Welcome to the VGHF Library - First Look Demo
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ธ.ค. 2023
- For the last two years, we've been working on a digital library, where you'll be able to remotely browse and access our collection. We think it's finally ready to show off!
This is a WORK IN PROGRESS and may not represent the final product. It's a little unpolished and a little unfinished, but we want to show you what we've been up to and how you'll be able to explore our collections next year.
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Music by Rifti Beats used with permission (CC BY-SA 4.0): • Final Fantasy VIII - B... creativecommons.org/licenses/...
IGN Save Point stream footage: • IGN Save Point Live St...
Game Player's covers via Retromags: retromags.com
OAIS chart via Digital Preservation Coalition, no license provided: wiki.dpconline.org/index.php?...
I'm a video game journalist; I've been to E3 as Press, reviewed countless games professionally, worked for huge websites, and now run a consultancy for video game journo websites. This is everything I've wanted, and I'm SO excited to use it.
Is business going well for you?
I've contributed many physical artifacts to places like the VGHF and The Strong. I'm glad to see tools like this making those donations available to the masses. I look forward to playing with the tool myself!
This was not on my recommended list when it was released; TH-cam, you have failed me...
That being said, this is amazing news!
I can finally stop trying to archive certain magazines for myself, and I'm looking forward to all of the new information I can gain. As a gaming history enthusiast, I may actually start looking into being an amateur historian. Thank you all, so much! 😊
I can't wait for this to be accessible to the public. You guys are doing amazing work, it's well worth the Patreon subscription.
This feels like gaming as a medium is skipping from being notoriously poorly preserved for how recent its entire history is, to having a historic archive with a depth and accessibility that other mediums could only dream of. Like, if something similar exists for music or film, I'd love to know. Incredible beyond words.
Ikr. It's a huge game changer.
I love the Bubsy plush and how it just gets a knife halfway through the video
From one (high school) librarian to another (significantly cooler) librarian: Hooooooray!
I don't know how I didn't hear about this! Been waiting for it for years and I can't wait to hear more as we get closer to launch.
Very impressive work! 🙌 Can't wait to do a deep dive into the records 😀
Thanks for showing this off guys, it looks very useful. I imagine this has been Phil's focus for the past two years and it shows.
This looks incredible! What an amazing resource this will be! Huge thanks to everyone at the foundation for your hard work!!!
Thanks so much for all your work on keeping this stuff up and running folks! It’s amazing all the work y’all at the foundation have been doing to keep and obtain archives of this work!
As a software engineer, I am so impressed by the ability to search for a term and then look at things like magazines that mention those terms. There must be a gigantic internal index that they worked on, and it shows the care they’re putting into this project.
This looks amazing. I learned who Mark flipman was from this video. Didn't know he helped you out. Also shout out to whoever thought of this whole thing. Love Hidden Palce and The Cutting Room Floor and I'm sure that this will be better than both. Might be Private right now but oh boy. Wait until you make it public, traffic will be red...red...RED. Bumper to bumper XD. I Kid but seriously, imagine how many would be jealous of you right now. This should be a actual library. Like check unreleased games out, Bring them back after some time, if your not done yet, get extra time. Stuff actual libraries do but for gamers. I did see someone play Power Up Baseball and I want to play it.
Sorry for the long comment Phil. I love video games and this whole thing is amazing. Ill check it out as soon as it goes public. This Human Fox would like to learn more every day so why not start the day it launches? Thanks for bringing this to me. I'm a happy Human Fox.
There's a specific magazine I had as a kid that I only this year figured out was an issue of Game Players, and I've never been able to find scans or images of it online. You put the cover of that issue on the screen. I pointed and clapped. Godspeed.
I am not a historian, but a librarian-to-be and I've got to say: incredible! This has got to be a dream project for many library nerds. It blows my mind that only ONE librarian (and up to a handful of people) has taken on such an ambitious project. Congratulations Phil and everyone at VGHF, I'm excited to see this thing launch!
I want to give huge credit for our director of technology, Travis Brown, who has been developing tools for us that have made this possible! --Phil
This looks amazing Phil, thanks for your work. Update The Obscuritory when you have the time. Miss your reviews.
