The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) has been set up with the aim of keeping the history of video games safe for future generations to learn about, study, and enjoy. Recently, the foundation has made significant progress by introducing a new digital library filled with a wealth of video game-related materials.
A Treasure Trove of Content
The VGHF’s new Digital Archive is a vast and expanding collection of video game content, which includes hard-to-find video game magazines such as Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro, along with promotional items, concept artwork, development papers, interviews, and lot more. This archive is freely accessible online for anyone, and you don’t need to create an account to dive in.
Easy Navigation
Like many digital libraries, the variety of materials can be quite a lot to take in, but the archive seems to function well. The magazines, development papers, and other media have been fully scanned, allowing users to look up a specific magazine title and explore all available issues that the VGHF has digitized. The quality of these scans is impressive, and even better, they are completely text-searchable.
If you enter a specific term, such as a video game name, console, or developer, the archive will try to show all media that includes that word. For instance, if you search for “Super Mario World” (including the quotes), you’ll find hundreds of magazines and other media pieces that mention those words together. This makes it easy to gather a large amount of material related to Nintendo’s well-loved SNES game.
Innovative Technology
To achieve this functionality, the VGHF had to create its own optical character recognition (OCR) software to properly read text from video game magazines, which are known for their vibrant colors and bold layouts. The initial outcomes are promising, as the VGHF’s OCR technology can recognize and scan text that many other OCR programs might have trouble with.
The VGHF Digital Archive is still in its early stages and expanding quickly. Some initial users have reported that the servers can be a bit shaky at times. As of the time of writing, all searches performed for this article went smoothly, but it’s important to note that the website might experience issues during peak usage times.
Don’t forget, the VGHF Digital Archive isn’t limited to just gaming magazines. If you’ve ever been curious about a Christmas card from a SEGA company party or wanted to see a company’s financial report for a certain quarter, the VGHF Digital Archive could have that, too.
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