What's coming next to the digital library

Phil here again! Now that we're recovered from GDC, we're back to processing materials for our digital library. The day after we all got back from GDC, we laid everything out on a whiteboard, and we were shocked just how much we have coming up in the next month or two. So we wanted to give you a teaser of what we're working on right now!

First, some things we teased last year...

Craig Stitt art and design papers

We digitized the art and design portfolios from Craig Stitt, who worked at Sega Technical Institute and Insomniac Games from 1990–2005. This collection includes original artwork and designs for games including Segapede, Sonic Spinball, Spyro the Dragon, and Ratchet & Clank. Stitt's papers from Spyro include his original design pitch back when the idea was called Lifespan — and it's pretty different from the Spyro we know today!

We're putting the finishing touches on this collection and should be launching it in the near future!

William Volk papers

William Volk was Vice President of Technology at Activision from 1988–1994 and oversaw the company's transition into the multimedia. He kept extensive notes and memos from his time at Activision, which we were able to recover from a backup tape!

There's plenty of Activision history in here, especially from the development of the 1993 adventure game Return to Zork, which Volk was heavily involved with. But Volk's papers are even better as a snapshot of an era when game publishers were navigating big changes in the game industry.

For instance, Volk was one of the people who had to help his company understand whether they should invest in the... [checks notes] "Super NES CD-ROM."

David Marsh ICOM Simulations collection

Thanks to some 200 IQ work from our volunteer Keith Kaisershot, we've started recovering data from the tape backups of David Marsh. (Keith had to reverse-engineer a Macintosh data tape backup format that there was no documentation for, so, uh, wow, thanks Keith.)

Marsh worked at ICOM Simulations, developer of classic games like Shadowgate, Uninvited, and Deja Vu. He now owns the rights to the company's catalog, and he was happy to share his backups with us. We've barely scratched the surface of this collection, but we're already finding some great stuff, including unused art, correspondence with Kemco, and a bunch of materials from an unproduced sequel to Shadowgate!

We've also been digitizing some rare print materials, including magazines...

CD-ROM Today

We're almost done digitizing CD-ROM Today, an influential but obscure magazine from the start of the multimedia era. CD-ROM Today was THE place for coverage of multimedia games for both Windows and Macintosh .There was SO much coverage in CD-ROM Today that it actually got split up into two separate, long-running magazines: MacAddict and boot (later Maximum PC)!

Only the first handful of issues of CD-ROM Today had been scanned before, and now we're working on the rest. We have a few issues up already. Expect the remainder of the magazine to be available, full-text searchable, in the next week or two!

(This one is personally important to me, because my family had a subscription to CD-ROM Today when I was a kid. The October 1995 issue of CD-ROM Today came with demos of some real weird sicko Japanese Myst clones, which were some of the first computer games I EVER played. This magazine is what radicalized me down the game history/archiving path I'm on today, so I want to do right by it!)

Game trade magazines

We mention this one a lot here, but there was a whole category of game magazines that were meant for the industry rather than the general public. We've been prioritizing these recently!

The big highlight is that we're digitizing the complete (?) run of Games Business, a game industry newspaper that ran from 1998–2000. There's so much inside baseball in these magazines that wasn't seen by the public.

These magazines are huge — we're talking newspaper-size — so to get high-quality scans in a reasonable timeframe, we made the decision to chop these issues in half and get them bound into a hardcover volume afterwards. Because they're SO huge, we had to borrow some time on a gigantic two-foot paper cutter at Stanford University Libraries' processing department to get these ready to scan. (Thanks to our friend Anne Ladyem McDivitt for arranging this!)

GDC proceedings

During the early years of the Game Developers Conference, if you were submitting a talk, you also had to submit a paper summarizing your panel. These got compiled and printed into a "conference proceeding" book, which could be over 1000 pages long. There's not many of these around anymore, probably because not a lot of people wanted to keep a conference book that was over 1000 pages long.

Thanks to a recent donation, we've been able to scan five years of these books! That's a total of 4592 pages of game dev talks, most of which haven't been available in decades! We're actually already done with this one, and you can access them in the digital library right now!

We've barely dug into this collection, but we've already found retrospectives on the development of Quake, Baldur's Gate, Age of Empires, Crash Bandicoot, and more.

There's also a couple big, big things we haven't announced here yet...

Michael Shorrock collection

Michael Shorrock has had a long career in game development, including serving as vice president of programming for Sega Channel, the short-lived cable games-on-demand service run by Sega. He let us borrow and digitize his materials, including behind-the-scenes documents from the planning of Sega Channel and even some test cartridges from Sega Channel itself!

We JUST finished digitizing all this stuff, so it's going to take a second for us to process it all. (And before you ask, this is completely unrelated to a different Sega Channel tease you may have seen from us at PRGE last year.)

Computer Entertainer

Video game historians might know Computer Entertainer, also called The Video Game Update. It was one of the only game news publications that ran through the 1983 US game industry crash.

We'll keep a long story brief in this post, but we announced the news at GDC this year: The Video Game History Foundation has acquired the copyright to Computer Entertainer. We're currently in the process of rescanning the magazine at higher quality, and we'll have more to share about our plans once that's taken care of.

Game Informer press material archives

In the wake of Game Informer magazine being shut down (and now it's back!), a lot of folks have wondered what happened to all the press releases, art CDs, and other materials that were used in the making of the magazine. Especially since we embedded at Game Informer for an archiving project back in 2019.

Well, we also announced this at GDC: Former Game Informer editors Andy McNamara and Andrew Reiner have donated their collections to the Video Game History Foundation. By my estimate, this collection includes over 30 linear feet of paper, plus an enormous lot of 8000–12,000 CDs that I described in our accession as "difficult to accurately measure the scope of."

This is a massive amount of material that we're going to be working through for a long time, but we're going to try doing it piece by piece. A lot of this collection was already organized alphabetically, so... maybe we'll start with the As and go from there...?

Wow that is a lot!

It is!!

Now that the digital library is live, our pipeline for preserving materials is starting to come together. The last piece we're missing is doing more videos and content about our collections. I'm sure I will find time for that when, I dunno, I'm dead? We're always really busy, is what I'm saying.

As always, thank you for your continuing support that makes our work possible. As you can see here, we still have a lot of work ahead of us this year, and you make that possible!