On Archiving Games History

Joey Wawzonek

It's been a year and a half since I first put paper to scanbed, so it's time to reflect on the confusing, illuminating, and harrowing.

Why am I doing this?

First, some background. I started my BA in History in 2015 after dragging my feet over what program I wanted to go into. I didn't get accepted into my first choice, a BComm Economics program (thank god), and History was my safety pick. I quickly fell in love with the practice of history after a professor of mine, who has since sadly retired due to health complications, encouraged me to do something that got to me and my identity. For me, it was being queer. Learning about and writing on Stonewall was a thrill, and led to an appetite for more. My interest turned to Latin American male homosexual desire (for which I got published in my school's undergraduate humanities review (and then cited a decade later as a cistorian)) and the American Lavender Scare. Living in Canada rather than the US or Latin America, my access to primary sources was limited. In time, I was directed towards the Canadian Lavender Scare equivalent, and truly found my calling. Cold War and postwar male homosexualities and masculinities excited me to no end. Wanting to impress my professors, I looked into archives near me for some nugget with which to work with. A good call as my requests for information from the RCMP are only now being returned.

Finding aids were little help, but I found some fonds which discussed the medicalisation of homosexuality in Canada and its ties to the mental hygiene movement -- even some parallels to American 'momism'! I would tell the archivists and reference librarians what I had found, as their catalogues made no mention of certain topics, and realised that archival work was far more cooperative than it seemed from the outside. Even the Provincial Archives of Alberta were not fully aware of their holdings as they had been -- understandably, given low budgets and a wealth of material to work through -- minimally processed. It became clear to me that queer history existed in spite of the archival record, each instance of gay desire or gender fucking a bulwark against the cisheterosexual hegemony of the stacks. Put another way, queer records were a rarity, an accident, fragile fragments of a past that had been scrubbed clean then and now. Perhaps just as importantly, I found that the archives were great for finding things un[der]documented in the historical records, and for putting out histories that wowed my professors.

After graduating, it became difficult to continue academic research without institutional access. I had been waffling about whether or not to go to grad school given COVID, a new relationship, and a lack of direction. Come 2022 I'd had enough of doing nothing, and started doing some games writing on Backloggd. I realised I could flex my historical research chops and go in-depth on some more niche topics, and my queer history background meant I could tackle certain topics with the sensitivity they needed. Research into 177 left me stumped, however, as I lacked access to the resources that might give me better insight into something so underdiscussed and poorly represented on the English web. So I picked up an old hobby of mine and ordered some stuff from Japan, most critical being ASCII's retrospective history of the NEC PC-8801.

The project turned out great, and I realised this expensive, rare text would benefit not just me, but others due to how rich its contents were. Digging into some other pornographic works (Yakyūken, Lover Boy, Private's CD-ROM offerings), I stumbled upon a citation on Wikipedia for Hustler Hard Drive, and I knew I had to have it. I found some issues for sale, as well as Interactive Quarterly and Adult PC Guide. They were fascinating! And nobody wanted to preserve them! I can see why, they were pornographic, they were raunchy, they were weird. But these magazines documented a part of Internet and multimedia history that couldn't be found on the Internet Archive or in (almost) any book. The connection might seem fraught, but these were analogous to queer records in my eyes. Fragile, forgotten, shameful, intended to be forgotten and destroyed. I wanted to share these, and so I scanned, following the advice in scanning.guide. Nobody found this as fascinating as I did at the time, but this alongside the PC-8801 book set me on the path to preserving print media.

I dabbled a tiny bit in optical media, but quickly found my niche with the aforementioned nudie mags and Japanese bishoujo publications. Some 800 scans later, I continue to digitise bishoujo and eroge materials, but now focus far more on industry coin-op magazines and catalogues for the benefit of arcade historians. I'm less interested in writing history these days, far more invested in serving as its arbiter and caretaker. Beyond that, I started my MLIS program in Autumn 2024, and the focus on Archival Management and Digital Curation is a perfect fit!

Why am I doing this?

