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Knee-deep in ROMs (Game Informer trip, day one)

Added 2017-05-11 03:27:42 +0000 UTC

Greetings from Minneapolis! Or more specifically Plymouth, where the hotels are way cheaper.

Today marks the first day of a long overdue trip for us. About a year ago I started talking to Game Informer editor-in-chief Andy McNamara about how to archive the magazine's collection of, well, stuff. You may have seen the vault, a beautifully organized library of mostly-retail games going all the way back to the magazine's beginnings in 1991. As it turns out that's just the nice vault they show people. Downstairs in this closet is where I'd say the real meat of this collection lives - the press-only material, like review games and art discs.

The photo above is what it looked like when I got in this morning. It looks a lot different now that I've spent a few hours cleaning it up, but I forgot to take a picture of that before I left today. In subsequent posts I'll show you some of the incredible material we're digging out of here - press discs, EPROMs, and what I'd guess are literally thousands of game builds on CD and DVD (I have never seen an archive this large), and FIVE FILE CABINETS FULL OF PAPERWORK, but for now I just wanted to say:

Thank you all so much!!!

Thanks to the generosity of our backers, I can do crazy things like embed myself at a magazine for almost two weeks saving history. I'll update you as time goes on to discuss what we're doing here, what I'm finding, and how we're planning to archive this material and make sure it's accessible.