Long before Polygon, video game lovers relied on print magazines to pass time at school, on commutes, and during slow days at work when the boss wasn’t looking. In the ‘90s, I checked the mailbox each day for the latest issue from publications like Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro, dog-earing pages so I could quickly revisit tiny, fuzzy images of upcoming PlayStation games that looked — to my childhood eyes — like graphical miracles. When I left for college, my parents hurled my dusty boxes full of mags into the dump. I assumed I’d never again see the reviews of Scary Larry or the rumors of Quarterman.
I was wrong!
Today, the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) announced its digital archive of video game history is now available for free to the public for research purposes. The announcement claims readers “will have access to more than 30,000 curated files (with lots more to come) of industry ephemera straight from the VGHF’s physical collection, including more than 1,500 full-text searchable out-of-print video game magazines.”
The database has been in production since the VGHF’s founding in 2017. Not only will visitors find more magazines than they could hope to read in a lifetime, but also a treasure trove of rarely seen development documents, assets, artworks, and marketing materials. One example? Here’s a plethora of promotional materials for From Software games, from Dark Souls box art to Armored Core stickers.
I’ll be flipping through “GamePro press CD collection,” which collects “all known press assets received by GamePro from roughly 1995–2004.” Not only can I see Scary Larry once again. I can see what he saw in 1995, while I was waiting by my door for the next issue of GamePro to come.
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