The simple answer is because I can and I want to. I've largely fallen out of love with games, especially as a topic for analysis, and this keeps me in touch with games in a more involved albeit indirect manner. I love seeing what people find. I love helping researchers. I love the hum of the scanner. This feels like my way of giving back, silly as it might sound. I don't want the curious mind to have to shell out hundreds of dollars for a sliver of information on something that interests them. I'm desperate to see the histories others can forge from my collection. I want others to have what I did not when doing my research. Plus, I can't rightly digitise queer history given the harm that may be caused in making certain info widely available, so this is a good second option.

Beyond that, I simply loathe copyright and the lack of freedom of information afforded to wide swathes of history. It was a pain to find accessible information on the 'Fruit Machine' for my Canadian histories, it's been a pain to find accessible information on strip rock-paper-scissors or controversial eroge. With so much of the information I preserve being Japanese, it is monstrously expensive for someone to access these materials (if they're even available), and good luck convincing someone in Japan to do the work with how draconian their copyright laws are. Information should be free and easy to access. If it has the benefit of devaluing some 'collection' then all the better. I don't want to stop at democratising access to history, I want to anarchise it. Stop the hoarding we see so many lost media types covet.

I'm young. I have free time. I enjoy this. It helps my education in a roundabout way. It builds connections. It's fun.

I love this thing.

Is this really archiving?

This is something I've had to contend with while I pursue an education in library science. The answer is.. kind of? There are clear differences between myself and an archive, but nobody calls people like me 'magazine digitisers', they call us archivists! That might be a little inaccurate.

For starters, archives as you or I know them are not resplendent with published material. That's more the realm of a special collections library, or a regular library! An archive seeks to preserve and render accessible one of a kind records. An archive might contain published material -- I've come across a lot of Chatelaine in certain fonds -- but they aren't the focus because those records are widely reproduced. At the same time, the work myself and others do with these materials is no different from an archive. We digitise, we preserve, we conserve, we render available. A library isn't digitising its own collection (usually), it has a digital collection and a physical one. A librarian isn't scanning books for patrons en masse. We treat these materials as if they are one of a kind because they effectively are. Magazines like Monthly Coin Journal, Amusement Industry, SEGA Prologue -- these materials rarely come up for auction and when they do it is almost always for exorbitant prices. These are often our only chances to digitise these materials, and we then send off the processed material to organisations like Video Game History Foundation for long-term physical preservation.

Consider what a magazine actually is. Disposable. Rarely are they meant to be hoarded in the long-term. Just consider how many people are desperate to offload their National Geographic or New Yorker piles. These resources thus function like a unique record by virtue of them still existing despite their destiny being a landfill. Complicating matters, queer archives are often fonts of independent zines for small organisations -- at what point does a resource become effectively unique despite its mass production? Is it when a library doesn't have it? When a search engine turns up no PDF? When nobody wants it? It's impossible to pin down. One might say Weekly Famitsu is anything but unique as it runs to this day and is the Japanese games publication, but a search for issues before the proliferation of the Internet turns up shockingly little.

Doing casual research trying to look up stuff about game history will continuously have you utterly speechless at the sorry state of preservation. Like, what the fuck do you mean there's no readily available scan of Famitsu's first 40/40 cross review of Ocarina of Time?

[image or embed]

— Transparency (@transparency.bsky.social) February 11, 2025 at 3:30 PM

Gaming Alexandria's magazine sets are heralded as enormous boons for games historians (rightly so), but surely the most popular games magazine in Japan isn't unique. And yet, Dustin Hubbard is on an unenviable journey to track down every issue of works like Famitsu, and it isn't an easy task. It was once widely available to be sure, but becomes harder and harder to source with every passing day. We certainly wouldn't call 2023 issues unique, but as more issues are incinerated each year due to people aging, moving, running out of space, or simply cleaning, they gain provenance. This process is all the quicker for publications with smaller circulation, greater age, and less reason to continue existing.

What, then, of books? Magazines are on the cusp, but surely a proper bound publication is not an archival resource, is it? Consider the aforementioned PC-8801 book. What I left out of its mention is the cost -- ¥20,000 -- and that it almost never comes up for auction, let alone sale. Though it may be accessible through libraries in Japan, it certainly isn't in the West, and with its effective rarity and worth, for us it becomes a virtually unique resource. Even a far more accessible publication like The Penthouse Guide to Cybersex can become more or less unique thanks to its subject matter. Adult content has been banned from sale on eBay and other ecommerce sites for a good few years now, with only occasional items seeping through the cracks. Even without a technical ban, retailers frequently dispose of salacious material, and libraries may not shelve something so overtly sexual. A tome which sells tens if not hundreds of thousands of copies then is virtually unique as well, the digitised version standing as the sole accessible version of the resource.

