Tomb raid-ing the remains of GamePro

Hi all! Here's a quick backer-only update from the VGHF Top Secret Storage Unit to show you a massively cool donation we just received: just about everything that remained of GamePro magazine, straight from the IDG office they were made at.

What we have here is a nearly-complete run of GamePro, from its first issue in April, 1989 all the way through its last in 2011. Officially, the IDG office in San Francisco didn't have an archive of the magazine (its New York headquarters might), but what we have here was put together for a project that never quite came together. 

Notice how the envelope above says "Google" on it? This is because at one point, IDG was packaging up the magazine to send to Google Books, back when they were scanning a ton of material. The entire run of GamePro might have been online and searchable on Google but, unfortunately, the Books project lost steam, so this never happened.

What's that peeking out behind the 1992 envelope?

It's a big stack of brand new, uncirculated copies of GamePro #1! Or, to be more precise, a big stack of REPRINTS of GamePro #1. Apparently as a promotion for the magazine's tenth anniversary, they ordered a new print run of the issue, which was (as far as I can tell) mostly just distributed internally, given out to clients and friends, etc. 

This also helps explain one of GamePro's biggest mysteries for me: why GamePro #1 is so much easier to find than #s 2 or 3! GamePro #2 is a beast to find...in fact, it might be the only issue this collection is missing! And it's missing because, uh, I have it. Back when I visited the magazine in, I believe, 2010, then-editor Jaz Rignall was kind enough to let me have their one spare copy (I don't know what happened to the other one, I'm guessing someone might have taken a full set out of the office when the magazine folded, but I'm not sure).

The Foundation's library already has a complete set of GamePro up through the end of 1999, but what's new to us now with this donation is two things: almost the entirety of 2000 through 2011 (back when I was privately collecting these, I only focused on the 20th century, but we're expanding now that the Foundation's up and running), and some of the spin-off magazines, such as Code Vault and S.W.A.T.Pro, seen here. 

There are also a few extra copies of issues scattered around, along with some random guide books that survived. Which is good for us, as we're hoping to start getting some "doubles" in the library anyway.

Why doubles? Well, I've got four use cases in mind:

1. If we go the route of trying to digitize magazines, I'd like to have the option to de-bind them and run the pages through an automatic feed-scanner. I refuse to do this with anything rare, and I also refuse to do this with anything we only have one copy of. But for something like GamePro, I think it's easy to justify partially-destroying issues for ease of use, if we have extras.

2. Condition upgrades! Our library was Frankenstein'd together from all kinds of places over the last 18 years or so of collecting, and some of our issues are, uh, not in great shape.

3. I also like the idea of having extra magazines to send to other libraries that might need them. For example, I was involved in getting a giant collection of 90s game magazines over to the Library of Congress a few years ago, as they'd actually gotten rid of most of their video game magazines over the years.

4. We might also occasionally sell some of our extra material as a way of raising funding. I haven't entirely decided if we'd do this yet, but it's possible!