The Video Game History Foundation’s digital library is now publicly available in early access

The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) has now made its digital library system available to the public, as promised last week.

Available in early access form, the library is available to browse on the VGHF website (but is currently suffering timeout errors due to demand).

The library currently offers more than 30,000 curated files (with “lots more to come”), as well as more than 1,500 out-of-print magazines, which are fully text searchable.

According to the VGHF, the early access version of the library has launched with a number of highlights, including:

• “Guidebooks and ephemera” from video game events, including the first 12 years of E3
• An international collection of FromSoftware promotional materials (“with a blessing from FromSoftware to donate them to the library”)
• 100 CD-ROMs of artwork and press releases from GamePro magazine’s archives
• More than 100 hours of footage from the making of the Myst series
• The ‘Mark Flitman papers’, a “treasure trove” of documents kept by Flitman from his time working at Konami, Acclaim, Atari and others

“After years of collecting, cataloging, and digitizing video game history materials, the VGHF is finally opening the virtual doors to its library – wherever you are,” the Foundation said in a statement last week.

The VGHF was set up in 2017 by game preservationist and historian Frank Cifaldi. Since then, it’s been building an extensive collection of video game related material, with the aim being to catalogue, digitise and preserve the history of video games.

The non-profit foundation relies on donations to build its archives. “Thanks to your support, we’ve built a powerful tool for video game history research,” it said last week. “We can’t wait for you to get your first look at what we’ve been up to.”