Photo credit: arstechnica.com
Digital Archiving Efforts Uncover Gaming History
In a recent video, Phil Salvador, head librarian of the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), shared insights about a fascinating discovery within their archival resources: a game known as Pretzel Pete. This little-known early 3D driving and platform game may not be widely recognized today, but it made its mark in the 1999 E3 catalog and was featured in an older edition of PC Gamer. These artifacts are now preserved in the VGHF’s digital archives, serving as a testament to gaming history.
Salvador explained that digitizing such obscure content was a complex undertaking. Achieving archival-quality scans involved collaborating with community-driven initiatives like RetroMags and Out of Print Archive. However, the challenge extended beyond mere scanning; the extraction of text from these pages posed significant hurdles for conventional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, which struggled with the unconventional layouts typical of ’90s video game magazines. Salvador noted, “If you’ve ever read a ’90s video game magazine, you know how crazy those magazine layouts get.”
To address these challenges, VGHF’s Director of Technology, Travis Brown, dedicated months to developing a specialized text-recognition tool. This innovative solution is capable of navigating even the most difficult magazine formats effectively, representing a considerable advancement from previous technologies. As a result, researchers and enthusiasts can now effortlessly locate 81 different mentions of Clu Clu Land across multiple issues with a single query.
However, while the VGHF’s archives provide a wealth of historical information, they currently do not allow direct access to playable versions of retail video games due to constraints imposed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Nonetheless, organizations like VGHF are actively pushing against these copyright restrictions, advocating for more accessible digital libraries that could one day include playable content alongside their vast informational resources.
Source
arstechnica.com