Welcome to the VGHF Library - First Look Demo

[@Joeseph_Mamamoa]

I'm a video game journalist; I've been to E3 as Press, reviewed countless games professionally, worked for huge websites, and now run a consultancy for video game journo websites. This is everything I've wanted, and I'm SO excited to use it.

[@Game_Hero]

Is business going well for you?

[@MetroGexual]

I love the Bubsy plush and how it just gets a knife halfway through the video

[@cyruskeane]

This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time.

[@Vub.]

This has always been my dream to do. Awesome you guys are doing this.

[@crtchicanery9605]

This feels like gaming as a medium is skipping from being notoriously poorly preserved for how recent its entire history is, to having a historic archive with a depth and accessibility that other mediums could only dream of. Like, if something similar exists for music or film, I'd love to know. Incredible beyond words.

[@SockyNoob]

Ikr. It's a huge game changer.

[@CoderQuest-mn8sh]

OH MAN THIS MUSIC

[@ThomasGameDocs]

This looks incredible! What an amazing resource this will be! Huge thanks to everyone at the foundation for your hard work!!!

[@Ruby_Sunrise]

I am not a historian, but a librarian-to-be and I've got to say: incredible! This has got to be a dream project for many library nerds. It blows my mind that only ONE librarian (and up to a handful of people) has taken on such an ambitious project. Congratulations Phil and everyone at VGHF, I'm excited to see this thing launch!

[@GameHistoryOrg]

I want to give huge credit for our director of technology, Travis Brown, who has been developing tools for us that have made this possible! --Phil

[@benlogan4038]

From one (high school) librarian to another (significantly cooler) librarian: Hooooooray!

[@donovanwilson1086]

1:01 ITS THE BUBSY PLUSH!!!

[@PowercellZeke]

You have no idea how happy this makes me! As an amateur archivist, I could only dream of documenting and preserving things this cohesively. And I cannot believe how feature rich and user friendly it is, omg, you've all killed it with this!! The amount of filtering ability is going to be such a life saver (and being able to word search magazine scans??? Insanity!!) Excellent work

[@Gamebits]

I've contributed many physical artifacts to places like the VGHF and The Strong. I'm glad to see tools like this making those donations available to the masses. I look forward to playing with the tool myself!

[@darktetsuya]

1:05 who invited bubsy?! ... 15:59 and WHY is he holding a knife? lol!! but all joking aside, this is an *amazing* project! I'm all for digital preservation of media, games, movies, tv shows, even the ephemera on the side like magazines and the stuff they sent to magazines. so I am really looking forward to see this project take shape!

[@TyGuy9001]

Thanks so much for all your work on keeping this stuff up and running folks! It’s amazing all the work y’all at the foundation have been doing to keep and obtain archives of this work!

[@vbsh9]

This is absolutely incredible! I can't wait to dive into this. What a great vision for preservation.

[@nikoamiko]

There's a specific magazine I had as a kid that I only this year figured out was an issue of Game Players, and I've never been able to find scans or images of it online. You put the cover of that issue on the screen. I pointed and clapped. Godspeed.

[@Bee892]

As a software engineer, I am so impressed by the ability to search for a term and then look at things like magazines that mention those terms. There must be a gigantic internal index that they worked on, and it shows the care they’re putting into this project.

[@DaniJam05]

This is genuinely going to be one of the coolest things to hit the internet.

[@ivomdcoliveira]

This looks amazing Phil, thanks for your work. Update The Obscuritory when you have the time. Miss your reviews.

[@NeonFeline]

I like the detail of the Bubsy plush in the back holding a knife lol

[@doctorclu]

That is what I tuned in for. :)

[@awogbob]

I close my eyes and see a vision of a future of countless hours of video game video essays that are actually well informed and interesting instead of rehashing the same bullshit amazing work here folks

[@sails9311]

BUBSY (with a knife) IS ON THE RUN 😳

[@BladedEdge]

Very happy to see what my donations are building. Keep it up, guys.

