The Video Game History Foundation has launched a digital archive containing hundreds of thousands of gaming documents, allowing anyone to be a games historian. Preservation within the gaming space has become a popular talking point in recent years, as gaming magazines are pulled from shelves, the physical market slowly dies out, and digital marketplaces shut down, rendering some games completely unplayable.

The Video Game History Foundation is one organisation trying to preserve the games industry’s history and has collected a staggering number of materials, including development documents, gaming magazines, and other such paraphernalia. Since 2017, the organisation has been working to make the materials more widely available to the public, with a digital library. And while it’s not quite finished, an early access version of that library has at last gone live.

Said library can be visited via this link, although at the time of writing it’s suffering from timeout errors due to high demand. The library currently offers a curated selection of over 30,000 files, which includes over 1,500 fully searchable and out-of-print gaming magazines, such as issues of Official Sega Magazine and the recently defunct Play magazine. If you never got to attend E3, you can experience it vicariously through a collection of old guidebooks that provide insight into its first 12 years in operation.

One of the VGHF’s personal highlights is a collection of materials by producer Mark Flitman, who worked on a number of games across studios like Konami and Acclaim throughout the 90s and 00s. The whole thing is essentially a treasure trove for preservationists and retro game enthusiasts, and the VGHF hopes its digital library will allow anyone to be a video game historian. ‘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 favourite game. We think this is the start of something that will change how people study the history of video games,’ reads a post on the VGHF website.

The VGHF fully intends to upload more materials to the archive, but the one downside is that it can’t share any of the out-of-print games it has collected. US copyright law prevents it from sharing digital access to such titles. Last year, the VGHF tried to convince the US Copyright Office to make an exemption, so researchers wouldn’t have to travel to the organisation’s premises just to access these games.

It ultimately failed, but the VGHF’s website says it is ‘fighting to change this law in coordination with the software preservation community.’. Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

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