and guides inside their game boxes, gamers didn’t just lose access to physical media. We also lost our personal attachment to the medium we so cherished, which made existing within the gaming sphere tangible. I would not be a writer if it weren’t for those magazines.
The VGHF Archive is a Fountain of Gaming Lore
The Video Game History Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for gaming preservation, unveiled its digital library last week. It’s an archive of not just magazines but trade publications, catalogs, memorabilia, and even some behind-the-scenes working documentation. You can find the original publicity booklet for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and FromSoftware’s beloved PS4 title Bloodborne. There are production videos and interviews from developer Cyan for the landmark adventure game Myst and directories for the E3 gaming showcases from 1995 through 2006. Other than watching old videos of PlayStation execs shouting “riiiidgggee, racceeer,” there are a few better ways to reminisce about that defunct gaming showcase.
In an interview over video chat, VGHF Library Director Phil Salvador told Gizmodo the archive was made to be as accessible as possible. While you may find .zip files full of magazine PDFs elsewhere on the web or your own stack of musty magazines sitting in a box in your attic, the VGHF archive is a research tool. In effect, anybody can become an amateur video game historian.
Even when you struggle to find keywords for the right documents, the VGHF’s archive is more easily parsed than any towering stack of funky-smelling periodicals. The library is searchable by keyword, titles, and date ranges. Digging through the magazine archives, I was struck by how much marketing around video games has changed. Several gaming magazine issues featured an advertisement for the cult classic PS2 game Ico before the game’s Western release. The image included a sprawling, impossible maze with the tagline “solve the puzzles or join the tormented souls forever.”
It was an eye-catching ad for a game that notoriously did not sell well in the U.S. Part of that may be due to the confusing advertising blitz before the game arrived in 2002. Salvador pointed to landmark titles like the seminal 1994 game Earthbound. Nintendo’s press releases showed that the company tried to market it from a “personal finance angle.” Those documents aren’t yet available in the archive, but the VGHF is working on them.
The collection started with the group’s founder, video game preservationist Frank Cifaldi, and his own personal magazine collection. The nonprofit invested in a quality debinder and scanner, but collecting the thousands of documents took years. The project started in 2017, and over the past eight years, a series of part-timers, volunteers, and Salvador have begged, borrowed, and bartered for more video game content. More outside groups like Retromags and Out-of-Print Archive donated magazine content, while more private collectors loaned out material to beef up the full library.
See for Yourself How the Gaming Sausage Gets Made
Families of video game executives have also contacted the group to offer documentation. The group highlighted a collection they dubbed the Mark Flitman papers. Flitman was an executive and producer at companies such as Konami, Acclaim, Midway, and Mindscape. His family invited the VGHF to digitize a hoard of old documents kept in his basement.
There are some stories you can find just by sleuthing through the back pages of gaming history. One file from the Flitman collection shows the initial design for a Nintendo 64 launch title called “Monster Dunk.” The game never made it past pre-production, but it included concepts for characters like “The Hunchback of Notre Dunk” and “The Ghost of Abrajam Lincoln (TM).” This ghostly Lincoln is described as “the slightly spiritualized head of Lincoln put on top of sour ghost body.” Sounds incredible, right? The devs received approval to develop the game, but a 1995 issues report noted Monster Dunk was “seriously understaffed.” The project was supposed to hit an April 1996 first draft deadline, but the game simply fizzled out, as many initial designs do.
It’s a dive into the sausage making of video games that few on the outside would normally get to see for themselves. Gaming, as an artistic medium, is restricted by funding, manpower, technology, and the whims of the market. For every landmark game like Myst, there’s a Monster Dunk—a game that never made it past the many, many hurdles of production.
“Not enough people are good video game historians, and it’s not because there’s not interest,” Salvador said. “It’s not because there’s a lack of skill; it’s because there’s often a lack of access to materials.”
So much of video game history gets lost simply because of storage. Salvador said they find so much history from early video game development in the Chicago area compared to studios from California because homes in the Windy City have basements, whereas Californians don’t.
Just because a file is digital doesn’t make it any more available for preservation. Modern publishers and industry groups have made it clear they do not want to grant researchers or players the ability to play out-of-print titles. The VGHF previously sponsored a study showing close to 90% of video games from past decades are not commercially available. The group also suffered a blow when the U.S. Copyright Office sided with game publishers and restricted historians’ access to non-accessible titles under fair use.
The archive won’t have access to actual games, at least not for the time being. Much to publishers’ chagrin, that lack of availability will only help push gamers toward emulation. Still, the nonprofit plans to update the archive with more material over time. Salvador said the team hopes more developers note the benefit of having such a resource available to everyone.
“A big part of our job is having those conversations with developers and saying this stuff really is valuable,” Salvador said. “We really want to preserve it and respect it.”