Video game history preservation is on a roll
It’s a great time for video game history buffs. Just last week, we saw unreleased footage of the GameCube’s first reveal. Today, we learned that Noclip, a Youtube channel famous for video game development documentaries, has just salvaged an entire decade of lost video game history.
The findings consist of dozens of boxes filled with video tapes. Why tapes? Because the internet was very slow back in the day. Even in the early ’00s, most video game reporting took place on TV, and only a select number of big tech and gaming websites ever got to do such coverage. Thus, most of the good stuff like trailers, gameplay captures, and interviews showed up on TV once and then disappeared forever. The few things that made their way onto the Internet featured absolutely abhorrent image and sound quality.
Noclip claims that this massive amount of footage was days away from getting dumped into a landfill, meaning it nearly shared the same fate as the infamous E.T. The Extraterrestrial Atari cartridges.
Their plan for video game history preservation
Noclip acquired so many tapes that they can’t even pinpoint how much quality footage they now own. It’s one of those rare “good” problems! The team is now going through all the tapes to find anything they deem to be of historical value, and will subsequently upload all of their findings in high resolution on a new video gaming history-dedicated Youtube channel (as well as Archive.org and some other methods). As for the already existing Noclip channel, the team is naturally planning on using the footage to create new documentaries.
Sadly, tapes degrade over time. A few of these have already sustained so much damage that either show nothing or seemingly preview an unknown video game adaptation of The Ring. There’s a ticking clock hanging over the people at Noclip as they try to save as much footage as they can. They have limited resources, so they urge anyone who wants to help by subscribing to their Patreon.
Such efforts quench our nostalgia thirst, yes, but that’s not the most important part. We need them especially because the preservation of video game history — and of all types of media, really— is at risk. Big streaming platforms don’t seem to care about keeping anything that’s not an immediate hit. Hell, even Nintendo, a company full of widely beloved games and characters, seems surprisingly adamant in eradicating even their own perfectly sustainable preservation platforms.
Here’s hoping that the sheer joy so many get out of seeing these efforts come to fruition might help bring some sense into the minds of big companies.
