Preserving Game Materials 
for the Future

The Game Preservation Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving Japanese games of the past. As a specialized archival organization, we collaborate with various institutions such as the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs (JACA) and the Japanese National Diet Library.

Finding and collecting software and hardware is only the beginning for retro game preservation. To understand the cultural background of the time and to accurately grasp the full scope of what games existed, reliable primary sources are indispensable.

In this industry where manufacturers and companies repeatedly consolidate, publications from that time are incredibly important as materials that convey the history of games. Game magazines and technical publications are some of the most important sources in our research activities.

Normally, libraries would collect and prepare such magazines for preservation and viewing, but many of these materials have not been collected by the National Diet Library because game magazines were classified as amusements and excluded from collection targets, or issues were not submitted.

Since our activities began in 2017, the Game Preservation Society has been managing a collection of tens of thousands of publications, including materials not collected by other institutions.

As the reevaluation of retro Japanese game culture progresses both domestically and internationally, requests from the community to view the game-related magazines and books that we have archived have increased from those seeking an accurate history.

Many materials are deteriorating, or we only have a single copy, so they cannot be safely lent out for viewing.
Due to this situation where such valuable research materials cannot be fully utilized, we are aiming to digitize these publications on a large scale to prepare them for use in the future as one of our services as an archival institution.

The activities of the Game Preservation Society are supported by donations from the general public.

Each year, we receive partial subsidies from the JACA, and along with the financial support of our members, we carefully review and plan a budget for our activities. However, these funds are always insufficient compared to the amount of materials we have collected.

Now, in order to preserve magazine materials, we must purchase a dedicated scanner, but we find that the budget for purchasing new equipment has fallen short as existing projects have expanded.

Of all the materials in our activities so far, game magazines are one of the most requested by the general public to view. Because this is a fundamental material for preservation research, we are reaching out to the public at large for their help. We have launched this fundraiser with the goal of obtaining the necessary hardware, and we hope you will consider contributing.

Digitizing game magazines as an archival institution does not end there.

Recently, under the JACA’s Media Arts Archive Promotion Project, we have been indexing the program listings published in these magazines.

Until now, the only way to find out what information was published in game magazines was to flip through them page by page.

If we digitize them and utilize OCR technology, it will be possible to search across large quantities of magazines for the information you are looking for.

Games are a relatively new cultural property, and even if we digitize and preserve everything, we cannot make all of it publicly available. Most of the requests we receive for viewing and photocopying materials come from the original authors themselves, or people with legitimate rights and clear research objectives. As a specialized archival institution, we strictly adhere to copyright law. We wish to further our ability to respond to such legally permitted requests and promote the utilization of materials.

With a long-term perspective of managing archives for 100, 200 years, we believe that if we digitize materials now while their condition is good, a time will certainly come in the future when we can make these materials publicly available. This is also important as disaster prevention measures as well, so that if the worst case of physical damage to the archive were to occur in disaster-prone Japan, at least having digitized images and data would prevent the permanent loss of information.

Games are a wonderful culture that Japan can be proud of. By advancing the digitization of game magazines, we expect that many people will be able to evaluate this one-of-a-kind game culture and make use of it in the future.