It’s finally arrived: our digital library archive is now open in early access! Our library team: library director Phil Salvador, director of technology Travis Brown, and artist and engineer Amanda Cifaldi all join foundation director Frank Cifaldi and show producer Robin Kunimune to celebrate and discuss the years-long project sampling just a portion of our physical collection. We highlight the library’s role in facilitating video game research, the importance of fair use, the novel tools and infrastructure we created in this process, legal and ethical considerations, and future plans for and potential of this digital archive.
*This episode has a follow-up bonus episode available to our paid tier Patreon members.
Digital Archive: archive.gamehistory.org
Library Catalog: library.gamehistory.org
You can listen to the Video Game History Hour every other Wednesday on Patreon (one day early at the $5 tier and above), on Spotify, or on our website.
Video Game History Foundation:
Email: podcast@gamehistory.org
Website: gamehistory.org
Support us on Patreon: /gamehistoryorg
TRANSCRIPT
–Transcript edited by Jeremy Seith
Frank Cifaldi 00:08
Welcome to a very special episode of the Video Game History Hour. My name is Frank Cifaldi, and joining me are three members of our team, actually four members. Robin’s here too. And, yeah, that’s right, Robin. Robin’s eyes are lighting up.
Robin Kunimune 00:24
I was not going to participate in this recording today.
Phil Salvador 00:27
Too bad!
Frank Cifaldi 00:28
Well, you’re here so you need to, otherwise, stay in your booth, Robin. But we’re here today. We’re all very excited because, as you’re hearing this, we will have finally launched the first public access to our digital library archive. As we’re recording this, however, it’s the day before, so we’re all very nervous in our tummies. But yeah, we’re going to spend the next hour sort of talking about where the library came from, what went into this product that we’re launching, what we’re hoping to see, what our hopes and dreams are, in general, about the library and just going to have a good time together. So why don’t we introduce ourselves? Because not every listener has heard all of our voices. Let’s start with you, Phil.
Phil Salvador 01:21
Oh, well, I’m Phil Salvador. I’m the library director at the Video Game History Foundation, and my voice might be a little dead as we’re recording this. I’ve just come back from a video game event where I was hooting and hollering a lot, and so might be a little raspy, but I think it just gives an air of mystique to what I’m talking about with the library.
Frank Cifaldi 01:39
Phil was at Gamescom, like, yelling at everybody. It was MAGFest, call out MAGFest. MAGFest rules.
Phil Salvador 01:46
It was Super MAGFest on the East Coast, and there was a great concert where it was like ’80s-’90s cover band, where they’re all dressed like Transformers for some reason. And my friend was on stage playing with them, and I screamed a lot, and then I haven’t been able to speak properly for about half a week.
Frank Cifaldi 01:59
So that is the best capsule of MAGFest, I think I’ve ever heard, as quickly as that was. Amanda, You’re up.
Amanda Cifaldi 02:07
I’m Amanda Cifaldi. I am a regular, recurring volunteer for the foundation, and for this project, worked on some of the creative and front end tech for this thing.
Frank Cifaldi 02:25
Cool, and then Travis. Travis has been on the show before, in profile, but for those who haven’t heard that, who are you?
Travis Brown 02:32
Yes, I’m Travis. I’m the director of technology, or volunteer director of technology. I don’t know what my official title is, but yeah, helping out behind the scenes on tooling and the infrastructure, basically wiring things up and getting everything ready for tomorrow, which is, yeah, exciting.
Frank Cifaldi 02:53
And then in the producer booth, as always, is Robin.
Robin Kunimune 02:55
Oh, I get to come out for a second? I’m Robin. I usually just produce the show, but sometimes I do join.
Frank Cifaldi 03:04
Feel free to join in. This is family fun time. So, yeah, you know what we’re talking about today is we’re celebrating the imminent launch of– are we calling it the early access of the digital archive, Phil?
Phil Salvador 03:19
I think we are still calling it early access because, and I want to before we even talk about what this tool is and what we have, and I do want to clarify that this is a work in progress, and it’s always going to be a work in progress. I think people might expect like, Oh, wow, we’re going to be able to see every single thing in your collection. But this is an ongoing project. We are still cataloging and processing and digitizing things. We’re going to keep upgrading and changing our systems over time, but we wanted to get this out to people sooner rather than later. If we waited to launch the library until we had absolutely every single thing in it, it would never launch. But we’re at a place now where we have a variety of exciting stuff people can use for research. We have some really robust systems in place, and at this point, it just makes sense to turn people loose on what we have now. So that’s why we’re calling it early access.
Frank Cifaldi 04:03
Well, you know, Amanda and I were talking early this morning. You may have noticed, listeners, that Amanda has the exact same surname as me. That is–
Frank Cifaldi 04:14
What a coincidence.
Amanda Cifaldi 04:14
I stole it.
Frank Cifaldi 04:15
So, we sometimes are together before office hours and after as well. We were talking this morning about this, and, you know, I think the way that we were describing it was like by opening up access to some of the material, and using the tools that we have, we’re really able to show, you know, not only what we collect, but what we can do with it. No, it is absolutely not the entirety of the foundation’s collection. I would estimate it’s less than 5% at this point, but it’s a remarkable amount within that 5%. I’m not saying that defensively. I’m just, you know, to set expectations like, this is, you know, the first of many milestones toward building, I don’t know, a better tomorrow for video game history research.But I think, yeah, to kind of start, I want to go backwards a little bit and just kind of describe the collection, right? Because this tool is access to a very specific, curated collection that is the backbone of what the Video Game History Foundation is. I’m not really exactly sure where to start this, because you could make the argument that this started 25 years ago in my mother’s apartment. Like, I was a young person on the internet who was interested in video game history. Specifically, I was interested in researching games that never came out, and what I had determined was the best resource for studying those things was video game magazines. And I had, you know, tried to talk to my local library about, like, back issues and of Nintendo Power and stuff like that, and they just didn’t have them, and so I started buying video game magazines on eBay for my own amateur research as, like, practically a teenager. And that collection, you know, it wasn’t substantial back then, but it literally is still in the library, like, right now. Like, the library that we have right now started there. You know, I ended up becoming a video game journalist for a long time, and continued collecting things. But really it was the, I don’t want to get into the entire origins of the foundation, but like, the foundation started on paper about nine years ago, as of this recording, almost nine years ago, before we went public, and at that time, as Amanda can attest to it was our shared living room was a bunch of white IKEA shelves full of back issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly.
Phil Salvador 06:55
Let the record show Amanda is like sighing and hanging her head as this is coming up.
Amanda Cifaldi 07:00
Well, something I was thinking about was, like, how many times we have moved those magazines? It’s been a lot.
Frank Cifaldi 07:15
Yeah. I mean, they’ve been in and out of storage, even when they were at the house, like–
Amanda Cifaldi 07:19
Right. They’ve moved offices. They, at minimum, went from the apartment we had, to the office, to the new office. And magazines are dense. They’re so heavy.
