Big Big Minneapolis Update

Hi everyone! Thanks to your donations, our tech director Travis and I are sitting at an Airbnb in Minneapolis tonight, with a giant wall of vintage PlayStation review code separating us. As you might have guessed, we're here continuing work on the Game Informer project I outlined a bit back in May.

I never really gave a post-mortem of that first trip, but basically: that time was spent scoping the project and getting a grip on just what GI has, which let me go home and do my homework to figure out how to tackle it. It took me roughly six days just to get everything organized and re-packed into file boxes.

As you might recall, this is what the closet looked like when I first arrived. It might look like a mess but, really, the material was mostly sorted in a logical way. It just wasn't accessible, and the boxes it was stored in weren't very safe or sturdy (some were ripping open, and some were waaaaay too heavy to move safely).

And here's what it looked like after about six solid days of work and several file box runs (that totally could have been one file box run if I found that Office Depot sale earlier in the week!). What we basically did was quarantine this as the "archive room," moving the rest of the stuff (equipment, swag, posters, hardware) elsewhere.

This is that left wall in the prior picture, which should give you an idea of the kind of scope we're dealing with here. Many of these boxes are crammed full of discs. At an absolute minimum (meaning, every individual disc in the box has a standard thick jewel case), there are 144 discs in one box. If it's full of thin cases, double that. If it's full of paper sleeves or loose discs, triple it.

You may remember that my original estimate was around 10,000 optical discs, spread between media assets and preview or review games. Having finished sorting, I've since adjusted that estimate - I think we're looking at something between 12 and 16,000. That's a lot of data. And that's just the optical media, which doesn't cover the ROMs, the film, the VHS tapes, the data backups, the mini discs, the 8mm video, the 20 deep file drawers full of paperwork...

That first trip was all about establishing scope, now this one is about establishing our process. We've invested in two Nimbie USB devices. These are basically disc-reading robots: you load discs into a hopper on the top (up to 100 at a time), and it auto-feeds them one at a time into a drive. Each one of those is then attached to its own dedicated computer, which is itself attached to its own 6TB HDD, both of which were donated to us by an employee of a hard drive manufacturer. We're still sorting out the software side of this, but that's why I brought Travis this time. I have him here until Monday, the hope is that by then we'll have squashed all the bugs. The goal is to have these running on semi-auto-pilot (I still have to supervise them unfortunately) while I work on other media, most likely the paperowrk.

We're not expecting to get a TON done this trip, but like I said, this one is about process. The next trip (when we can afford it, all this travel is draining our bank account fast) should hopefully see a big chunk of this collection digitized. I'm hoping to get more Nimbies and bring in some volunteers, but we're not doing that until I'm sure we can have a big impact. Hence, scoping trip.

"But when can we see this stuff??"

Well, first we have to actually digitize it! We did a few tests last time around, but we haven't properly started our archiving yet. In terms of how, when, and where you'll see it - this is an ongoing discussion we're having with the folks at Game Informer. I have a good feeling actually being here in person again means we can sort this out soon and come up with a plan. But until then, I want to thank all of you for your patience. I know it's a little weird to back a Patreon account that doesn't actually make much content, but working on this project has literally been the entire focus of the VGHF since May, so we haven't had anything to show. But I promise it's going to be worth it. There is no other collection like this in the world, and I don't think there's a better place for us to be putting our efforts right now. Heck, I wonder if there's EVER going to be a better place.

Thanks for sticking around everyone! More updates soon!