Awesome project VGHF! Also, who was here to see the Bubsy plush?
You have no idea how happy this makes me! As an amateur archivist, I could only dream of documenting and preserving things this cohesively. And I cannot believe how feature rich and user friendly it is, omg, you've all killed it with this!! The amount of filtering ability is going to be such a life saver (and being able to word search magazine scans??? Insanity!!) Excellent work
I close my eyes and see a vision of a future of countless hours of video game video essays that are actually well informed and interesting instead of rehashing the same bullshit
amazing work here folks
Balamb Garden
This is genuinely going to be one of the coolest things to hit the internet.
This is absolutely incredible! I can't wait to dive into this. What a great vision for preservation.
This is going be so fucking dope. I can't wait to see how many rabbit holes I get lost in.
Very happy to see what my donations are building. Keep it up, guys.
BUBSY (with a knife) IS ON THE RUN 😳
Such a tremendously valuable asset! I have been disappointed in many research projects to discover there are volumes of rare printed materials, manuals and technical references housed in museums or off-site libraries that have no potential means of accessing other than flying across the country (or world). None of the printed materials in so many computer / VG museums have been digitized, and it's painful.
I am SO PROUD of Phil and the VGHF for reaching this awesome milestone! Phil is a wonderful addition to the VGHF team and excited to see this take flight!
I am really exciting about you sharing this information, and think you guys could be the leaders of Video Game History. It would be great if other History sites could share their info for you to include.
that Bubsy with the knife tho!
Congratulations. You have done a great job. I'll keep an eye on it.
This looks really great. There's a lot of significant material about older games available online already, but it tends to get spread out between a bunch of different platforms. Many old games were presented completely differently in different territories, and understanding that feel like a missing piece of the puzzle when trying specific releases. Being able to browse and compare regional material on older games should be really helpful for younger people approaching them for the first time. The Final Fantasy music brings to mind how complex and strange that series' history with international releases was, and how helpful it may be to have all of its promotional material laid bare in a comprehensive, well-categorised format.
The ff8 music was classy
Thank you so much, you are doing Cyberpunk God's work
That search system is so good!
This is so unbelivably cool! Massive thank you to the VGHF!
This is huge! Thank you VHGF for all the incredible work you have done and continue to do! ✨
Make sure to chip in a donation while you're visiting, even if just a small one.
I'm very impressed of how ambitious this archive is! 😲 This archive will be incredibly useful not only for my freelance journalism but also for my video game radio show in the present and in the future.
I'm a freelance journalist and a radio presenter. I've already written and contributed for a wide variety of publications such as websites, print, digital and online magazines, books and most recently, radio. I've also made appearances on a few podcasts.
You had me at the lofi Balamb Garden mix ❤️
This is perhaps the best early-ish, late-ish Christmas gift I could ever receive, thank you
hell yeah, you love to see it. i hope this takes off and goes well, far into the future. hope the things i sent were in some way helpful.
This video exceeds the expectation, looking forward to see it live.
This will be huge for the gaming historian comunity and hopefully will start new convesations with better context of the era.
1:01 ITS THE BUBSY PLUSH!!!
I'm curious if there has been a significant # of Mark Flitman types helping out. Surely they have to be out there. It's not just VG history. It's their legacy and place in VG history that's being preserved. The effort is greatly appreciated.
Yes! We've also announced this month that we're working on collections from game designer Mike Mendheim and Sunsoft executive vice president Rita Zimmerer. Part of this project is making people more comfortable with the idea that we can publicly preserve their work. Devs often don't think of their own work as being "history"! --Phil
@@GameHistoryOrg Awesome!
13:54 Shout out to OpenSeadragon!
This is the dream... wow.
I like the detail of the Bubsy plush in the back holding a knife lol
That is what I tuned in for. :)
I'm soooooo cool with that, library guy!
okay good --Phil
Keep up the great amazing work.
This is so amazing! I can't fathom just how much effort was behind this, and I think it's going te an immensely valuable resource to an incredible amount of people.