Frank Cifaldi 07:34
Yeah
Phil Salvador 07:35
If anyone ever moves, don’t put all your, like, books in one box, because it will be extraordinarily heavy. I helped a friend who’s a writer, move once, and the moving company was just furious about it. But that’s the hell we’ve lived in for years and years and years. But it’s also not just magazines. You had also been collecting, like, flyers from trade shows, along with folks like Steve Lin on our board of directors, has been collecting that kind of stuff, press kits, even developing documents that you may have come across. Like there’s been a lot of that, and it’s all just kind of lived in our offices for a while with a theoretical plan of, well, one day we’re going to do something about this, and it’s going to be accessible.
Frank Cifaldi 08:09
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Like I was collecting things that were of use to me in my research. I was, as I said, a journalist. I didn’t do the best job of keeping all the stuff that publishers sent me, but I kept some of it. I know you’re a fan of like, the Gizmondo stuff that I kept because I thought it was funny.
Phil Salvador 08:27
Oh yeah, we will–
Frank Cifaldi 08:28
I don’t know if you found the Phantom console stuff yet, but I kept that too.
Phil Salvador 08:33
I haven’t yet, but I will spotlight one of the things we have in there in the library that we’re launching with. We have a collection of press kits, and one of them is a press kit for the Gizmondo, which, for folks who don’t know that thing, it was a game console that may or may not have ties to the Swedish mob. It’s kind of unclear what happened there, but it’s suspect at best. But it’s a press kit titled, Gizmondo, I Can Do Anything, and it is printed on the highest quality paper I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s like the thickest, nicest card stock, and it’s like, oh, all their weird mafia money went into, like, promotion and printing for this thing. So that’s a really fun– we had a couple of those. We were able to debind one of them and scan it from the library. So that’s just one of the materials we have at launch.
Frank Cifaldi 09:15
Yeah. But to your point, Phil, like, you know, I was kind of doing it for myself at first. When the foundation started, it was formalizing the idea of a video game history research collection. And, yeah, I mean, I think one of the strengths of the foundation, and I’ve talked about this before, is that everyone on staff staff, like, paid staff, all two of us, like, we are people who do historical video game research, and that’s where this started. This didn’t start from a place of, you know, I don’t know a university library starting a video game collection or something like that, right? It started from like, What are the needs specifically of a video game history researcher? And that’s how the collection started. That’s how the foundation started. Because I just recognized that there wasn’t really, like, a formalized, organized collection for studying video game history outside of maybe the collection at the Strong Museum of Play, who we’ve talked about before, but really, like, you know, that’s how we started. And then bringing Phil in was something that we basically had to save up money for, like I had to figure out how a nonprofit makes money. I don’t know that I’ve actually figured that out yet, but–
Phil Salvador 10:32
Slowly is the answer.
Frank Cifaldi 10:34
Figured out enough to pay two people. And when we were, you know, talking to Phil, like, I was about to say, interviewing for the position, but we didn’t talk to anybody else.
Phil Salvador 10:48
It was a very weird interview. You brought me out, and you were like, Here’s our weird flamingo from the Godfather video game that we got as a promo item. Would you like to work for us? It was a very weird interview process. But–
Frank Cifaldi 11:00
Well, I mean, but really, the idea was, like, Phil, we’re building this thing from scratch. We don’t have, you know, the bandwidth to, like, manage you, really. You know, like, we need someone who can just come in and we can point at all this stuff and– which, you know, like some of it sure is unorganized, but give me credit, right? Like the magazines were on shelves alphabetically,
Frank Cifaldi 11:28
Like I had filled in full sets of US magazines like I had, I had gotten collections from developers and kept them in labeled boxes, stuff like that. But the notion was, Phil, like, take this and start, like, organizing this, organize the mess that is sort of around it, and work toward building a digital library. And the way that Phil described it, that that really told me that he gets it, was that you described us as a library startup.
Phil Salvador 11:28
That’s true.
Phil Salvador 11:57
Yeah, which isn’t a thing. Libraries exist for hundreds of years, there’s not usually new libraries. It doesn’t happen too often, so it’s been a daunting project. And I think that’s what we’re going to get into, is all the tools we’ve had to build up, all the systems that Travis and Amanda have helped us build. But one thing I want to emphasize before we get to that part is that I think what’s really important is that we’ve always had the mindset that what we’re building is not just stuff to look. What we’ve built is a tool. I know when we originally– when the foundation was first launched, I remember you put up a Google Drive folder called Video Game History Foundation digital library, where it was like, PDFs of, like, clippings you had of NES launch stuff. And we’ve purposely made this towards not just a bunch of files. This is a tool where you can discover things. This is a place where you can type in a keyword and then search by different categories of materials and time periods. And it helps you explain what the materials are, and can guide you from one thing to another. It is a powerful tool for doing research that I think the best testimonial I’ve heard of, that our launch video, which is up now by the time that you’re hearing this, we had a testimonial from Jordan Minor, who is the author of the book Video Game of the Year, and he said what he really appreciated about it is that it’s a great way to find fun surprises, that it’s a platform that’s not just about, you know, here’s some old magazines, here’s some things we found, but it’s a discovery system that’s kind of a playful, exciting way to explore video game history.
Frank Cifaldi 11:57
Yeah, and it’s coming from a place of, I mean, we’ve gone through a lot of like, taglines for what the foundation is, and I don’t remember my exact wording, but one of the awkward ones that I don’t think we ever published anywhere was something like, we give people the tools necessary to tell the story of video game history. Like, the idea is we’re the facilitators of people discovering video game history through what we call contemporary resources that are in our library and telling new stories from that. And Travis, I actually kind of want to tag you in here, because, like, you’re, I think you kind of predate all of this, and when we talked about this kind of thing, you know, before I even started the foundation.
Travis Brown 14:10
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that was actually the pretense of how we met originally, was I had, you know, ideas in my head about building out databases of databases, and how we would track all of these disparate, you know, DAT files that track all these binaries. And, you know, it was very Helter Skelter. It was like, Oh, we should do this. We should do this. We do this. And you’re like, Okay, like, yeah, in time. Like, but definitely, like, I think at the very beginning of the foundation we have been talking about how we get to this point, and I think that’s why it’s so exciting, it’s like, we’re finally getting there. And even before Phil came on board, like, we were evaluating technology and tools. And I remember thinking like, I can evaluate how good this tech is, but from a library management perspective, like I don’t know. I don’t have that experience. So when Phil came on, I think that was, like, a really big, you know, thing that allowed us to, kind of like complete the loop on putting together what makes sense from a library science perspective, but also from a technology and tools perspective.
Frank Cifaldi 15:18
Well, I’m remembering, as you’re talking that like me, you and Amanda, went to the Strong Museum in like 2017 I think it was, and we met with the leadership there, and we just kind of presented them with with the idea that, like you know, we want people to access video game history online. Do you want to maybe seek funding with us to figure this out, and it was a positive conversation, but we just didn’t really, like, there was no follow through on that. And, I don’t know if I’m going anywhere with this story, other than like, Oh, I remember it. But the point is that, like, we have been building toward this like, from before the beginning of the foundation. And, yeah, you’re absolutely right. I think for all of us it’s like, you know, I know my skill is, I know what things are useful and where to find them and how to get them. You know, your skills tend to be more on the technical infrastructure side. Amanda, you’re kind of good at, like, everything. But, you know, like, but you also, you know, your role in this, of course, was the front end. But, like, a lot of the conceptualizing, even in the early days of, like, what could this be? But then–
Amanda Cifaldi 16:35
Well and the muscle of moving all of that paper. Do not forget!