[@widdowson91]

I can't wait for this to be accessible to the public. You guys are doing amazing work, it's well worth the Patreon subscription.

[@ACMICollection]

Very impressive work! 🙌 Can't wait to do a deep dive into the records 😀

[@DeliciousMorsels]

You had me at the lofi Balamb Garden mix ❤️

[@kitestar]

This is perhaps the best early-ish, late-ish Christmas gift I could ever receive, thank you

[@Katosepe]

I don't know how I didn't hear about this! Been waiting for it for years and I can't wait to hear more as we get closer to launch.

[@fionali4502]

I'm very impressed of how ambitious this archive is! 😲 This archive will be incredibly useful not only for my freelance journalism but also for my video game radio show in the present and in the future. I'm a freelance journalist and a radio presenter. I've already written and contributed for a wide variety of publications such as websites, print, digital and online magazines, books and most recently, radio. I've also made appearances on a few podcasts.

[@rotallyPumpered]

This looks really great. There's a lot of significant material about older games available online already, but it tends to get spread out between a bunch of different platforms. Many old games were presented completely differently in different territories, and understanding that feel like a missing piece of the puzzle when trying specific releases. Being able to browse and compare regional material on older games should be really helpful for younger people approaching them for the first time. The Final Fantasy music brings to mind how complex and strange that series' history with international releases was, and how helpful it may be to have all of its promotional material laid bare in a comprehensive, well-categorised format.

[@MattPilz]

Such a tremendously valuable asset! I have been disappointed in many research projects to discover there are volumes of rare printed materials, manuals and technical references housed in museums or off-site libraries that have no potential means of accessing other than flying across the country (or world). None of the printed materials in so many computer / VG museums have been digitized, and it's painful.

[@maewilkes8883]

This was not on my recommended list when it was released; KZbin, you have failed me... That being said, this is amazing news! I can finally stop trying to archive certain magazines for myself, and I'm looking forward to all of the new information I can gain. As a gaming history enthusiast, I may actually start looking into being an amateur historian. Thank you all, so much! 😊

[@StrikerObi]

Watch out behind you, Bubsy has a knife @16:00!

[@GameHistoryOrg]

Bubsy has escaped confinement and we are concerned. Please contact us immediately if you hear yarn-related puns and the sound of a knife being dragged.

[@Retromags_Brian]

Dang it, Frank! You beat us to it! Looks amazing!

[@RayceARoni]

Thanks for showing this off guys, it looks very useful. I imagine this has been Phil's focus for the past two years and it shows.

[@greymatter77]

I'm curious if there has been a significant # of Mark Flitman types helping out. Surely they have to be out there. It's not just VG history. It's their legacy and place in VG history that's being preserved. The effort is greatly appreciated.

[@GameHistoryOrg]

Yes! We've also announced this month that we're working on collections from game designer Mike Mendheim and Sunsoft executive vice president Rita Zimmerer. Part of this project is making people more comfortable with the idea that we can publicly preserve their work. Devs often don't think of their own work as being "history"! --Phil

[@greymatter77]

@@GameHistoryOrg Awesome!

[@PersonaSama]

This is so amazing, y'all are making such an incredibly valuable and useful resource! Bless 🙏

[@VideoDojoPro]

This is huge! Thank you VHGF for all the incredible work you have done and continue to do! ✨

[@ing.rafaelsolorzano1976]

Congratulations. You have done a great job. I'll keep an eye on it.

[@thejananigans431]

You guys are doing incredible work! I love this soo much

[@TAoVG]

I am SO PROUD of Phil and the VGHF for reaching this awesome milestone! Phil is a wonderful addition to the VGHF team and excited to see this take flight!

[@mariomadproductions]

This looks really great. From what I can come up with from this video, an additional feature that'd be useful to me would be manifests/hashes for all files (magazine scans, anything) not just discs, so fixity/comparisons can be done for those too. And CRC32, SHA1, SHA256 and "Checksum-16" (which Nintendo used for old ROMs), in addition to the MD5 checksums, since some other sources will only have one of those, so it'd help with cross referencing.

