While the video game industry is huge and has been around for decades, studying its history is tricky due to a lack of tools and resources, as well as legal headaches. But the Video Game History Foundation has just launched a new, free to use website that will let you dig through decades of old game magazines, press kits, advertisements, and more. And the plan is to grow this tool with more content in the future to make it easier than ever to look back at video game history.
On January 30, the VGHF announced that its long-in-development digital library was now live for everyone to use. The non-profit organization has been working on it since 2017, collecting development documents, behind-the-scenes content, and rare video game magazines. And now, after a lot of hard work, VGHF’s library is open to the public and it’s awesome.
With the new VGHF library, you can dig through over 1500 issues of old video game magazines, including popular ones like EGM, Game Informer, and Gamepro as well as less well-known publications like Girl Gamer and Digital Diner.
Not only can you flip through these magazines for free on your PC, but you can also search through all of them using keyword searches and filter your results. Want to look up a particular game and see old stories about it? You can do that! Want to check out stories on an industry icon? Just search their name. You can even filter out years and types of content to get really specific. It’s a powerful tool that will help researchers and historians for years to come.
“Our library is the future home for all our collections,” said VGHF’s Library Director Phil Salvador. “We’re in this for the long-haul, and over the coming years, we’ll be adding even more materials to our archive and adding new features to our library system. If you want to learn more about what we have in our library, our catalog has additional information about items that aren’t available digitally yet, and even materials we haven’t processed.”
And if you’re wondering if this is all legal or if publishers of these magazines will come with lawyers to take them down, VGHF Founder & Director Frank Cifaldi explained that the team has “legal help on-call” in case that happens.
“We are working within what we all believe to be fair use for out-of-print materials,” said Cifaldi on Bluesky. “A big part of the DMCA takedowns for vintage video game magazines in places like the Internet Archive has been because they were community-uploaded, and not digital copies of books and magazines they actually own. We own almost all of them, and when we don’t, we have a custodial record of who does.”
If you want to help the VGHF continue this awesome work, you can donate money to them using this website. And you should, because video game history is important and there aren’t many people out there doing the hard work to preserve it like the VGHF.
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