Frank Cifaldi 16:43
Oh my god, yeah. Yeah, like, Amanda has been the muscle here for years.
Amanda Cifaldi 16:46
Yeah, there’s a lot of video game brains here. I would argue I’m a lot of video game muscle.
Frank Cifaldi 16:54
But then yeah, to your point, Travis, I think like, really bringing Phil in is like, okay, like, Phil can, like, organize all of these disparate things and start making some cohesion out of it. And that was the piece we were missing for a long time.
Phil Salvador 17:07
Yeah. I mean, the way I thought about it is that you needed someone who knew how to do libraries, but was also a subject area expert. And that’s where I came in. And my first day was February, 1, 2022. My first day, this is like in a movie where, like, they have a scene set in the ’80s, and they try to make it a period piece where, like, people have big cell phones or whatever. My 2022 period piece was the first day I did video trainings on the library systems we had signed up for, split-screen playing the beta of Vampire Survivors, was my first day. So that just puts it in a certain time and place. I did absorb all of it, by the way, I also did okay in Vampire Survivors.
Frank Cifaldi 17:45
Are you playing right now?
Phil Salvador 17:48
No.
Amanda Cifaldi 17:50
I mean something that I want to call out about us as a group is, I think we all have an eye for, like, the utility of this resource. And, like Frank, you were talking about the background between both you and Phil of like, actually using these resources to create, you know, whatever it is you’re creating, you’re using it as a resource to build something else. And I think that shows in not just the collection that exists, but of the materials that we’re going to showcase.
Frank Cifaldi 18:34
Yeah, it is kind of an interesting challenge sometimes to make sure– And this is a challenge for any archive, I’m sure, that we’re not curating towards our personal tastes, necessarily.
Phil Salvador 18:47
So it is funny, because I think our launch collections do reflect that a little bit. That a preponderance of the material we have is either NES era stuff or, like, weird sicko shareware, CD-ROM, PC stuff. Like, there is a little bit of that in both directions. But, like, I have purposely tried to think, like, when we’re doing magazines, I know there’s ones people obviously want to see, but it was like, no, let’s get some PlayStation magazines in there. Let’s get some Xbox magazines, and let’s get a British Sega magazine. Like, there’s been an attempt to have a broad spectrum of stuff that people might want to research with. And I think that’s going back to the first time I was on the podcast as an employee of the foundation. I talked about the laws of library science. And there’s that really vital one of every user has a material, and every material has a user, and it’s the idea of, We have all this stuff, what can we select that not only is going to meet, you know, what our use– just thinking about use in both directions. Like everything we put up has to have a use, and everyone who comes to the library should be able to find themselves in their own interests in it. And for what we’re doing at launch, which I assume we’re going to be talking about next with our collections, we have been gearing it towards that. It’s like, if we are going to launch with 5% with, like, a vertical slice of what’s in our library, let’s purposely try to cater to a broad spectrum of what a library like ours could be, to show people what it is.
Phil Salvador 18:47
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s kind of talk about how– I don’t want to spend– because we can spend like, two hours on the tech honestly, like, I’m just thinking about things like, it’s not even just like the online back end, front end. It’s also just things like the investment in our tools for like digitizing things and all the research that went into that, and like learning how to, like rebind saddle stitch stapled magazines. And, you know, like, there’s just so many directions we could go. There’s so much that went into this, but
Phil Salvador 20:39
While Travis is here. I think we should talk about some of the very invisible tools Travis designed for us that are making such a huge difference. Because, you know, we have our library systems. Our library is powered by two systems. This is getting a bit into the weeds, but they’re called ArchivesSpace and Preservica, and it’s our catalog that manages all of our metadata, that’s ArchivesSpace, and Preservica is our system where you can actually access the content from. That’s where, you know, we have, like, all the materials are being preserved long term, and it provides a way for people to view them. And those systems don’t talk to each other, especially well most of the time. There is some built in integration, but it wasn’t really what we wanted. We wanted to have more control over what metadata appears in both places, making sure that, like, what you see in our catalog is what you see in the digital archive side of things. And to that end, we talked to Travis that we’re like, Hey, can we come up with a solution to this? And Travis has spent, you know, the last like, two years building and iterating on this tool, which I’ll hand over to you to talk a little bit about.
Travis Brown 21:38
Yeah, I mean, the big advantage of both of these systems is that while they don’t have the out of box things we need, they both have open APIs, which are pretty serviceable, can do a lot of things. And so there’s a lot of potential there to kind of create our own custom glue between these systems. And so, you know, in the interest of inane acronyms, you know, one of the first things we created was BUBSY, which is the Basic Utility for Batching and Syncing metadata. And so that’s one we probably put the most time and effort and cycles on. I mean, for the past three years nearly, Phil and I have met on a weekly basis and talked through what needs to be done, what looks, you know, what, kind of features we need to add. And so, yeah, we created this, basically a command line utility for syncing metadata between these two systems using–
Frank Cifaldi 22:32
Let me interrupt and, like, just play listener here, because I think there’s a lot of jargon happening. So, we have two systems, and it’s because we have a really large collection of physical things that need to be cataloged and accounted for, right? Like what they are and where they live. But in addition to that, we have digital things. Many of them are our digital versions of our physical things. So, for example, a scan of a magazine, right? And so the two systems, ArchivesSpace is what we use to catalog everything, right? Like, whether we have a digital version, whether it’s even possible to have a digital version or not, like, everything’s cataloged in ArchivesSpace. But then Preservica is the thing that we use to not only present the digital versions, ie, let you look at a PDF of a magazine online, but also, like, preserve that data in a safe way where there’s like, retention and redundancies and stuff built in and that, and that’s kind of what we pay them for, and the problem that we identified as, Well, first of all, we need both of these systems because we have things that are only physical, we have things that are only digital, etc. But the problem is that they don’t really talk to each other. And that’s what BUBSY is. That’s what BUBSY does. Is that a fair way of explaining that?
Phil Salvador 23:55
Yeah, it’s a system that says, This thing is this thing between two systems. Item A goes to Item B. Which, it’s funny, because we’re talking a lot about this. I assume folks listening to the podcast will be interested in kind of this nitty gritty, but the hope is that all this is going to be invisible. The hope is you won’t even notice. And it’s weird, because so much of our jobs for the last couple of years has been this invisible work. I mean, the library, for a long time, has been a theoretical collection of metadata linking to PDFs that made sense on paper. And it wasn’t until, in the last half year, I would say, that we really started to think like, oh, this is a really good tool, because we put years of that work behind the scenes, because we’ve had people, you know, sustaining us through Patreon and donations we’ve had the time and flexibility to get that foundation in place with tools like BUBSY. I just love that we called it BUBSY. I remember one time Travis was visiting the office, and we had a conversation where I think, Travis, I think you said out loud, I don’t think we should give BUBSY admin access, which I think we eventually did give BUBSY admin access. But like those are the kind of things we say in the office because of these acronyms. We have a separate one elsewhere in the system for helping make things visible, called the General Entity X-poser, or GEX.
Frank Cifaldi 25:10
Oh, I forgot about GEX!