[@GameHistoryOrg]

Good points! Our system automatically does checksums/fixity checks on the backend, so that part is taken care of. I double-checked, and our manifest tool does generate SHA1 and SHA256 (not visible in the video because I'd have to scroll to the right). That's an interesting idea about using it for individual files like ROMs on top of just CD images, I'll take those notes back the next time we're talking about development on the tool. --Phil

[@mariomadproductions]

@@GameHistoryOrg Cool, thanks!

[@RogersBase]

This is so unbelivably cool! Massive thank you to the VGHF!

[@RetroHousecr]

This video exceeds the expectation, looking forward to see it live. This will be huge for the gaming historian comunity and hopefully will start new convesations with better context of the era.

[@landamo84]

This is going be so fucking dope. I can't wait to see how many rabbit holes I get lost in.

[@elliogle]

I am really exciting about you sharing this information, and think you guys could be the leaders of Video Game History. It would be great if other History sites could share their info for you to include.

[@HybridDivide]

This is AMAZING! Definitely need to make another donation soon!

[@DarthPaperBoy]

Though I don't know if any are actually in the collection, a model viewer of 3D scans for non-digital development materials would be pretty great. A lot of games like Fallout, Doom, and Shenmue at one point in development used things like clay or papier-mâché models for either planning or actually producing the animations of monsters or talking heads. Being able to look at them close up, see how they're made, materials, and all that would be really cool and way better than iffy photos uploaded to Flickr years and years ago. I guess a 3D model viewer could also be good in the event that development materials of things that were only ever seen pre-rendered are archived. Games like Donkey Kong Country or Harvest Moon 64 that rendered high quality models as sprites. It'd be great if any of those kinds of things were archived.

[@Shoobster]

That would be a delight, I wonder if a website like Sketchfab could share or license their model viewing tech to make development easier.

[@backlogburning]

Truly heroic levels of effort. I can’t wait to dig into this.

[@jamesattridge4911]

This looks amazing!!! Being able to text search magazine scans in particular will be so helpful! It would be incredible if it's possible to include searchable transcriptions/captions for A/V materials as well!

[@GameHistoryOrg]

This is a good recommendation! I don't think our platform currently supports captions/transcripts on videos in general, which is frustrating, but there might be a solution similar to how we do checksums for discs. This fell down my list once I saw it wasn't supported, but thanks for reminding me to reinvestigate it. --Phil

[@natelawrence]

@@GameHistoryOrg WebVTT is an open standard for HTML5 video captions. OpenAI's Whisper 3 can give you a massive head start on transcription of AV content. It will need to be hand-corrected by human reviewers, though, to be useful.

[@GameHistoryOrg]

Following up on this! I spent the last couple days exploring this, and YES we have a way to add captions and transcripts! (At least for video, it doesn't seem to be currently supported for audio.) I'm still exploring if we can get them full-text searchable, but either way I'm excited. --Phil

[@natelawrence]

@@GameHistoryOrgI'm just going to follow up and point out that you could also perform forced alignment of the transcript to the audio to provide interactive transcripts with per-word timing. Look up lowerquality's 'Gentle' or m-bain's 'WhisperX' for an idea of what I'm talking about.

[@GameHistoryOrg]

Replying again nearly a month later: we've figured out searchable/interactive transcripts now. Thank you for suggesting this, this was a great thing to get sorted out as a feature! --Phil

[@serrotnodnarB]

this is truly a dream come true. one of my goals since childhood was to collect all of the Pencil Puzzles from Tips & Tricks magazine to make a book out of them to keep forever and to share with the future. thank you and everyone who contributed to this! it looks phenomenal

[@doctorclu]

Awesome project VGHF! Also, who was here to see the Bubsy plush?