At times, it seems that 'library' or 'special collections' are more fitting to describe our work. If we consider a loftier description of our mission and work, we might dispel that labelling. Our work is preservation focused as we battle a ticking clock to ensure the lasting legacy of fragile games history. We ensure long-term preservation through digitisation, migrating informational content to a stable and accessible format. We curate what we collect and preserve -- yes there are diversions, but the work is overwhelmingly concerned with games and games history. We provide access for research and reference. Most critically, we are capturing context, not of an institution through its records, but of games as a whole. We may at times appear to be a special collection library, but the work and purpose are wholly archival. A library holds, an archive preserves.

How do I choose what to archive?

Anyone who's followed my scans can attest to my scattershot approach. It is uncommon for me to digitise things in order, though I'm getting better at this. This no doubt frustrates a lot of people, particularly if they are sure something they want information on is in an issue immediately prior to or after one I just scanned, to which I sympathise. But I'm also doing this for me.

Our 27,000JPY worth of magazines cost $715CAD after fees, labour, shipping, etc. That's $24CAD/issue. These are in the mid range for the mags I do, and I don't always have donations to help pad things out. I am grateful for everyone who uses my scans and chips in, but seriously, this is expensive.

— Joey 'Detchibe' W. (@detchibe.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 12:25 PM

Let's address the realities of this undertaking. It is extraordinarily expensive, time-consuming, and tedious. I enjoy it, sincerely, but it is important for my heart to stay in it. Mixing things up helps so much in this regard. At the same time, doing short bursts of sequential issues makes processing far simpler as my scripts only need to be tuned once. But the real reason for this approach is that it is best for determining interest. I live for the finds people make from my scans, that enthusiasm gives me life, and I've found that people are more enticed to dive into scans for goodies when they are kept, partially, on their toes, and when there is variety. If a batch of coin-op magazines goes up, one group of people will tuck into the issues and may even become overwhelmed at the volume -- they need time to digest the material. If some coin-op goes up alongside bishoujo, general games coverage, and a computer magazine, then four groups have something to gnaw on, and are far more likely to put the time into trying to find something from the available material.

I understand this is frustrating and perhaps even selfish, and for that reason I am always open to suggestions and requests for what to scan next. I provide tables of contents on occasion to facilitate this (though it rarely ever leads to anyone asking for anything). If there is something I do not have, people are always welcome to send the resource or funds for it to me, and those items are always prioritised. I post photos of my hauls to gauge interest in particular items. I in no way intend to be the sole arbiter of information, the scans dependent on my whims alone, but in the absence of requests, whims are all I've got.

It's cool! But it hasn't proved useful.

'Historic value' or provenance certainly plays a role as well. If something is known to be unique even among the unique, that's going to come first -- see the Joypolis Perfect Guide or 1970s issues of Amusement Industry for proof of that. Interest still remains an important factor, however, as the pile of 1968 issues of Computopia on my shelves can attest to. These resources are neat for what they are, but have little value outside of their novelty, at least until I meet a historian of Japanese mainframes. They are rusted, waterdamaged, and smell of cigarette smoke, and so I digitise them as I wish, a little reminder of the breadth of my stacks. After all, I am content to preserve any aspect of history, not just the smut and arcades.

Sometimes I just also have to get something done. Mechanical Memories Magazine was loaned to me by a holder of a near-complete run with the proviso that it be returned within a few months. If something is outright donated to me, or primarily funded by others, that gets prioritised as well unless I'm graciously told I can get to it whenever I want. Above all else, I just don't want to stagnate. If I only scanned one mag at a time, it would become monotonous and uninteresting. I look at those big runs of Side-BN I did and my eyes glaze over.