Phil Salvador 25:11
We are insufferable here at the Video Game History Foundation. But the point is, we have put so much work into all this foundational stuff that I don’t think when people think about, what does a library startup do? That’s stuff you have to figure out. Like, there in other places, there already are systems and catalogs and repositories in place. We had to figure all that out. And that is not as easy as it sounds. And again, the goal is, hopefully the user just won’t even notice.
Frank Cifaldi 25:36
yeah, I mean, like, it’s hard to convey that, like, we’re just not interested in anything off the shelf. Like we tried off the shelf solutions for accessing things, and we very nearly launched an off the shelf solution for accessing our digital material. But what we’ve built, I don’t believe that if we hand this to someone, they will go, Oh, my God, this is incredible, for the most part, because everything just works the way that your brain would expect things to work. But like, behind the scenes, yeah, like, there’s a lot going on, you know, including, you know, the BUBSY, right, which makes it so that you’re not, like, copy pasting things between two systems, like they’re just talking to each other, which is–
Phil Salvador 26:23
Yeah, when we have a magazine with like 500 items, I catalog it once, and don’t have to do that a second time when I upload all the PDFs. Which, talking with other folks who use a combination of ArchivesSpace and Preservica, they do have to do and it sounds like a nightmare. And early on, we decided, No, no, we’re not doing that. We’re not wasting our time doing that. We’re going to do this smartly.
Frank Cifaldi 26:43
Well, and I think that it kind of speaks to, I don’t know, maybe the strength of the foundation like, we’ve run really lean and focused, where we don’t have a ton of overhead, so we can do things like just focus resources on making the correct digital product. Of course, like none of this would have been possible if I had to pay Travis and Amanda, if they weren’t just superstar volunteers who could, who could find the time, but, like, I think I’m sure you can attest to this Phil,in the library world dedicated, like, senior engineers, right? Like, that’s not really a thing.
Phil Salvador 27:34
No. I mean, because libraries can’t afford to hire, like, top engineering talent and, like, bluntly, yeah. So I think the fact that we have this team is incredible, and I think it’s also been refreshing, because coming from the academic library world, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that’s involved in, like committees, and we’ll do a task force to decide X, Y, Z, and I think Frank, something that has been kind of– shocking is not the right word. Something that’s been surprising to me working with you is that you clearly come from a like, journalist and producer background in a way that is sometimes, I’m not saying this in a negative way, but blunt and dismissive in a way that is a little like, jarring to my process, in a positive way. Where I’ll say, like, like, Hey, I’m figuring out what our metadata standard is forever. And you’ll say “why?” and it’s like, I’ve never– a lot of this has been like translating like, you know, things that are core to being librarian and my process and how things work, and actually having to articulate why it’s important to do something versus why it’s not important. And there happens sometimes where you said that, and I’m like, You know, I guess we don’t have to do that. I don’t know. But it’s very, very different than coming to a library that’s existed for 100 years, that has had systems baked into systems, baked into systems over generations. It is a very different way of operating.
Frank Cifaldi 28:45
Yeah and I guess that’s coming from a place of, yeah, very little library experience. Definitely no, like, professional experience on my part. But just like, my experience is like, how do I find the information that I need? And, yeah.
Amanda Cifaldi 29:00
I want to jump in because I think this is in the right spot. But on, like, having talent. I mean, okay, look spoilers, I’m married to Frank, so I’m like–
Phil Salvador 29:16
She’s choosing to announce it here. This is a podcast, exclusive.
Amanda Cifaldi 29:19
Exclusive! Breaking news. But even outsider, just like wanting to, you know, be involved in the things that my partner is doing, that cares deeply about, like the way, if I remove that, let’s like, kind of imagine that’s separate, the foundation is a way that I feel very strongly that I have the ability to make an impact. And I think if this organization wasn’t, like, if you weren’t as focused, if you didn’t have as clear of a mission, it might feel like, Oh, my volunteering effort is, like, only scratching the surface, but when I see what you’re working on, and I compare that with my background of working in software, and I’m like, Oh, you need a foo. I can build you a foo, and you’re like, oh, it would be really helpful if you could build a foo. This one happens to be, you know, an interface for your digital library. Like, that is very compelling for me as a person, a way that I can apply my skills in a way that helps your mission and hopefully helps people research video games. So I think in terms of, like, you know, acquiring talent to help, like, even just as a person, this was kind of an easy sell for me.
Frank Cifaldi 30:56
Yeah, and I mean, of course, like getting your help specifically was a very easy sell for me. And what I mean by that is that, like, I think a lot of times running a nonprofit, from a distance if you’re not involved, it’s like, Oh, just get a bunch of volunteers. You know, just like, volunteer the heck out of it and you could do anything . And we are an organization that has lots and lots of very interested potential volunteers. Like what we do is really cool. You know, like, people love video games. People like video game history. The idea of, like, preserving and studying video game history is something that many people can get behind, but being able to, I mean, the irony of volunteer work is that it’s basically a job, you know what I mean, to manage the volunteers. And we don’t have enough jobs here. We have two of those. We have two people on staff.
Phil Salvador 32:00
And I’m sort of a lot of ways self sufficient in the job. Like, you turn me loose on it with the goal of, Hey, we need you to do this largely independently. So, you know, when people come with volunteer offers where it’s like, I know a lot about Fire Emblem versus Amanda, like, Hey, I can design us a new front end in two months. Like, that’s a very different type of, yeah.
Frank Cifaldi 32:20
Well, and where I was going with that is that, like, both Amanda and Travis are, and, you know, I should say you too, like, and all four of us, you know, like, we are all capable of just being handed something and just running with it, you know, not needing instruction. And like, I don’t think we would be where we are, if the four of us weren’t all like that, like, if I had to, like, you know, if either of us had to, like, manage either of you, you know, in terms of your volunteer time and, I just, I don’t know, there’s so much about the foundation and this library and everything that’s just like, you know, it’s just very, like, refined, is a word that comes to mind. Like all the pieces are just there and they just fit. And I’m just thankful to all of you.
Phil Salvador 33:10
Would you say It’s oddly satisfying, Frank?
Frank Cifaldi 33:15
No. No, I hate that term, because I don’t think it’s weird for things to be satisfying. It’s like guilty pleasure, right? Like, no, just like the thing, it’s okay to like the thing.
Phil Salvador 33:26
I want to get talking about the content we’re launching with, but I do want to talk about one of the other big tech pieces we have, which is what Amanda was alluding to, which is the front end Amanda designed. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds about our process for like, how we weren’t launching the library. If you want to sign up for our Patreon, we are going to have a bonus episode where we are going to get a little bit more into the weeds, if you really want to hear more about that. But the short version is, like Frank said, we were ready in October to launch a version of our library that used the, like, out of the box library system provided by Preservica. And the more we looked at it, we realized we want some custom features. And we made a really tough decision. We were, like, a week away from launching, and we made the decision to push back because Amanda had been poking around all Preservica’s APIs, and said, Hey, I can build us a new front end. I was like, Okay, what’s the timeline on that? Are we gonna get all these delays? And Amanda said, No, I can build it in, like, two months. And you did, so I’m gonna pass off to Amanda so you can talk about what you have built.
Amanda Cifaldi 34:27
I would say plus or minus a month, right?
Frank Cifaldi 34:29
It’s been three.
