Today, the Video Game History Foundation launches early access to its digital archive of video game history research materials, available now at library.gamehistory.org.
Ever since we started in 2017, the Video Game History Foundation has been building a digital library to help the study of video game history. We’ve been collecting development documents, behind-the-scenes content, rare video game publications and catalogs, magazines, memorabilia, ephemera, and more.
After years of cataloging, processing, and digitizing our collections, we’re ready to open our (virtual) doors to the public for the first time.
Our collections
Our digital library platform launches with access to a curated selection of materials from our library, including:
- Never-before-seen game development materials.
- Artwork, press kits, and promotional materials from iconic video games.
- Over 1500 full-text searchable out-of-print video game magazines—including game industry trade magazines rarely available to the public.
Learn how games were made
VGHF works with the game development community to preserve design documents, artwork, video footage, correspondence, and other unique items from behind the scenes of game production.
Now we’re opening these resources for you, and you can discover for yourself how games were made and sold.
The highlight of our launch collection is the Mark Flitman papers. Mark is a retired game producer who worked at companies like Konami, Acclaim, Midway, and Mindscape in the 90s and 2000s. He and his family graciously invited the Video Game History Foundation to his home and allowed us to digitize and share the mountains of paperwork and digital file backups he’s kept in his basement for over two decades.
Even if you don’t know the games he worked on—and you probably know a few!—his papers are an incredible record of the business of video game production and marketing.
Our library also premieres with over 100 hours of footage from the production of the Myst series by developer Cyan, including the original FMV filming footage for Myst and Riven: The Sequel to Myst and hours of never-before-seen interviews with the Cyan team. We digitized these in support of the upcoming film The Myst Documentary; Cyan has been unbelievably supportive of our mission and has given us unprecedented access to their internal archives to share these videos with you.
Collaborating with the community
Fans around the world have been collecting, preserving, documenting game history. We’re helping build their work into something even more impactful.
Many items in our digital library were donated or digitized by members of the gaming community. Hundreds of magazine scans were provided by groups like Retromags and Out-of-Print Archive. Other exciting items, like a rare educational game catalog and an early electronic game commercial, were loaned to us by private collectors who wanted to make them available for everyone.
The VGHF Library is a force multiplier for citizen archivists who have been preserving the history of games. We’re excited to formally recognize and institutionalize their work.
And that’s not all!
The launch of the VGHF Library also includes:
- The first 100 CDs from the art and press release archives of GamePro magazine, reformatted to view in your browser.
- Guidebooks and ephemera from video game events, including searchable directories and maps from the first 12 years of the Electronic Entertainment Expo.
- An extensive international collection of FromSoftware promotional materials, collected by citizen archivist Kris Urquhart, with a blessing from FromSoftware to donate them to our library!
- And much more!
Meet our library system
Our digital library system makes it easier than ever to explore video game history. We’ve spent years creating rich, extensive metadata for our collections and figuring out how to share our library materials with you. What we’ve built is more than just a bunch of files: This is a powerful tool for video game research with best-in-class discovery features.
Our library is powered by ArchivesSpace and Preservica, two archival management platforms that we use to catalog, preserve, and share our materials. Using the power of these professional-grade archive tools, you can search and filter our collections in deep detail and view digital items directly in-browser.
We’ve also built our own tools to make the library experience even better. We developed a state-of-the-art text recognition toolset that makes even the wildest, weirdest video game magazines and promotional materials fully text-searchable. And we’ve created our own digital archive portal with the powerful search and navigation features that video game historians have asked us for.
There has never been a better way to research video game history. By putting our rich collections in conversation with each other in a curated, text-searchable archive, we’ve turned them into a powerful, one-of-a-kind resource.
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 favorite game. We think this is the start of something that will change how people study the history of video games.
(In fact, we’ve already been using the library internally for our own research for months!)
What’s next?
Our library is the future home for all our collections. We’re in this for the long-haul, and over the coming years, we’ll be adding even more materials to our archive and adding new features to our library system. If you want to learn more about what we have in our library, our catalog has additional information about items that aren’t available digitally yet, and even materials we haven’t processed.
Stay tuned to our blog and YouTube channel for highlights of our collections and announcements about new acquisitions!
And if you’re a game developer who wants to contribute your materials to our growing collections, please reach out at info@gamehistory.org.