[@Crobisaur]

heck yeah super excited for you all! I've been excited to hear when the archive would be available!

[@woodsmal]

Well done guys. I wouldn't consider myself a historian but I do run a group for retro game collectors and I'm always pushing the historical aspect of the games we're playing. I appreciate all the effort you've gone to and can't wait to get my hands on it.

[@natelawrence]

13:54 Shout out to OpenSeadragon!

[@Ribiveer]

This is so amazing! I can't fathom just how much effort was behind this, and I think it's going te an immensely valuable resource to an incredible amount of people. Since you asked for comments, I have a bit of a selfish request. You see, while Nintendo has their video game manuals from the GBA onwards preserved pretty nicely on their website. For the European versions, the manuals were multi-language, and for languages like German and French, these have been preserved pretty well by them. The Dutch parts of those manuals however are literally cut out of the files! For all of these manuals, the pages will skip from 59 to 74 or something, and pages 60-73 will have been the Dutch segment of the manual. For the DS, the manuals were per-language. Again, German and French and English manuals have been preserved, but on the Dutch pages Nintendo serves the English ones. Even though Dutch manuals definitely do exist for most of these games! As a Dutch localisation nerd, it pains me to see these Dutch translations get lost to time. However, I have no way to get a hold of the manuals, and no way to scan them if I did.

[@LordMarlle]

I can not believe how awesome this is. My mind is so blown I don't even know how I'm writing this

[@bryceandrewmusicofficial]

I would like there to be 3D scans of game cartridge's and boxes that you can rotate and look around every direction, along with a way to view them in a VR headset like the Meta Quest 3.

[@MathiasMahieu]

Balamb Garden

[@saladplainzone]

This will be amazing for people researching video game stuff in the future, this is actually huge. Thank you for everything

[@fluffy_tail4365]

This is huge! Looking for old information from the past eras will get easier

[@omegarlm]

Thank you for doing this! As a person who grew up loving print magazines and still purchases them to this day, this will be fabulous.

[@tdfitzsimons]

Looks absolutely fantastic and I can't even begin to imagine what an wonderful tool this will be for people interested in video game history research.

[@cherokeestarfish]

Incredible archival achievement, and amazing to see such an important and neglected medium (and a huge part of my childhood) preserved with such passion. VGHF FTW 💜🤟

[@mattcolewilson]

Great work, all. SO STOKED.

[@yankrob]

Keep up the great amazing work.

[@McGrizz43]

This looks great, really looking forward to seeing it go live. Great to the early vision for the organization starting to take shape in a way that masses can enjoy it.

[@marktreerng]

This is absolutely amazing to see. As a regular member of the public, the prospect of global access to this stuff online is so great to see for accessibility. Will certainly be having a look!

[@BeyondTheScanlines]

I'm genuinely excited for this - if only for all the work done on categorising the magazine side of things, which should make that far better for research (especially because most of what I'm interested in tends to be more from the computer gaming side of the fence than the console side). Can't wait to see more progress on it!

[@PointZoneTelephone]

Wonderful! I know a lot of uninformed people gave you guys shit for not being able to access the materials in the past but I always believed in you and knew something like this was just a matter of time! Can't wait to dig into it

[@JoeSlap]

Oh, man I'm speechless. You guys are amazing, keep up this wonderful work of love. Thanks from the bottom of my gamer heart.

[@CMM1215]

Absolutely incredible. I can't wait to explore the digital library when it launches! That Mortal Kombat content is looking really interesting!!

[@cryomancer199X]

hell yeah, you love to see it. i hope this takes off and goes well, far into the future. hope the things i sent were in some way helpful.

[@ChromeColossus]

To echo other comments: This is incredible! The positive benefit this will provide to video game history and documentation is incalculable.