Amanda Cifaldi 34:31
Okay, okay.
Travis Brown 34:34
Same quarter.
Phil Salvador 34:36
You told me two months with buffer time built in, and I was gonna hold you to account but things have worked out.
Amanda Cifaldi 34:41
Sick. Okay, okay. Good job, past me.
Frank Cifaldi 34:45
The estimate was done in December for launch in January, and that kind of happened.
Amanda Cifaldi 34:50
We kind of did that.
Frank Cifaldi 34:53
It was in a really good state at the end of December.
Phil Salvador 34:55
No Time Zone is going to be in February when we launched the library, so we’re not liars.
Amanda Cifaldi 35:01
Sick, nice. I mean, what can I say about it? First of all, I’m really proud of it. I think it kind of speaks to the mission of providing access. Something that I’m really proud of is every feature you can use on a phone, and it doesn’t, personally make me mad to use it on a phone. I feel that way about a lot of things that I try to use on my phone where it’s like, Ah, okay, clearly you meant for me to be at a desktop computer to be able to use this feature, or like the feature is just missing. They were like, Oh, I don’t know how to do it on a phone. We’ll just hide it. I get it. I’m in software. I’ve done it before, too. I totally get it, but I had– I really wanted to make this usable on a phone. Just thinking about the ability to use the resource, the powerful resource that we have, where you can look through, you can find magazines where the word BUBSY is so cool, I guess that’s multiple words, but you could find that, and you could just be like, out at dinner. You’d be like, I wonder if there’s a video game magazine that has this in it, and you could go find it, and then you could look at it on your phone like, that’s that’s wild. And I wanted to make sure we could do that.
Phil Salvador 36:33
This happened at Super MAGFest this past weekend. There were people came up to me at the event because we announced the launch to the library at the event and we showed off some materials, and people came up to me afterwards and said, Hey, do you know anything about XYZ game? Do you have this? And it was like 15 seconds, like, let me pull up my phone, search, Okay, here’s all the E3 guidebooks we have where this game was mentioned. Here’s every person who was there representing that game at E3 and it was like, showing that to someone who was just kind of curious, becoming a historian in real time and seeing how quickly you can access this material kicks ass. It was incredible. So it’s, you know, I think even before we had this new system, I felt very good about what we had built. I felt like, Okay, we have all these great materials and they’re discoverable. This is great. We started filming all of our like marketing stuff back then, when we already felt like this is going to change how people study video game history, and now it is, like, orders of magnitude better than it was back then. So I think if I recorded it now, I would just be emitting like, this high pitched humming noise the entire time in terms of my like enthusiasm about it. So I’m feeling very good about where that is, and that’s to Amanda’s credit that she was able to quickly iterate on this new interface and add all these features we wanted to make it into something really robust.
Amanda Cifaldi 37:48
Well, and I mean, something that was also important just to me personally as a person working on this, it needed to be fun to work on. So I won’t go into the details, but I can deploy changes to our site in five minutes. That feels amazing, and it kind of needed to be that way for me to want to continuously work on it as hard as I did. So it’s on some latest and greatest Angular, shout out to Angular peeps. I’ve been working with Angular for like nine years now. I’ve been on Angular since it was like, one point x, is like so long ago now. But I feel like it’s something I’ve been working with for a long time. So just being able to drop in and be like, Oh, Phil, you want me to change whatever you know, change this thing, or move this thing around, or add this feature, it feels so approachable to me, and I really wanted to have that ability so that we could, like, we’re gonna launch this thing, and then I want to add more stuff to it, and I want it to feel like it’s not just in one static place.
Phil Salvador 39:16
Yeah, and that’s part of what we mean by early access too. Is like we are going to keep building this long term. You know, we have two interfaces right now. If you go to the main library.gamehistory.org website, you get access to the library catalog, and then you can click through to get to Amanda’s digital archive front end. We do have plans to maybe try to merge those in the future, like, we’re always thinking about, like, what could be the next thing to come? And that’s what we meant early access, like, this is we think it’s in very good shape, but it’s probably never going to be feature complete, because we want to keep adding all these new features and abilities to it.
Frank Cifaldi 39:49
Well, yeah, there’s no such thing as, like, the library is finished, you know, like, physically or digitally. That’s just not a concept. And like, even if you want to just think, like, you know, pie in the sky stuff, it’s like– there’s no playable games, for example, in the Video Game History Foundation library. That is not on the docket, right?
Phil Salvador 40:08
There’s a couple reasons for that. Stay tuned to a future episode with Kendra Albert where we rehash what happened with the copyright stuff this last year.
Frank Cifaldi 40:16
But you know, like talking about, you know, Amanda coming in and the tool evolving. Something I said last night on our– we have a monthly call for higher-donor patrons. If you’re interested in that, like we do this every month. It’s for $25 and up patrons to patreon.com/gamehistoryorg. But we were talking with our larger backers last night about and what I said, which is true, is that when we were getting close to using the provided front end for this library, I started getting really bummed out, because I felt like we had done so much like, we haven’t even talked about, like, the character recognition stuff that was built, and maybe we’ll circle back to that. But you know, we had like, we literally innovated on, text recognition in video game magazine scans in a way that, like, no one else has. Like, we have better character recognition. So when you search for things, you’re likely to find them if they’re actually printed. Phil had been working for like, plural years at this point, at like, properly cataloging everything with appropriate publication dates and author names and things like that that were all like, tagged and accessible somewhere, but, like, the front end that we had just didn’t really, like, give you the ability to use all this work that was done. Like, yes, you could text search, but you weren’t getting, for example, like, snippets in your search results. So you might search for Bubsy and it might show you 1000 results in, you know, kind of like, hard to understand order, and you don’t know what any of them are, unless you go, like, render that PDF and then go look for it. Just as an example.
Phil Salvador 42:17
I think the biggest testament to how well things have come along is that we’ve described ourselves as frustrated historians, and we all use the same resources everyone else does in terms of other websites, other sources for materials. As this system has gotten more and more robust, we are primarily using our own system now for our own research, which I think as the target users for this thing, I think it doesn’t get higher praise than that.
Travis Brown 42:38
I think that was the ultimate like inflection point when we were evaluating the out of the box stuff is like, we all have an idea of what the audience needs and what the users are gonna need. And I think we got to the point where it’s like, Man, this is nearly there, but it’s missing some kind of like, deal breakers, and that’s when we kind of like, started thinking about building out something custom, which I, you know, I’m really glad where we landed, because it just does– we’re able to build out exactly what we envision, rather than compromising on that vision.
Phil Salvador 43:18
Yeah, Amanda really came in with the the hadouken and sauce
Amanda Cifaldi 43:23
Well, I mean, I will say, like, part of it was a little bit of a frustration on like, Travis and Phil’s behalf, because, like, I kind of got involved a little bit and was able to see, like, how great it could be, and it’s like, Wait, what’s stopping you? What’s stopping– Wait, hang on, what’s stopping you is a thing that I could literally go make. And then it was just like, Okay, let’s let’s go like, let’s just do this. And especially like with the thought that I think we all kind of agreed kind of loosely, not like formally, but that in the future we could envision, like Phil was saying earlier, a version of this that is kind of all one combined thing. And I think we still don’t quite know what that means or what it is, but I can imagine it in the future that you just go to gamehistory.org, and everything’s there as like one tool.
