Library of Congress' Video Game Collection

American Libraries Magazine recently published an article featuring the Video Game Collection at the Library of Congress.

According to the article, the collection preserves every game turned in for copyright registration, which works out to be about 10% of the games published each year. They collect the games themselves, along with promotional materials and guides associated with each game.

According to the Moving Image Materials collection policy listed on the LOC's website:
"Video games have become an established, popular medium of moving image entertainment which demand inclusion in the collections of MBRS. The Division is developing new approaches for the more systematic acquisition of video games, including playback consoles and platforms, the multiplicity of formats and their equipment needs, and the technical challenges in preserving the digital source files. The collection will encompass a wide range of examples of video game culture, to allow historians decades hence to fully understand this as a popular phenomenon, and not have simply a few games which seemed significant at the moment of release."

Read the article here.

Brief Links

Atlantic Monthly has a short piece on the state of video game preservation: "Pac Rat."

APM's Future Tense podcast talks to a Dante scholar about the video game Dante's Inferno: "Dante scholar considers new video game based on the Inferno."

What Happens to Old Web Games?

John Scalzo (of the Video Game Librarian blog) has a nice article over on Gaming Target called "Bejeweled Blitz and the Disappearing Web Games." In it, John talks about the difficulty in preserving Web games when the developer is not longer interested in making them available.

Resurrecting Cartridges

I spent the morning resurrecting old non-working SNES cartdiges that had been donated to the archive. This involved opening them up, applying polish & fixer to the contacts, then re-sealing. I went six-for-six in getting the old cartridges working again!

Here's the inside of the SNES game Zombies Ate My Neighbors:




Buoyed by my success, I went back this afternoon and resurrected another seven NES cartridges and eight Atari cartridges. That's twenty-one games in all; pretty good for a few hours' work!