[@BinarySplit]

Eeee! This looks amazing! I've felt the pain of searching through game magazines on Internet Archive, etc. and am thrilled to see the focus on consistent metadata. Thank you for all your hard work! I can't wait to use it

[@Maxemillian_X]

As someone who loves video game history and believes in taking lessons from the past, this is such an amazing resource to have. Beyond what one could ever hope for. I knew the foundation was doing good work, but honestly this is next level. Y’all have my my utmost respect and gratitude for the work you’ve done and continue to do.

[@ChrisLerouxDesign]

This is absolutely fantastic and makes me so giddy with joy and excitement. I can't wait to use it when it launches next year.

[@kellan4578]

Reading old gaming magazines is a favorite pastime of mine, but I have to visit my brother to actually do it. Super stoked for this project!

[@dr.araujo-junior]

🎮 O-M-G ❤ As a Video Games Researcher/Educator for Lifelong Learning, I cannot express how grateful I am for this invaluable work! This library is going to be 🔥LIT🔥 in the academic literature !!

[@Harukurochan]

This is super cool! I’m looking forward to seeing this launch and giving more people access to the history of video games!

[@Mythough]

That search system is so good!

[@mehIXIX]

I'm in love, this is going to improve the accuracy of information in video game culture so much. I can already see myself losing hours to browsing the archive!

[@Qwarky]

This is wonderful stuff, I can't wait to explore when we get the chance. I was also delighted to see all those issues of Super Play on the shelf in the first shot. Such a wonderful magazine!

[@neogohanamv]

This looks amazing! Thank you so much for highlighting Game Players. It's no exaggeration to say that magazine shaped my childhood, especially during the magazine's later crazy years. It's criminally overlooked, and I hope your archive helps others find it and experience the surreal experiment it became.

[@bdjeffyp]

"Try to hurt the wizard every time you see him." 😂 This is looking fantastic so far! I have been really excited to see this and look forward to how it progresses and it's eventual release.

[@r.j.etrogames]

Thank you SO MUCH. This is everything I could have ever hoped for. Excellent!

[@contrafell3969]

i gotta say, this is SUPER well done, every feature is everything ive dreamed of for searching materials and such I gotta admit, im no historian... but i am someone with a great interest in the history of some of my beloved games and ive always wanted somewhere where i could browser documents, files, images and scans for any magazines or just general developtment material archived i absolutely LOVE the category system, how theres specific categories for magazines and press material (this being a really interesting subject for me that ive honestly really loved hearing about) I cannot wait to be browsing your guy's library, kudos to the team for crafting this for so long!!

[@0xF00F00]

Great stuff! As a DB dev myself, I'm also happy to see you're building this with certrain flexibilities in mind, as seen in the Game Players example. If you were to paper over stuff like that at the start, you're just setting yourself up for a world of pain later, and it gets worse as it goes on!

[@mombijombo]

Binders of Rare's LTD early work! that library deserves those things and strategy guides! you already making site great!

[@sebc255]

Thank you so much for this! Greetings from Peru.

[@hypersphere]

This looks phenomenal! You definitely did the right thing pursuing your own system, doing this the RIGHT way!

[@lesterrr12312]

that Bubsy with the knife tho!

[@SpriteCell]

Very excited to dig in to this eventually, looks much nicer to navigate than the Internet Archive. I'd love to have those magazines be text searchable, but I don't know how viable that is. Another comment also reminded me that there are very few Japanese manual scans around, it would be interesting to be able to see how some early game manuals explained things differently or used different art, or to be able to see what got lost in translation.

[@twiztidewok]

The ff8 music was classy

[@denburk74]

This looks fantastic. Wish this was around when I wrote my book

[@mattsephton]

Super great work!

[@ArtofWEZ]

Thank you so much, you are doing Cyberpunk God's work

[@Dorito_Djinn]

This looks awesome! Can't wait to read through it.

[@grahamwalker2168]

I love that standing lamp ❤❤❤

[@SockyNoob]

Amazing work, absolutely game changing for preservation. This should be the gold standard for how it's done. Can't wait to be able to finally see all those parody game covers in Game Informer. Who remembers EA Sports Pro Spitball?