Phil Salvador 44:40
[singing] Imagination
Amanda Cifaldi 44:40
Right. right.
Frank Cifaldi 44:45
Phil with the Wonder Showzen reference. Let’s go.
Phil Salvador 44:48
So we’re getting pretty close to the hour, and there’s so much we want to talk about the OCR that Travis designed, which is incredible and is doing such great work. We want to talk about the collections. I want to make sure we touch on too. I know we’ve got viewer questions. Should we just lightning round through some of this stuff?
Frank Cifaldi 45:01
Yeah, let’s start with a question from Matthew Callis, one of our favorite volunteers, helps us every year at Portland Retro and GDC when he can. Matthew asks, is there any collection that is not in the launch collections, meaning what’s accessible digitally but could still be considered a cornerstone of the library that you can share? Yeah, actually, like, there’s a lot. Phil, I think you’ve you at least, correct me if I’m wrong, like you have, within our ArchivesSpace, our physical catalog, you at least have some representation of almost all of our collections, right? So people know what’s unprocessed, right?
Phil Salvador 45:37
Yeah, we do have some of the big collections we’ve gotten recently, like the Rita Zimmerer papers. Rita was an Executive Vice President for Marketing at Sunsoft of America, things like that we at least have in the unprocessed materials collection. One that I want to make sure to mention we talk about cornerstone collections is, I know we’ve already gotten some questions about the work we did with Game Informer back in 2012 which is the big one, and that is, honestly, when I started the job, I was like, All right, I’m gonna tackle Game Informer. And I was told, No, you’re not. No.That’s just such a massive scope of project that we purposely let it wait until a little bit later. There is a lot of gold in there, and that is the kind of thing that, you know, we may be able to help researchers find things in at our discretion, depending on our resources and budget and things like that. But that is one that is, you know, coming in the future that we just have not been able to tackle yet, because it’s like, you know, trying to eat a bunch of ice cubes versus trying to eat Antarctica. I don’t know why that was the comparison I just came up with, but that’s kind of where my mind is on a lot of it. It’s like, you know, thousands of, you know, CDs we imaged, and like, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, versus these smaller discrete collections. It’s like, let’s do some of the more discrete collections first before we try to tackle this mammoth thing that we have.
Frank Cifaldi 46:53
Well, I think at this point you have ingested most of the media types that are in that collection, for example. And like, there’s probably a lot of learnings that happened there.
Phil Salvador 47:04
Oh, absolutely, if I was trying– I will mention one of the collections we have is a lot of art and press CDs from GamePro magazine. And, yeah, it’s a case where, like, it took me a long time to do those, and that was the first 100 out of 700 CDs, which is like a fraction of the CDs we imaged while we were embedded at Game Informer. So it’s like, yeah, I did not have the tool sets and workflow for doing something of that scale. So that’ll come eventually, but that is a very important collection we have that isn’t part of what we have at launch.
Frank Cifaldi 47:35
Yeah, you know, I’ll just name drop a few other things that aren’t there yet. Like, I put a lot of emphasis in just grabbing people’s collections of their work, if they kept them in a basement. I’ve talked multiple times on the show about the glories of the Midwest in the US, and most of our collections are from the Midwest. But Phil mentioned Rita Zimmerer, and there’s some really amazing like daily correspondence paperwork from Sunsoft, like their meeting notes and letters of correspondence and stuff like that. Michael Menheim, we had in an episode of the show, a lot of his design work throughout his career. We have a really nice collection from ICOM Simulations. They did the MacVenture, point and clicks like Deja Vu and Uninvited and then later, things like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. We have a lot of that masterwork.
Phil Salvador 48:31
One I’m really excited about that we haven’t gotten to that– I have my list of like, what are we gonna tackle as soon as we start working on new things? And to be clear, I’m gonna give myself a bit of a rest once we launch the library. But in terms of what comes next, another one I really like is, it’s a smaller one, but the Andrew Nelson Collection. He was a writer for a company called CyberFlix, that did some beloved multimedia CD ROMs, like Titanic Adventure Out of Time. And so we have, like, the draft scripts of that game and all the research materials they used when they were trying to study the Titanic, like a list of the movies they watched together to get a feel for what the Titanic was. Again, not a cornerstone, but one that I’m excited about personally.
Frank Cifaldi 49:07
Well, and it’s, you know, it is, I think, cornerstone for me is people’s collections like that, just, you know what I mean, like, it’s not necessarily a specific one, it’s just that, like, when you start documenting multiple collections like that, in a system like ours, the connections that start happening are kind of mind blowing sometimes. And like, every collection I just mentioned, for example, Sunsoft and ICOM and Mendheim, like, all three of those actually touch each other, you know, like, it’s like a spiderweb of history.
Phil Salvador 49:43
My favorite thing is that Rita Zimmerer was in charge of publishing Road Runner’s Death Valley Rally for Super Nintendo, which was developed by ICOM Simulations. And it’s like, oh, between these two collections, we have the complete record of the development of this random Looney Tunes game. These two completely random, different collections we got.
Frank Cifaldi 50:02
Yeah, and then Mendheim also did a Looney Tunes Sunsoft game design. He did Taz-Mania, like, it’s wild.
Phil Salvador 50:09
We are the Looney Tunes History Foundation. Someone, please, mock up that logo for us.
Frank Cifaldi 50:14
But, I mean, two things I want to just say here, also that, like, there’s, what, like 2300 magazines, maybe right now, like at launch?
Phil Salvador 50:21
Yeah, in our launch materials, we’re saying 1500 but yeah, right now it’s, it’s closer to 2300 in the time since we–
Frank Cifaldi 50:27
In our collection of what, like–
Phil Salvador 50:29
Over 7000. Yeah, again, a fraction.
Frank Cifaldi 50:33
So I mean, I think the library of video game magazines is a cornerstone, and we have a really good representation of it. But like, the idea of putting them all up is a lot. And then the other thing I just want to, like, kind of add in here, is that like, expect this to be a forever challenge. You know that, like, we cannot populate this thing as much as we want to, because it’s literally just a numbers game. Like, we just don’t have enough resources. Like, we don’t have, for example, like, I’d love to hire a second librarian. I’d love to have a second Phil, like, helping, like, a little tiny Phil that follows Phil around.
Phil Salvador 51:11
I know several tiny Phils you could hire.
Frank Cifaldi 51:14
But I don’t have the resources for that currently. And so there’s a bottleneck.
Phil Salvador 51:19
To your point, I’m just going to read verbatim from something on our help page. There’s an item that says, Why isn’t specific item here? And I said, processing materials takes time. Our long term goal is to make as much of our library digitally accessible as possible, but that’s going to take a while. We plan to roll out additional material as resources and labor allow.
