As reported KotakuKirkland has preserved over 1,900 PS2 game manuals, artbooks, mini-guides and comics by downloading them from Archive.org in 4K. A real good deed for the world of video games.
A collection of 1900 PDFs
At a time when tutorials and tutorials did not yet exist, paper manuals were included in all console video game boxes. These contained all kinds of information: instructions of course, but also story elements and sometimes even illustrations.
These manuals are now a thing of the past, but Kirkland has done much to ensure that this content is remembered — and in internet archives, by unstacking each manual and painstakingly scanning each sheet of each manual. then digitize them in 4K and upload them to archive.org. In all, 1900 PDF files, for 17 GB of compressed content from a huge 230 GB folderand icing on the cake, the whole thing is listed in alphabetical order.
This almost general interest project will have taken 22 years old in Kirkland, and will have cost him close to $40,000.
A real piece of history
“The goal is to raise awareness for game preservation efforts,” Kirkland told Kotaku. “[Il y a] So many games that marked our childhood have shaped the way we see and experience the world. Of course, as we grow older, we move on, but many of us long for those games and want our kids to enjoy what we’ve made. […]”
“And there have been great efforts to preserve the games: The VGHF [ndlr : l’association Video Game History Foundation]the Strong Museumand community efforts like MAME [ndlr : Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, un logiciel d’émulation pour PC dont le but est de reproduire fidèlement le fonctionnement des jeux et des systèmes d’arcade], redump.org, No Introand Cowering’s Good Tools [ndlr : des groupes de joueurs qui conservent les meilleures ROMs de jeux sur divers format] before that. I always thought, “That’s great! We’ll have it all. But without the manuals, we won’t know how to play it.”
Kirkland had already done a gargantuan job of making an archive of SNES 2K manualsand is currently working on an archival 4K version of Game Boy and Atari 2600 manuals.
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