Game Informer trip, day two

Hi again! Quick update tonight, as I try to catch some sleep and get back to work early in the morning. My hotel room has a mysterious phantom dripping sound coming from somewhere in the general bathroom area but, luckily, I don't hear it if I crank the fan up.

Today was all about sorting. It's hard to appreciate the magnitude of material that is sent to a magazine over 26 years...especially a magazine that has never had to downsize in a meaningful way, and whose editor-in-chief has not only been there since day one, but who recognized the importance of holding on to everything the entire time.  The amount of stuff here is just...inconceivable.

The photo above is the same space from yesterday, after I cleared out everything but the actual game discs. All of these boxes (according to their markings and a quick peek inside, anyway) contain nothing but non-retail game code, on discs, sent to Game Informer by video game publishers. These were games burned onto writable media (CD-R, DVD-R, etc.) that could only be played on special debug consoles - this is how publishers sent games to editors before they were completed and manufactured. What this means is that the majority of these games were burned before the game itself was complete. Every one of these discs has the potential to show us interesting changes that were made to a game throughout its development, which is invaluable for an historian trying to understand creative (or sometimes, technical) decisions that went into a title. Several of these discs will likely show us something even rarer - games that were never finished or sold at all!

Having sorted a couple of these boxes now, I'm estimating this archive having somewhere north of ten thousand of these discs. I've never had to deal with a collection of this magnitude before. I doubt anyone has. I doubt a collection like this even exists anywhere else. 

The goal of this trip is to, at bare minimum, get a rough inventory of what the magazine has, and work with them to help figure out how we go about ensuring that as little of this data deteriorates and dies as possible. This is something that has been on the staff's minds for years now, and we're thrilled to be able to help them solve this problem. But it's a big one! 

I've got six more weekdays in the office to get as close as I can to a rough estimate. Right now I'm just powering through trying to figure out how many discs this collection has for each platform, so we can go home and start doing the math. I'm hoping to sort these as quickly as possible, so we can move on to other stuff things in the office. Just wait until you see the file cabinets...