Frank Cifaldi 51:40
I think that’s a great explanation. Got a lot of good questions here. Let’s go with– actually this one. I’m just gonna, I want to answer because, like, I have a story from about an hour ago that’s relevant, which is– So bob bob in the Discord– And by the way, we answer questions every show, whenever we can, that are submitted by people in our Discord. The Discord is for members of the Patreon. So if you’d like to come hang out with us, patreon.com/gamehistoryorg, a lot of fun perks for the podcast and otherwise. So bob bob, one of our newer Patreon members, actually, asks, Are you worried about someone, a writer, photographer, artists, etc., of these articles for whatever reason, asking the VGHF to remove the item from the library. There’s two ways of answering that. There’s sort of personal, like, Oh, I don’t like that that’s there. Then there’s also sort of the legal, like, DMCA takedown kind of approach to it, which I’ll pass over to you, Phil, but for the first part of that, I think it’s something that is, you know, a delicate responsibility of any historical archive is, like, is this embarrassing to the person? Right? There is some level of discretion on our part, like we do redact personal information. I mean, I actually– there’s one set of material from a game developer that that I was processing that, like, on the back of one of the sheets of paper, like he was very young at the time, he, like, kind of wrote, like, kind of a sad, emo thing about this girl he was dating. And it’s like, no one needs to see this, you know, like, so we redact stuff like that, and we use some discretion. And when and where appropriate we do keep the raw material out of the public eye, but it exists still. And there’s sort of a conversation that could happen because of that.
Phil Salvador 53:38
I think, a really good example of that I know you have them that just happened. But Mark Flitman’s papers, one of the developers, have one of our big collections. He, you know, had a lot of correspondence with people at his time. And so, you know, things that are related to game development, like, we have a very angry memo from Mark Flitman, like, threatening people over deadlines. And like, that’s part of understanding gaming history. But his personal messages with people, we save those, but it’s in a like, restricted personal section. It’s like there’s no reason for someone to have access to that. Like, when we get tapes that, like home movies in them, we’ll cut those out and just leave the things relevant to their career. Like, if someone really needs that material, for some reason, we have a way to provide it at discretion, but we do try to exercise some caution. And I think a big part is just treating things respectfully. It’s like treating this material– people are entrusting it to us. It’s like we can treat it respectfully and do right by them. And that’s not inconsistent with the idea of wanting to preserve history.
Frank Cifaldi 54:30
Yeah, as cute as the footage of Mark’s cat is.
Phil Salvador 54:35
There is a non-visible catalog record for Ricky, the cat takes a bath VHS.
Frank Cifaldi 54:39
I have seen that record, yeah. And when I saw it, at first, I was like, Phil, you didn’t put this in the thing?
Phil Salvador 54:46
It’s for us to know that we have it.
Frank Cifaldi 54:48
Yeah. And then again, of course, the other part of it is like, is there sort of legal concern about some of the material? bobbob is asking specifically, I think, about because they use the term article, right? So, like magazine publication, stuff like that. You know, we do have magazines that are accessible, that are still held under copyright somewhere, and we do have fair use arguments for this. Is this something you’d like to kind of talk about here, Phil?
Phil Salvador 55:24
Yeah, just briefly, because I think Fair Use is something that is misunderstood in the world. It is an explicit, you know, privilege you get in copyright law that under certain circumstances, you can use copyrighted material. And as far as I know, from what we’ve been doing and from talking with our lawyers, we are absolutely meeting those standards. You know, it’s not just, this isn’t just, here’s copyrighted material to download. We are doing this not just in the context of a not for profit educational archive, but we are also doing something transformative with it. There’s a reason we’ve talked about how we’ve built a tool. That’s what it is. It’s like, it’s not just, you know, Here’s magazines. We have built a video game research tool that includes material from video game magazines, that thinks just some of the amazing OCR work that Travis has been doing is now full text searchable in a way it never has been done before. It’s not just a file dump or like, people are uploading random things to the library, and, you know, we have to say, like, oh, we’ll take that down. We can’t defend it. It’s like, no, this is all stuff we own that, we have digital copies of that, we are purposely doing all this work on to transform from, you know, effectively what was like children’s entertainment objects for some magazines, and turning them into a powerful research tool, in conversation with our collections of development materials and promotional materials and everything else. So on those grounds, I feel very good about how we’re doing in terms of, like, yeah, we are following Fair Use as best we can. We’re only doing it for out of print magazines. You’ll notice conspicuously, some collections end around maybe 2012 or so, because those issues past that point are still available to purchase online, and we’re trying not to step on any toes about that. So we are being conscientious about that. But we are, I think, being a little bolder in how we’re using fair use than, I think, you know, libraries and archives tend to be a little more conservative around that, but we are using this, you know, privilege we have under copyright law to the fullest extent.
Frank Cifaldi 57:12
Yeah, and that’s just a really good point, and a really good like, I don’t know, tenet of this organization is that we choose to be a little bit more bold, you know, like we don’t go all the way, but like, we, I can’t think of other libraries that are, you know, offering like periodicals the way that we are and and it’s and we aren’t just like throwing spaghetti at the wall, like we’ve done the research. We’ve talked to lawyers like we have a set of criteria that we feel good about and we believe that we’re operating in a way that you know, not only is respectful of the law, but whatever, but like, also respectful of people.
Phil Salvador 57:59
Did you just say “the law, whatever”?
Frank Cifaldi 58:02
Yes, I did say the law, whatever, because I think that the law is very restrictive toward being able to do cool things. I don’t think it should matter that a magazine from 40 years ago is under copyright. So that is why, yes, I’m saying the law, whatever.
Phil Salvador 58:18
But Fair Use is part of the law too, and we are using that judiciously.
Frank Cifaldi 58:21
Yeah, that part’s not whatever. That’s the good part. I think actually, for user questions, we might cut it off there, unless anyone feels strongly about any of the ones that are left. But if you are interested in hearing more, we will be publishing a bonus episode along with this one for Patreon backers that goes a little bit deeper into the weeds and answers a few more user questions. But as we’re running close to the titular hour of the Video Game History Hour here, is there anything any of you would like to say to sort of wrap up?
Phil Salvador 58:58
Can I rattle off about the collections we’re launching with? Because we haven’t even talked about that. There’s so much to talk about.
Frank Cifaldi 59:03
Yeah, you know what? Like, I want to start with a couple.
Phil Salvador 59:07
Okay, okay.
Phil Salvador 59:08
What’s your favorites, Frank? Like, let’s go.
Frank Cifaldi 59:08
Don’t think I’m going to steal your thunder.
Frank Cifaldi 59:11
Well, I don’t know about favorites, but I’m just thinking about things that are really unique that we have. So, you mentioned the E3 guide books. Like, I’m very proud of the fact that over the last, like, 10 plus years, I have purchased any E3 or CES guidebook during years that video games were at CES, because those tend to be really interesting, not just interesting, but like, they tend to have people’s names in them, which is a hard thing to do, you know, like, who actually worked at Vic Tokai’s US office in the early ’90s? Like, there’s no one on LinkedIn who claims to have worked at Vic Tokai’s US office. They’re not credited in the games because they weren’t the ones who made them. But, like, we kind of know some of that stuff because of these things. The Journal of Computer Game Design is one that we don’t really even think about that often, but it’s really interesting. We have the full set of the Journal of Computer Game Design, which Chris Crawford ran from what, ’87 to ’96 I believe, and Chris Crawford, you know, kind of a controversial figure, maybe, but like, he was an early figure in advocating for the game developer, right? He was an early figure in elevating the art form of game design into something that necessitated a journal, right? And having that full text has never been online before.
