Video Game History Foundation launches digital library of old video game magazines, development assets, and more

The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) is an organization created to preserve the history of video games for future generations to discover, research, and enjoy. The foundation has made a massive leap in those efforts with the launch of a new digital library chock-full of video-game related media.

The VGHF's new Digital Archive resource is a large (and growing) repository of content related to video games, including out-of-print video game magazines (e.g., Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro), promotional material, concept art work, development documents, interviews, and much, much more. The archive is online and free to use for everyone, no account required. 

Like most digital libraries, the amount of resources available can feel overwhelming, but the archive appears to work as intended.

The magazines, development documents, and media are fully scanned in, meaning users can search for a specific magazine title and browse through all issues the VGHF has scanned. The quality of the scans is quite good. Better yet, the scans are fully text-searchable.

This means users can type a specific keyword (such as a video game title, console, developer, or other pertinent search term) and the archive will attempt to list any and all media that contains that keyword. For example, searching for "Super Mario World" (with quotation marks included) pulls up hundreds of magazines and other media that contain those words in that order, making it simple to gather a large pool of resources mentioning Nintendo's popular SNES title. 

To accomplish this, the VGHF had to develop its own optical character recognition (OCR) code to better recognize text in video game magazines, which are notorious for their bold and brash colors and layouts. Initial results look fantastic, and the VGHF's OCR tech can recognize and scan text that most other OCR tools would struggle with.

The VGHF Digital Archive is still new and rapidly growing, and as such, early users have noted that its servers are somewhat unstable. At press time, all searches conducted for this article worked without a hitch, but be aware that the site may struggle during times of heavier traffic.

Keep in mind that the VGHF Digital Archive is more than just gaming magazines. If you've ever wanted to see what a Christmas card given during a SEGA company party looked like or what a company's expense reports for a specific quarter were, the VGHF Digital Archive might have it. 

You can check out the Video Game History Foundation Digital Archive here.