Ever since we launched our digital library earlier this year, we’ve been hard at work continuing to digitize new collections. We’ll be sharing more about those in the future, but we wanted to put a spotlight on a collection we made available this month.
During the earlier years of the Game Developers Conference, speakers had to submit papers about their talks. That’s how most academic conferences still work, but it’s pretty unusual for video game event! All the papers would be compiled into massive 1000-page which were given out to attendees.
Not many developers kept these huge tomes around for 25+ years. But we’ve collected enough copies that we’ve been able to debind and scan our duplicates to make them accessible through our digital library.
So far, we’ve scanned five books, from 1997–2001). There’s over 300 game dev talks in these, most of which haven’t been available in decades! This is a terrific resource for seeing inside the development community. There’s talks about game dev skills, but also reflections on the state of the gaming, issues affecting the industry, and retrospectives on the development of beloved games like Baldur’s Gate and Quake.
These books of GDC proceedings are available for free for research use in our digital archive. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s in these books, and we look forward to seeing what researchers find in them!