The Video Game History Foundation has added complete 5000 total magazines to our digital archive, a important milestone in our project to build a first-in-class video equivalent former investigation library.
When we launched our digital archive final year, we announced an first gathering of complete 1500 out-of-print, text-searchable magazines, which are liberated for investigation access. In the period since we launched, we’ve additional than tripled the size of that collection—now totaling nearly 600,000 pages, the equal of nearly 100 feet of rack space!
Our mag archive now spans 46 years of video equivalent history, from 1981–2026. Major new additions since initiate contain hundreds of commerce magazines, a historically important newsletter, and publications for niche gaming communities. Altogether, these document for concerning 60 percent of the Video Game History Foundation’s complete bodily mag gathering that we’ve cataloged so far.
This milestone would not have been imaginable without assistance from community-run scanning projects. With our blended efforts, we’ve turned their mag scans into a mighty investigation tool.
Around one-third of the magazines in our digital archive were digitized by the Video Game History Foundation, alongside the remainder provided by external groups. We desire to appreciate the groups and individuals who have helped:
- The community-run scanning groups Retromags, Out-of-Print Archive, Sega Retro, AtariAge, Atari Compendium, CGW Museum, The Odyssey² Homepage, TOSEC-PIX, eXoDOS, and Gaming Alexandria.
- Industry partners and alumni from Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Developer, Game Informer, and MCV.
- …and a particular shoutout to VGHF Patreon associate Chris Chapman, who provided us alongside 157 scans and digital magazines, the most of any unaffiliated contributor.
It’s lone been a twelvemonth and a fractional since we launched our digital archive, but we’re already seeing its transformative consequence on video equivalent former research. In fact, the VGHF Digital Archive has already rotate into the preferred citation origin for out-of-print equivalent magazines on Wikipedia, alongside complete 500 citations and counting. We’re grateful that researchers have responded so quickly to our imagination for a well-organized, openly accessible investigation platform.
We have additionally heard from the community concerning what additional features and sequence they’d akin to see in our mag library. We’ve taken that feedback to heart, and that’s helped us decide anywhere we’re heading next.
Introducing Japanese magazines
You asked, and we’ve delivered: we are now supporting Japanese-language magazines in our digital archive.
Japanese magazines are a critical asset for studying video equivalent history; in particular, they can be a affluent origin for interviews alongside developers—most of which have rarely if always been reprinted—and first-hand accounts of Japanese participant culture.
While there are a figure of community projects to digitize Japanese magazines, they’ve frequently been met alongside distinctive traditional and lawful challenges. We average for our digital archive to build on the community’s work, much akin we’ve done for English-language magazines.
How we’re doing it
Today, as our aviator project, we’re launching research admission to Neo Geo Freak, a mag that covered games for Neo Geo residence and arcade platforms from 1995–2000.
Neo Geo Freak felt akin a fine applicable starting location for us. Last year, a generous community associate donated the complete run of Neo Geo Freak to our library, and the mag had already been digitized by the person Japanese Magazine Scans, the two of which reduced the amount of activity on our end to commencement exploring what it would obtain to add Japanese materials to our digital archive.
More importantly, though, Neo Geo Freak is additionally a fine example of the distinctive matter that can established in Japanese publications. Neo Geo platforms performed particularly fine in Japan related to the remainder of the world, making this an outstanding applicant for the kind of sustained safety you wouldn’t discover in the English-language press.
However, adding Japanese magazines to our archive was not as uncomplicated as uploading a bunch of PDFs. We keep a elevated norm for how we current materials in our archive, and for a content-dense mag written in a tongue that our personnel isn’t fluent in, gathering those standards was easier stated than done.
First, we worked alongside our community of peers to decide the finest methods for Japanese manuscript recognition. Professional archivists in Japan pointed us towards their preferred libraries for Japanese document transcription, which we unified into the content mapping toolset that we use for English-language magazines.
We accept the outcome is the most exact text-searchable Japanese magazines currently in any digital archive. We verified the results alongside equivalent former researchers who use Japanese materials to justify that the output is dependable and usable at scale.
To create Neo Geo Freak additional discoverable for an English-speaking audience, we took the additional stage to indicator the important articles from complete run of the mag in English. Rather than attempting to translate 10,000 pages of Japanese text, we assembled a collection of Japanese-fluent volunteers to create a catalog of important articles and interviews for all issue.
We think this is a applicable and productive method for making these magazines’ contents additional accessible, during avoiding the pitfalls connected alongside automated bulk translation. Users are encouraged to translate mag content using their own tools of choice as needed—even fair using their phone camera.
Full assistance for Japanese magazines additionally required several improvements to our digital archive platform. New features we’ve added for this aviator project contain filtering items by language, displaying right-to-left leaf layouts, and supporting Japanese content without interword spacing in hunt results.
We additionally went rear and re-processed Japanese materials that were already in our digital archive, specified as our gathering of FromSoftware promotional material, to equivalent our new standards.
What’s next
This is—hopefully!—the commencement of a dedication from us for additional global materials in our library. The Video Game History Foundation does not have the most extended gathering of Japanese-language magazines, but all this new construction volition create it easier for us to activity alongside the materials we do own.
We additionally are open to operating alongside another organizations and collectors who have additional extended libraries of Japanese material, but would need assistance to rotate them into a investigation resource.
This project was made imaginable gratitude to the efforts and input of our community volunteers, who had the topic and tongue ability we needed to equal regard undertaking this pilot. Thanks to Brian Clark, Rob Curl, Misty De Méo, Dave Fishel, Akito Inoue, Stef “pidgezero_one” Kischak, Lillian McIntyre, Stephen Meyerink, and Adria Miller for their help.
How are we doing?
We desire to comprehend from you concerning how we’re doing so far. Adding Japanese publications to our investigation archive is an breathtaking new stage for us, and we desire to be certain we’re treating these materials alongside the regard and fidelity they deserve.
If you activity alongside Japanese-language materials in your research, please let us cognize what you think. Positive feedback is welcome! We’re eyeing another lot of (gulp) 70,000 pages that we’re preparedness to add in the coming years, so we desire to create certain we’re on the correct track before going further.
(And if you are expert in Japanese, we’d affection your assistance indexing the next magazines we’re preparedness to add! Please reach out to our archive team.)
Thank you to everyone who uses our digital archive and has encouraged us to continue expanding our collections. We’re construction our archive to assistance to the study of video equivalent history, and we’re enthusiastic all day by how you use these resources.
