The Video Game History Foundation Library opens its archives for the first time

Today, the Video Game History Foundation announced an early-access launch of its digital archive, including magazines, catalogs, behind-the-scenes content, and much more — and it’s completely free to access. The VGHF has more than 1,500 searchable video game magazines, all of which are currently out of print. You can even check out industry trade magazines that the general public rarely sees.

A particular point of interest among these files is what the VGHF calls the Mark Flitman papers. Flitman is a retired game producer with a career spanning multiple companies including Konami, Acclaim, Midway, and Mindscape. He allowed the VGHF to digitize more than two decades’ of material for posterity, giving viewers a sneak peak into the game development scene in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Fans of Myst will also find over 100 hours of footage from the series’ production, including original FMV content, much of which is planned for inclusion in the upcoming The Myst Documentary.

In the midst of a video game preservation crisis, the launch of this digital archive makes the history of one of the world’s most popular pastimes much more readily available. There’s a bit of something for everyone, like the first 100 CDs from the GamePro Magazine archives and even maps from the first 12 years of E3.

The mission of the Video Game History Foundation is to bring video game history “back to life.” The non-profit organization gathers and collects promotional materials, instruction manuals, and much more for its research library, but VGHF also seeks to preserve the original source code for as many games as possible.

The Video Game History Foundation has made much of its collection available for free; anything that can be publicly accessed has no charge. You can also request specific materials, but the team warns it could be slow to respond due to high demand after the launch.

Unfortunately, you can’t play the video games in the archive. US copyright law makes sharing those files a murky area, but the VGHF says it is “fighting to change this law in coordination with the software preservation community.”