This is as good a time as any to point out some donated materials are still at my US post office box. I am aware people want me to go pick them up, but the current administration makes me feel entirely unsafe crossing the border. As one of roughly 3,000 people in Canada with an X gender marker in their passport, it is all too easy for me to be targeted at border control, and that is not a risk I am comfortable taking. I am working on a solution to get those materials forwarded to me in Canada, or to my fiancé in the US who will bring them up on an upcoming visit. My apologies to those who are waiting, but safety comes first.

On Networking and Connections

One of the greatest aspects of doing this work is the people it has connected me to. The kind folks at Gaming Alexandria are of course chief among them, and I wouldn't be doing this without them. Seeing people find things in my scans is a delight, and it's all the better when I know it's actually helping with research projects. And it increasingly has been! I love knowing some bigger name creator is stumbling upon my goodies (I shrieked a little when Cybershell saw my Mother 2 Gamebook upload) just as I adore hearing that a scan is leading to tangible progress for someone writing histories.

Seeing what Caitlyn Pascal pulls for her Eremeka Search Tool astonishes me. That Japanese Magazines' Ads posts so often from my scans warms my heart. Reading up on the queries the folks at Sega Retro are able to solve thanks to me is humbling. The takeaways that the likes of @saturnjaguar.bsky.social, @augitesoul.bsky.social, @ftb1979.bsky.social, or @puke.bsky.social boggle my mind and remind me of why I'm doing this. To facilitate investigation, curiosity, interest, fun! These folks are all able to provide me better input on what is valuable to them, and in turn, what is valuable to most.

The guidance of Gaming Alexandria's Dustin Hubbard and ozidual have been instrumental. Through these ventures I've had the opportunity to assist in the Japan Games Preservation Society's history of early erotic games. The scale of this task has impressed former professors and looked great on grad school applications and volunteership inquiries. Meeting others, even online through scans of eroge magazines, has made me aware of so many people with interests similar to my own. I've been fortunate enough to chat however briefly with the former editor of Interactive Quarterly, and let artists like Christopher Engel understand the value of their work and its long-term preservation (I swear I'll archive his 'Vincent van Gogh: Straight from the Heart' recordings soon, especially after he went to all the trouble of sourcing the original recordings for me). I've ever been afforded the opportunity to twice give guest lectures to fledgling history students at my alma mater, though lecture may be pushing it, it's more like talking to kids about archives and queer history and video games. I would not be pursuing a MLIS without scanning. I would not be where I am without dirty magazines. I am phenomenally lucky to be able to do this, and to love it in twain.

Sorry Chris.

What is the process? The problems?

It ain't that complicated. I scan destructively, meaning the resource is, well, destroyed in the process (which is to say, unbound). The spine is removed from a print publication if it has one -- this is easier with a binding machine as it loosens the adhesive -- or the staples come out if they're present. My scanners only accommodate A4 size pages, so staple bound magazines typically need to be sliced in half. For glue bound material, a bit of the page along where the spine was is removed so adhesive does not gum up my scanner. I do this with a guillotine now, but previously used a rotary blade and ruler. I cut myself very badly three times doing this so the guillotine is for my safety. Everything goes into my Automatic Document Feed Scanner if possible. If there are foldouts like in Dengeki Hime or Coin Journal, I scan those on a flatbed so I can photomerge them. I hate doing that which is why I am sitting on so many Coin Journals, Dengeki Himes, and P-Mates.

The scans are immediately put into a ZIP as my RAW files. I then run some scripts to get rid of overscan, then level and descreen everything in Photoshop. Those are made into a CBZ and a PDF which I OCR, and then pop it all on Internet Archive, simple! In an ideal world.

An issue of Amusement Industry from the 1970s. Ew.

Chasing down effectively unique publications means sometimes you have to deal with what you got. That means water damage, rust, adhesion, and stink. Fragile materials are all done on the flatbed. Staples get nasty. I have my tetanus booster for a reason. They outright crumble into dust. For water damage, I find steam can gently unstick pages and help with curling. But sometimes the efforts are for nought, as with the above. You just gotta do the best with what you got. The alternative is zero access to the resource, and something is better than nothing. This is an ongoing learning process where I hope I never have to apply what I've learned. The National Archives and Records Administration would weep at what I've done and how I've done it if they weren't being dismantled.

