We made a library! With our hands!

Hi all! We haven't done a Backer Blog post in quite a while, so I thought I'd share what's been taking up most of our time this year: building an actual, physical library!

We haven't formally announced this yet, but we plan to open what I believe to be the country's very first dedicated video game history research library this year. This is the kind of thing that is only possible because of your help! I'm not going to lie and say we're funded enough to actually STAFF a library, but thanks to having a really steady amount of income from the Patreon, I've been able to plan and work on a scrappy little space that I like to think of as our FIRST office location. 

We're not quite there yet, but now that all the actual pieces are in place, I thought I'd give y'all a little behind-the-scenes.

This was the space we inherited. It's only about 300 square feet, and kind of oddly-shaped, but the rent on it is a steal. We're actually renting this from my former employer, Other Ocean/Digital Eclipse. It's an office that is connected to the development studio, but has its own private entrance. 

This used to house some of the development staff here, but the studio recently expanded enough to justify renting a second building. 

The room as-is had some issues. It had a painted concrete floor, which I'm not a fan of. The wall color was an aggressively dark green, which should be a crime. And the overhead tubes were only half-functioning: the previous tenants actually forced LED tubing into a fluorescent light housing it was never meant for, meaning that the lights kinda flickered randomly. Which is...not pleasant.

The first thing I did was plot out a basic layout, taking into account all four (!) of the doors that lead into this small space. This layout isn't actually final (I've since decided against some of the Ikea furniture), but it's pretty close!

The idea here is for this space to serve the following functions:

1. Be the Executive Director's office (hey that's me!) for the VGHF. I need a place to sit and work, and I need to not hate it.

2. House a significant amount of our physical archive, with an emphasis on paper material (books, magazines, developer notes, artwork, etc.). To accomplish this, I decided pretty early on to invest in double-facing professional cantilever library shelves. These are actually the exact same shelves you'll find in almost any public library. I like these because they really maximize space: they can simply float in the middle without attaching to any walls, and you only need about 2.5 feet between shelves for comfortable browsing.

3. Have an area for entertaining one researcher at a time. I don't know yet how often we'll be able to do this, but the ability is there.

4. Have space to stage items as they come in to the archive, on their way to their permanent homes. What this basically means is: have a place to put stuff that isn't my living room while they await transportation. This could be as close as one of the library shelves in the same room, or as far as being mailed to another library or institution that can make better use of them.

Thankfully my wife Amanda - the VGHF's secret weapon - is kind of into home repair, so I wasn't alone. We started off with the paint, which as you can imagine took about four coats to get to the point where we weren't seeing green anymore. The hardest part here was all of the odd-shaped pipes and things in the office, as this was a former industrial space - it might have been part of a factory or something? We also had to fill in and repair a lot of the holes in the wall.

I used a lot of spray primer to get into weird spots. Don't do this without protection!

The neutral color we chose (Almond Whisp!) immediately gave the place the tone that I want. I want this to actually LOOK like a library archive, I want it to be just a little bit sterile and boring.

After the painting was done came the wiring. Having LED lighting was really important to me: because it gives off no UV, it won't fade the artifacts! I didn't want to have to replace all of the existing light fixtures with new LED-capable ones, so we had to do some rewiring to retrofit them to take the tubes. Thankfully no one died.

The room immediately got way brighter and more vibrant. This caused my beautiful Almond Whisp to start looking like plain ol' white, but I'm fine with it.

Next up was the carpeting. This was the one part of the labor that I let you all pay for, since we had no experience doing it and thought it was better left to the pros. We considered doing hardwood over the concrete but I think for a place like this, carpeting is best...even if it was crazy expensive to do.

Much better.

Next came the baseboard between the carpet and the walls, and the heavy duty racking. I wanted something good that would last and could put up with a little bit of abuse - who knows, maybe I'll be tossing CRTs on these?

After that was about 45 days of waiting while our library shelves got manufactured and sent. There are only a couple companies that make library shelving like this, and there's almost no used market for them, so we had to have them made.

All seven of the things came on one giant palette that weighed over 1,000 pounds. I hate this palette. This is a nightmare palette. I had to push this down the street with the FedEx guy but, again, no one died.

And that brings us to today! Things are still messy, but all of the pieces are here. I started filling the shelves this morning with the set of EGM that had been in my living room for as long as I can remember.

I'm about to disappear for a month on a SPECIAL ARCHIVING PROJECT we'll talk about soon, so it's nice to be able to come back home to everything being built once I'm done. I'm pretty excited to start unloading the piles and piles of unsorted magazine boxes in storage - I don't even know what we have!