Serious Player

Posts Tagged ‘history’

Six years ago, I had to move from a place  to another one, and I needed a lot of space so I decided to re-organize my stuff and sort it by categories : things I wanted to keep VS things I wanted to throw away. Many old junks have been thrown in the garbage but the hard part was about all my videogames. There was no way for me to throw any of my games away but in the other way, I really needed space and all these boxes were taking so much space ! It was a heavy dilemma for me, but I had to make a choice and I finally find a solution : If I could just fling away the boxes and only keep the disk/cd I would still have the games ! After all, boxes were useless or at best decorative, and there was no other motivation for me than materialist one… Finally I was nearly convinced and proud to be separated from these materialist object which were invading my place, year after year !

Recently, I just felt stupid about this choice because I thought I was making a kind of “preservation of video game heritage”, but in fact, I wasn’t ! Nowadays it is generally easier to get a good “abandonware” copy of any of my old games than get a good scan of their covers or even their handbooks. If you consider this from a player point of view you will probably don’t really think there is much to worry about. If you consider this from a historian point of view, it is a real shame. As an art historian and a game studies researcher I now realised that I have lost precious informations. Video games covers and handbooks embody a part of video game history. I will try to summarize why: Read the rest of this entry »