The Video Game History Foundation launches its digital library later this month, providing access to over 1,500 videogame magazines and ‘never-before-seen game development materials’

The videogame industry doesn’t have the best track record at preserving its past, though this is slowly changing with the help of independent organisations. One such organisation is the Video Game History Foundation, which today announced it will be launching its digital library platform later this month.

Posting on BlueSky, the VGHF revealed that the digital library will officially launch on January 30th, stating, “Good things come to those who wait!”. No follow up information regarding the launch was provided, with the post simply stating, “We’ll tell you all about it then”. 

However, in a statement (via VGC) the foundation explained that the library includes “never-before-seen game development materials”, as well as “artwork, press kits, and promo materials from iconic video games”. The library will also allow readers to access 1,500 out-of-print videogame magazines stretching back to the early 1980s. This includes issues of the recently departed Game Informer, previously the US’ longest-running videogame magazine before it was closed abruptly by owner Gamestop last year.

The organisation’s founder, Frank Cifaldi, also showed off some of the library’s functions in a Bluesky thread earlier this week. The magazine library will be fully text searchable, organisable by chronology, and allow users to filter mags by region, platform, publisher, and more. In Cifaldi’s example, he searches for “every videogame magazine in our collection in chronological order that says ‘Metroidvania’.

Originally founded in 2017, the Video Game History Foundation has numerous projects dedicated to protecting the medium’s past. This includes preservation of videogame source code and its physical library of videogame media that delves even farther back than its digital equivalent. In 2023, the VGHF conducted a survey where it concluded that just 13% of videogame history is “represented in the current marketplace,” with the remaining 87% inaccessible without resorting to piracy or travelling to an archive. Last year, meanwhile, it proposed changes to DMCA regulations to allow remote sharing of “out of print” videogames by libraries and collections, an exemption which the US Copyright Office refused.