Isn't most of this (plus terabytes more) available on archive.org? I'm not trying to diminish this effort - anything that is done to preserve digital history is to be applauded - just struggling to see what differentiates this.
The big differentiator is the VGHF's archive supports fulltext search, which is huge. For example you can find the first mention of one of my favorite games, M.C. Kids, in seconds with VGHF's search[1]. How would you do that on archive.org?
It's also professionally curated, which means you can trust the scans and metadata to be accurate and consistent. Aside from that, VGHF has a ton of material that archive.org doesn't (donated collections from game industry people[2], magazines that have yet to be scanned by anyone). Much of that isn't in the digital archive yet, but it's coming.
One important item was a custom OCR for the magazine scans, particularly those with text on a crazy background. This was discussed in a Patreon call but might also be discussed in the podcast, I haven't listened through just yet. Another important distinction is it is actually being run and curated as a library (backend is preservica.com), not a grab bag like Archive.org can end up being, so the data will be more consistently correct.
That actually would be a topic of particular interest to this community.
Some of the layouts of these enthusiast magazines are so chaotic (looking at you Hardcore Gamefan) that the current technology for parsing text from scans wasn't good enough and they had to develop their own.
Non-centralization is enough for me (I love archive.org, but always worry about them flying too close to the sun one day and getting shut down), but this does also have a different UX, and has a more direct focus on videogame history, which should help them surface things in more interesting ways than a general purpose archive.
They have tons of physical stuff too. And if archive.org is ever destroyed we'll be glad they weren't the only ones with these records. Plus, people donate things directly to VGHF that may not be on archive.org.
archive.org is also under the shadow of a $621 million lawsuit and run on a shoestring by activists. That amazing "play the game" feature was explicitly called out as fully illegal (even to people with disabilities) by the Librarian of Congress a few months ago.
> The librarian renewed all existing exemptions except for the exemption for accessible access to video games, for which there was no petition for renewal.
There's enough balls being dropped here that multiple organizations with different boards, advisors, and funding models are needed. Kudos to all involved.
Just search for literally any piece of software or media you want, and you will find multiple copies of it uploaded by random people without permission. Petabytes upon petabytes of games, movies, TV shows, software, etc. constantly uploaded 24/7 for years, is all right there out in the open for anyone in the world to download. Want a zip file with every Nintendo game ever made? There's a dozen different scene groups all with their full dumps available right there. Have a favorite TV show? They have every episode of it.
Jason Scott himself has publicly advocated for people to "upload whatever you want and ask questions later" because it's "too difficult" to figure out copyright and their stance is always to just wait until a rightsholder complains before taking anything down.
Every single Nintendo game ROM for all systems, every arcade ROM you can imagine, acres of PlayStation games. It's a full on pirate site in there.
You can even play Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and thousands more from one click in the browser if downloading the stuff to your hard drive instead of your browser cache is too much trouble.
