Video Game History Foundation Posts A Treasure Trove Of Rare Gaming Mags For Free
Fans who want to revisit memories of yesteryear will be pleased to see that a significant portion of the archive is comprised of digitized versions of gaming magazines. There are more than 1,500 available, from out-of-print publications to industry trade magazines that weren’t distributed to the public. The foundation even got its hands on 100 of the first CDs made for the GamePro magazine art and press release archives.
Gaming historians will appreciate the breadth and depth of behind-the-scenes content from game developers. These include design documentation, artwork, and videos that provide an insight into how games were made. One of the highlights of this part of the collection are the mountain of materials acquired from game producer Mark Flitman, who worked at 90’s powerhouses such as Konami, Acclaim, and Midway.
To make this all accessible as possible the foundation developed a portal to search through everything, reminiscent of a system commonly seen at libraries. The team worked over the years to make the archive fully text searchable alongside providing rich metadata. This should make it easy to find a specific piece of media for fans and researchers alike, as the foundation says that it has “best-in-class discovery features.”
It's heartwarming to see the preservation efforts being undertaken by the foundation. There have been too many stories of materials generated during game development that have been lost to the ether, never to be enjoyed again. Ideally, someday we'll hopefully get to a point where studios and publisher send copies of materials automatically, to ensure that video game history doesn’t just disappear.
