Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s. Some of them have found their way online thanks to preservationist efforts, but most are seemingly gone forever. (I’m talking about the particular magazine I read as a kid, many others have complete or near-complete collections available online in the form of scanned hardcopies.)
Do the publishing houses keep a digital copy of every magazine they release? If so, why don’t they release them? They could probably charge a fee to download them, like other digital magazines do, but of course it’d be great if they just shared them for free for historical purposes on the Internet Archive or something.
It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to not keep masters of these publications forever, no? 🤔 The raw files probably take up a few CDs’ worth of space for the entire run of the magazine. Big assumptions on my part, I have no clue how any of it is done!
So:
- Do they retain the files forever?
- If so, why might they not be shared 20 or 30 years later?
Cheers!
I think the bigger problem is when a publisher goes out of business, is there anyone left who cares enough to save the archives?
If lucky, there will be an acquiring publisher who cares enough to fold the archives into their own.
Otherwise it’s dependent on the outgoing editor in chief or some other individual to save that stuff and keep in in their garage until one day they die and their heirs send it to the dump.
Which is why archive.org is so important. Many of the earliest films have been lost to time. Now Nintendo is trying to shut down rom sites and websitea hosting pdf’s of their game manuals, and yes, Nintendo Power.
So far they’ve been sucsessful, except for archive.org, who has an exemption. That exemption lasts for a few years, and every few years it needs to be voted on to KEEP that exemption.
I don’t trust our government to always do the right thing. So over the next few weeks, I’m hoard downloading. Instead of downloading 1 or 2 roms at a time, for games I recently discovered, I’m just downloading entire rom sets. Fuck you Nintendo. Instead of downloading a few dozen roms, I’m now downloading your entire catalog, and making backups once I have everything. And sorry Sony, but Nintendo roped you into this. And microsodt? Oh, you’re safe. I don’t give a shit about xbox…
How does the archive.org exemption work? When is it voted on next?
NGL I kinda want to look into OG Xbox emulation, been waxing nostalgia for Fable.
Last I was playing around with it (about 2 years ago) there were at least 20 stable games running, even 360 ones
Most commercial publications in the USA and UK – UPC/ISBN or not, regular or not – will often send copies of their work to the national library (ie Library of Congress). That said, those copies might not be prioritized for digital viewing. So seeing them in-person might be the only way to access them.
As for whether the publishing houses keep them, it’s probably very individualized, so who can say.
So much missed potential to train LLMs on 90s Teen Bop.
Hoping to hear an answer to this.
As someone who saved literal cases of gaming mags from the 90s-00s I’m ready to part with them hoping someone else will go through the effort to scan them and make them available. I just don’t have the time or resources for that project and I’ve got a storage unit FULL of gaming gear that I need to empty. It’s hard enough to go through the games and hardware, I just want to get rid of the boxes and boxes ofabysls and magazines but I don’t want to trash them.
Archived versions of the final publications are often saved by libraries and such, as others have pointed out.
As for the source files that went into production…that is a more complicated set of issues. The business may have gone into receivership and the legality of who owns what gets messy. You’ll need legit software licenses to use those files and many other details. If the publication ran ads, that could potentially be a factor, too.