Phil Salvador 59:11
And I think, importantly, he’s also someone who, I think, was one of the early leading figures in skepticism towards the concept of the video game industry. And in that journal, you can see that shift in real time that initially, it’s articles people are submitting about their game design style, and by the end, every issue is just essays from him about how video games are doomed. And it’s actually really interesting to watch that transition happen.
Frank Cifaldi 1:00:55
Yeah, so that’s a really great set. Another set from the magazines that I’m very proud of is it’s called The Logical Gamer. This was essentially a fanzine, but, like a really nice, big, oversized one that ran in the very early ’80s, where there were, I don’t remember offhand, maybe, like, 15 issues, something like that. And the last four or five, you can kind of find there were a couple scans. But like, you know, the first, like nine or 10, were considered lost, and we may have scanned the only surviving examples of them. They were borrowed from– like, the editor of that magazine is long gone. His family does not have any copies of The Logical Gamer. But we, you know, we did talk to his friend and found out that basically, and this will be, you know, I mean, I’m almost guilty of this myself, like he started a magazine to, like, get into trade shows and it’s actually a really, really interesting piece of ’80s American consumer video game media that just again, did not exist anywhere, and we may have scanned the only copies known to man. And there’s really, really good stuff in there. Gosh. I mean, I could rattle off stuff forever, but let’s just kick it over to you so that I don’t.
Frank Cifaldi 1:02:13
That letter is in the collection.
Phil Salvador 1:02:13
I’m gonna rattle off things really quickly. There’s a whole section we have called promo materials, or promotional materials, which has been a lot of the odds and ends we found around the library, but it’s really fun things that people don’t think about a lot, where it’s press kits, flyers, catalogs is a big one. We have a lot of retailer catalogs for video games, and just being able to see how games were sold is super interesting. We have an Electronics Boutique catalog that I think is the only catalog I’ve ever seen that had like, a dedicated CD-i section, and it has a listing for one of these Zelda CD-i games with a completely different plot than what’s in the final game, which is really weird. So it was like early placeholder marketing copy they got. We have a huge collection of promotional materials related to the company, From Software. There’s a donor, Chris Urquhart, who donated us this huge collection of From Software stuff. And honestly, I don’t know about the research value of a ton of it, but it is sick as hell, and I really hope people dig into a lot of it. My favorite part is that he wanted to donate it back to From Software so they could have an internal archive of their own materials. And they told him to donate it to us instead, which I–
Phil Salvador 1:02:16
That is in the collection too. And he digitized all of it in advance, which is really fun. So I can’t wait for like, you know, like the real like Dark Souls, sickos– Armored Core sickos are gonna eat real well in that collection. We have a collection of, again, the first 100 CDs we digitized from the art collections at GamePro magazine. So it’s high res art from games from about ’95 to early ’98 so a lot of that good PS1/N64 era stuff. Personally, the one I’m excited the most about, obviously is the Cyan collection. If you heard in the previous episode where I was in the Cyan vault with Rand Miller, all of those videos we helped digitize, including the original filming footage from the original Myst is in that collection, we have footage of Robin Miller recording the soundtrack to Myst. It’s like a lost making of video from one of the biggest video games of the 20th century. It’s unbelievable that we have that and that thing let us do this. I think that’s really amazing.
Frank Cifaldi 1:04:16
Amanda, Travis, anything you’d like to end on?
Travis Brown 1:04:18
I think the only thing I’ll add to this is, you know, I appreciate the opportunity to be on the podcast and for us to talk a little bit about some of the behind the scenes stuff. I think, for people that are going to be able to interact with this tool and see everything, there’s a ton that has to take place for this to become available. So from Amanda’s front end and all the work Phil did to kind of massaging the attributes of all this, this data and and the tools that we put together, and even, like you referenced earlier, our conversations with lawyers about what we can and cannot do about certain things. So it’s like there’s just so much that’s behind the scenes that that has to be done to make this available. So I’m just really excited that we’re finally there.
Amanda Cifaldi 1:05:02
Yeah, I would say, if you’re listening to this and you go check it out, maybe send something cool that you find to us to just share with us, like what you found or what you liked about it. I think that would just be really rad. It’s been in our heads, and you can hear from us that, you know, Frank and Phil, you’re using it yourselves for your day to day stuff. But would they have specific use cases? Tell us about yours and what you found and why you thought it was cool.
Frank Cifaldi 1:05:38
Yeah, please do. And that’s– let’s just send it to the podcast email. You want to handle those for us, Robin? So that’s podcast@gamehistory.org and yeah, we’d really love to hear from you all.
Phil Salvador 1:05:50
Robin, do you have a favorite thing in the collection, Robin? I don’t know how much you’ve gotten to take a look at it.
Robin Kunimune 1:05:54
I haven’t, but the other day I asked you, I asked generally within the foundation for the spelling of somebody, and Phil looked it up within our collection and got back within seconds.
Phil Salvador 1:05:54
On our previous episode about GamePro with Dan Amrich and Kat, who, again, Kat supplied the art collection. You were trying to get the spelling of someone they worked with, and we were able to, in seconds, get the correct spelling up from our magazine collection, so.
Robin Kunimune 1:06:21
It was particularly helpful because I’m sure, just by mistake, I think verbally, Dan transposed a couple letters. And so I’m like, frantically Googling. Our transcriptionist Jeremy was frantically Googling, and we could not find this person. They didn’t exist, but we knew where they worked and stuff. And so we’ve just found the print copy of this person’s name so we knew for sure that it was correct, and for sure had been slightly typoed on our end.
Phil Salvador 1:06:49
People are going to use this thing in ways we’re not even expecting. I’m really psyched.
Frank Cifaldi 1:06:52
Yeah, yeah. I hope it’s not– so the story that I almost told and just forgot to was that right before the recording of this call, we just got a physical donation come in from someone who worked in the the print media in the late ’90s on things like Ultra Game Players, and she’s like, Oh God, I’m gonna get canceled. Half jokingly, but like, when, when I was showing her that, like, you know, a lot of her work is, like, text-searchable, she’s like, please don’t let people see our stuff. But again, half jokingly, like, but that’s sort of going back to the responsibility of archivists like us. But yeah, everyone, I mean, I guess we didn’t even say the URLs, archive.gamehistory.org is where you can check out the thing that we are talking about.
Phil Salvador 1:07:45
Yeah, archive.gamehistory.org is the accessing the digital stuff. Library.gamehistory.org is the sort of hub where you can get to the library catalog itself and then get into the digital content from there, too.
Frank Cifaldi 1:07:56
But, yeah, that’s it for now. If you’re on the Patreon, stay tuned for a bonus episode where we’ll go in a little bit deeper just for a few minutes. We’re gonna kind of vent after this, I think. And for everyone else, we’ll see you next time on the Video Game History Hour. Thanks everyone. Thank you so, so much for listening to the Video Game History Hour brought to you by the Video Game History Foundation. If you have questions or comments for the show, you can email us at podcast@gamehistory.org. The Video Game History Foundation is a 501(c)(3), non-profit, and all of your contributions are tax deductible. You can support us right now by going to gamehistory.org/donate, or by joining our patreon at patreon.com/gamehistoryorg, one word. This episode of the Video Game History Hour was produced by Robin Kunimune and edited by Michael Carrell. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
–Transcript edited by Jeremy Seith