Since you asked for comments, I have a bit of a selfish request. You see, while Nintendo has their video game manuals from the GBA onwards preserved pretty nicely on their website. For the European versions, the manuals were multi-language, and for languages like German and French, these have been preserved pretty well by them. The Dutch parts of those manuals however are literally cut out of the files! For all of these manuals, the pages will skip from 59 to 74 or something, and pages 60-73 will have been the Dutch segment of the manual. For the DS, the manuals were per-language. Again, German and French and English manuals have been preserved, but on the Dutch pages Nintendo serves the English ones. Even though Dutch manuals definitely do exist for most of these games!
As a Dutch localisation nerd, it pains me to see these Dutch translations get lost to time. However, I have no way to get a hold of the manuals, and no way to scan them if I did.
Wow. This is amazing.
This is so amazing, y'all are making such an incredibly valuable and useful resource! Bless 🙏
1:05 who invited bubsy?! ... 15:59 and WHY is he holding a knife? lol!! but all joking aside, this is an *amazing* project! I'm all for digital preservation of media, games, movies, tv shows, even the ephemera on the side like magazines and the stuff they sent to magazines. so I am really looking forward to see this project take shape!
I would like there to be 3D scans of game cartridge's and boxes that you can rotate and look around every direction, along with a way to view them in a VR headset like the Meta Quest 3.
"Try to hurt the wizard every time you see him." 😂
This is looking fantastic so far! I have been really excited to see this and look forward to how it progresses and it's eventual release.
This will be amazing for people researching video game stuff in the future, this is actually huge. Thank you for everything
Dang it, Frank! You beat us to it! Looks amazing!
this is truly a dream come true. one of my goals since childhood was to collect all of the Pencil Puzzles from Tips & Tricks magazine to make a book out of them to keep forever and to share with the future. thank you and everyone who contributed to this! it looks phenomenal
Incredible archival achievement, and amazing to see such an important and neglected medium (and a huge part of my childhood) preserved with such passion. VGHF FTW 💜🤟
Though I don't know if any are actually in the collection, a model viewer of 3D scans for non-digital development materials would be pretty great. A lot of games like Fallout, Doom, and Shenmue at one point in development used things like clay or papier-mâché models for either planning or actually producing the animations of monsters or talking heads. Being able to look at them close up, see how they're made, materials, and all that would be really cool and way better than iffy photos uploaded to Flickr years and years ago.
I guess a 3D model viewer could also be good in the event that development materials of things that were only ever seen pre-rendered are archived. Games like Donkey Kong Country or Harvest Moon 64 that rendered high quality models as sprites. It'd be great if any of those kinds of things were archived.
That would be a delight, I wonder if a website like Sketchfab could share or license their model viewing tech to make development easier.
Super great work!
As someone who loves video game history and believes in taking lessons from the past, this is such an amazing resource to have. Beyond what one could ever hope for. I knew the foundation was doing good work, but honestly this is next level. Y’all have my my utmost respect and gratitude for the work you’ve done and continue to do.
This is absolutely amazing to see. As a regular member of the public, the prospect of global access to this stuff online is so great to see for accessibility. Will certainly be having a look!
Great work, all. SO STOKED.
This is AMAZING!
Definitely need to make another donation soon!
This looks really great. From what I can come up with from this video, an additional feature that'd be useful to me would be manifests/hashes for all files (magazine scans, anything) not just discs, so fixity/comparisons can be done for those too. And CRC32, SHA1, SHA256 and "Checksum-16" (which Nintendo used for old ROMs), in addition to the MD5 checksums, since some other sources will only have one of those, so it'd help with cross referencing.
Good points! Our system automatically does checksums/fixity checks on the backend, so that part is taken care of. I double-checked, and our manifest tool does generate SHA1 and SHA256 (not visible in the video because I'd have to scroll to the right). That's an interesting idea about using it for individual files like ROMs on top of just CD images, I'll take those notes back the next time we're talking about development on the tool. --Phil
@@GameHistoryOrg Cool, thanks!
Truly heroic levels of effort. I can’t wait to dig into this.
I'm in love, this is going to improve the accuracy of information in video game culture so much. I can already see myself losing hours to browsing the archive!
perfect choice of music my dudes🕶
We're doing that thing where Rinoa points her finger up right now.
