Isn't most of this (plus terabytes more) available on archive.org? I'm not trying to diminish this effort - anything that is done to preserve digital history is to be applauded - just struggling to see what differentiates this.
It's also professionally curated, which means you can trust the scans and metadata to be accurate and consistent. Aside from that, VGHF has a ton of material that archive.org doesn't (donated collections from game industry people[2], magazines that have yet to be scanned by anyone). Much of that isn't in the digital archive yet, but it's coming.
[1] https://archive.gamehistory.org/search?keyword=%22m.c.%20kid... These scans actually turned out to contain early, pre-release mockups of the game still in development, which I've now documented on TCRF. https://tcrf.net/Prerelease:M.C._Kids This whole process took me less than an hour.
That actually would be a topic of particular interest to this community.
Some of the layouts of these enthusiast magazines are so chaotic (looking at you Hardcore Gamefan) that the current technology for parsing text from scans wasn't good enough and they had to develop their own.
It has a timeline, magazines, videos, nes guides and a DOS box emulator that you can play the game on. All in about 10 seconds.
> The librarian renewed all existing exemptions except for the exemption for accessible access to video games, for which there was no petition for renewal.
https://www.arl.org/news/librarian-of-congress-expands-dmca-...
There's enough balls being dropped here that multiple organizations with different boards, advisors, and funding models are needed. Kudos to all involved.
Just search for literally any piece of software or media you want, and you will find multiple copies of it uploaded by random people without permission. Petabytes upon petabytes of games, movies, TV shows, software, etc. constantly uploaded 24/7 for years, is all right there out in the open for anyone in the world to download. Want a zip file with every Nintendo game ever made? There's a dozen different scene groups all with their full dumps available right there. Have a favorite TV show? They have every episode of it.
Jason Scott himself has publicly advocated for people to "upload whatever you want and ask questions later" because it's "too difficult" to figure out copyright and their stance is always to just wait until a rightsholder complains before taking anything down.
You can even play Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and thousands more from one click in the browser if downloading the stuff to your hard drive instead of your browser cache is too much trouble.