Testimonials for the VGHF Library
The Video Game History Foundation Library is a tremendous resource for my research. Being able to look at magazines, press releases, developer documents, and advertisements all in one place and fully searchable is a huge time saver. And by studying a video game through this rich variety of sources, I’m able, as a historian, to see the history of that game in a new way. I’m excited to see the Video Game History Foundation Library grow and I can’t wait to see what else is added in the future.
―Norm Caruso, video essayist, Gaming Historian
At Digital Eclipse, we start every one of our interactive documentary games with a huge deep dive into the research, and to have this all at our fingertips—design documents, and press releases, and internal stuff, and magazines—it’s incredible.
―Chris Kohler, Editorial Director, Digital Eclipse
If I’m trying to find the earliest use of a word or the earliest news related to a game, it’s a relief when I sort by date in the Foundation’s library, I can trust that all the dates are actually correct. In other databases, the details are frequently entered incorrectly, if any date was entered at all.
―Kate Willaert, gaming historian, A Critical Hit!
As someone who thinks about creating content around, “Hey, what were people thinking and feeling at the time?” […] this is gonna very quickly become an invaluable resource. It feels primed to change how people create videos and books going forward. It’s going to be a very important tool, and I’m so glad it exists.
―Jeff Grubb, News Editor, Giant Bomb
What the VGHF is doing now isn’t just going help researchers presently, but it’s going to be a hugely important resource for researchers and historians in the future.
―Holly Nielsen, play historian, game writer
This is the coolest thing ever.
―hbomberguy, video essayist
Frequently asked questions
Is this everything you have?
Our archive portal only includes items that have been processed and have a digital copy available to the public. We are actively working to catalog and digitize as much of our collection as possible, and more materials will be coming to the library on an ongoing basis. For a more complete list of VGHF’s holdings, visit the Library Catalog and the “Unprocessed Materials” section.
Do you really have everything here?
Yes! Every item listed in the library is held by the Video Game History Foundation, or if we do not own a physical copy, VGHF has received permission from a donor to share a digital copy of their material.
Are you allowed to do this?
Yes. The VGHF Library follows the guidelines for fair use in U.S. copyright law, which allows us to use copyrighted material for transformative, educational purposes that do not impact the commercial market. Our non-profit archive uses out-of-print and freely available materials, which we have turned into a powerful research tool.
Who can access the library?
The VGHF Library is free for anyone to access digitally, anywhere in the world. You don’t need special credentials to use the library. Anyone studying video game history is a researcher, and we do not charge to view publicly accessible materials.
As a paid service, we may be able to provide researchers with access to original or unprocessed materials, at the discretion of VGHF staff. Researchers can contact the library team with requests, although we may be unable to respond during the initial launch of the library due to high demand.
Can people use your items in their books, blog posts, videos, etc.?
For some special collections and developer materials, we may have permission from the donor to let people reproduce materials for research purposes. We have included notes in each collection that describe what people can and can’t do with our materials.
Unless stated otherwise, the library does not own the intellectual property of materials in the library and cannot give express permission to reproduce them. However, researchers may still be able use these materials as fair use.
Can you play games in this archive?
No, for now. With limited exceptions, the Video Game History Foundation does not collect retail video games and does not have plans to provide them to researchers.
Additionally, restrictions in United States copyright law currently prevent VGHF from sharing digital access to out-of-print video games with researchers. We are fighting to change this law in coordination with the software preservation community.
I would like to contribute my materials to the archive.
Prospective donors can contact the Video Game History Foundation team at info@gamehistory.org.
Meet the library team
Phil Salvador is the Library Director at the Video Game History Foundation. Previously, he was the author of the Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States, a groundbreaking study on the state of commercial video game preservation. His research on video game history and preservation has been featured on NPR, The Verge, and Game Developer.
Travis Brown is the Director of Technology at the Video Game History Foundation. He is responsible for developing and managing the VGHF Library’s tech infrastructure, including its next-generation text-recognition tools. When he’s not working on his day job as Director of Developer Relations at Live Aware Labs, he’s working on restoring arcade cabinets and vintage motorcycles.
Amanda Cifaldi is an artist and engineer with a passion for creating joyful experiences, who regularly volunteers at the Video Game History Foundation. Drawing on a background in consumer and enterprise software, she brings both creative and technical expertise to many of the Foundation’s public-facing projects. Outside of volunteering and work, she enjoys looking at plants and reading horror comics.
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