To echo other comments: This is incredible! The positive benefit this will provide to video game history and documentation is incalculable.
Looks absolutely fantastic and I can't even begin to imagine what an wonderful tool this will be for people interested in video game history research.
Watch out behind you, Bubsy has a knife @16:00!
Bubsy has escaped confinement and we are concerned. Please contact us immediately if you hear yarn-related puns and the sound of a knife being dragged.
This rocks so much
This looks amazing! Thank you so much for highlighting Game Players. It's no exaggeration to say that magazine shaped my childhood, especially during the magazine's later crazy years. It's criminally overlooked, and I hope your archive helps others find it and experience the surreal experiment it became.
Great idea. Thanks.
heck yeah super excited for you all! I've been excited to hear when the archive would be available!
One day in 2003 i was bored of moving 6 or 7 boxes of video game magazines and i just through them out in the alley for the trash to pick up. Im still heart broken. Game mags from 1990 to 1998, everything feom Sega Visions to EGM to Diehard Gamefan and Next Generation. Im so distraught that i let them go to the dump. I never inagined a time in the future where i would want to revisit these issues again...
I'm genuinely excited for this - if only for all the work done on categorising the magazine side of things, which should make that far better for research (especially because most of what I'm interested in tends to be more from the computer gaming side of the fence than the console side).
Can't wait to see more progress on it!
You do a lot of good work
Thank you for doing this! As a person who grew up loving print magazines and still purchases them to this day, this will be fabulous.
This is great!
Well done guys. I wouldn't consider myself a historian but I do run a group for retro game collectors and I'm always pushing the historical aspect of the games we're playing. I appreciate all the effort you've gone to and can't wait to get my hands on it.
This looks great, really looking forward to seeing it go live. Great to the early vision for the organization starting to take shape in a way that masses can enjoy it.
This looks amazing!!! Being able to text search magazine scans in particular will be so helpful! It would be incredible if it's possible to include searchable transcriptions/captions for A/V materials as well!
This is a good recommendation! I don't think our platform currently supports captions/transcripts on videos in general, which is frustrating, but there might be a solution similar to how we do checksums for discs. This fell down my list once I saw it wasn't supported, but thanks for reminding me to reinvestigate it. --Phil
@@GameHistoryOrg WebVTT is an open standard for HTML5 video captions.
OpenAI's Whisper 3 can give you a massive head start on transcription of AV content.
It will need to be hand-corrected by human reviewers, though, to be useful.
Following up on this! I spent the last couple days exploring this, and YES we have a way to add captions and transcripts! (At least for video, it doesn't seem to be currently supported for audio.) I'm still exploring if we can get them full-text searchable, but either way I'm excited. --Phil
@@GameHistoryOrgI'm just going to follow up and point out that you could also perform forced alignment of the transcript to the audio to provide interactive transcripts with per-word timing.
Look up lowerquality's 'Gentle' or m-bain's 'WhisperX' for an idea of what I'm talking about.
Replying again nearly a month later: we've figured out searchable/interactive transcripts now. Thank you for suggesting this, this was a great thing to get sorted out as a feature! --Phil
Oh, man I'm speechless. You guys are amazing, keep up this wonderful work of love. Thanks from the bottom of my gamer heart.
Amazing stuff! Thank you for all that you do.
Holy crap, Phil. You are the master of metadata. I choked up a couple times during your presentation. ❤ VGHF
I can not believe how awesome this is. My mind is so blown I don't even know how I'm writing this
This is REALLY cool. Thank you for doing this.
Eeee! This looks amazing! I've felt the pain of searching through game magazines on Internet Archive, etc. and am thrilled to see the focus on consistent metadata. Thank you for all your hard work! I can't wait to use it
Amazing work guys.
Congratulations, this looks fantastic!
This looks awesome! Can't wait to read through it.
You guys are doing incredible work! I love this soo much
Awesome stuff!! Can't wait to get my hands on this
So excited to use this in the future!!
This is great and looks to have a ton of potential. Keep up the amazing work!
Wow, this is fantastic - well done to all involved.
Thank you for all the hard work VGHF!