The biggest challenge is one of time and capacity. I'm one person going to school full-time and working a job and volunteering. I'm going as fast as I can as best as I can. Don't let what I do intimidate you into not trying to do this same work. I am an anomaly and I'm burning the candle at both ends. The important thing is doing what you are able to and trying your damndest.

I don't care about copyright.

Okay that's not entirely fair or true. I have some rules. I do not scan anything still in print. I do not upload publicly anything published in the last ten years on Internet Archive, within the last five on e-hentai. In the rare cases where I do scan something in print that is newer, it is only provided privately to people actively needing it for on-going research projects. I do not care about copyright because it is a barrier to the freedom of information. There is no reason for a researcher to need to shell out copious amounts of money to a third-party for access to information. The publisher is not seeing a cent. The author isn't either. The only beneficiary of that exchange is the seller. Not only do I not care about the collectors whose collections' value I am diminishing, I actually very much dislike those people! In an era of hypercapitalism and ballooning costs of living, I do not give a fuck if my scans are making some dweeb's hoard less valuable. I can tell my work aggravates people, I've had my offers on magazines outright rejected out of fear I would digitise them (which I did). When I posted my complete run of Interactive Quarterly, listings plummeted overnight. Good.

If anyone ever actually came to me and said to take down my scans, I would. I would certainly hope some understanding could be reached. For example, if I digitised a work I know the creator would like to have digitised, I'm more than happy for them to share my digitised version and save them the headache. I do this to help researchers, but would love to help creators as well.

But copyright concerns are valid, and explain why so many Japanese collectors straight up will not share scans. They'll hardly share photographs. Draconian copyright laws make our work all the more important. I have been approached by a few people in Japan who have scanned valuable works and wanted them shared. Under condition of anonymity, I have taken their scans, processed them, scrubbed them of any metadata, and uploaded them on their behalf. I would do the same for anyone. I would be hesitant to be in flagrant violation of newer copyrighted works published in the US or Canada, but I'm unlikely to be extradited to Japan over scans of out of print magazines. I hope.

What's next?

The goal for 2025 was to at least meet the number of scans I did in 2024, 600. I no longer think this is feasible but would love to be proven wrong. That would require 2 scans minimum per day, and that's hard to do with school, work, life. So I'll just keep doing as much as I can when I can.

I do hope to write more about the scans themselves, to highlight what folks are getting out of them, to showcase the possibilities of these materials. I want to make videos about them. To start researching again -- there's so much more Yakyūken to talk about! But I must be realistic about how much more I can stretch myself.

2025 is proving to be a year of profound change, for me and for the world. I am getting married soon to the love of my life. I am seeking further avenues for professional development. I am taking on more volunteer work. I am contending with a world where fascism is on the rise and my nation's sovereignty is under genuine threat. I am debating whether it is safe for me to remain in my home province as a visibly trans, non-binary individual considering transgender rights are being taken away from our children. I have never been more stressed, more anxious, more excited than I am now.

That ain't even including the processed stuff. Or the things in my workspace. Or in my room. And there's more stacked behind each of these rows. Oh my.

My hope remains that the things I learn during my MLIS and future internships and volunteer opportunities will inform this project. I would still like to collate everything into a better searchable database, perhaps highlighting the key works and figures in each issue. Maybe that can be a project for school. Maybe it can incorporate Hubz' and ozidual's scans too.

I'm still just getting started, but acquisitions will probably slow outside of those paid for largely by others. My stacks are getting big enough as is. Maybe the next step, when all is said and done, when I am settled with my then-husband, will be to teach him how to help me.

To make this a collaborative effort offline just as it is online.

Addendum (February 25, 2025)

Many of the people working in games history and its preservation are minorities in one fashion or another. I'm queer and non-binary. Many of us are trans and/or queer. Some are physically disabled or living with chronic pain. Many of them are women, many belong to visible and invisible minority groups. My point in bringing this up is that this is not solely the undertaking of white cisgender heterosexual able-bodied men. Just as history itself, it is resplendent with those on the periphery, those who are un(der)represented.

I think it is very easy to forget this, to consider the creators and facilitators of history -- or any cultural production -- as effectively faceless and nameless. I'm a person scanning magazines, you don't need to know anything more about me. But in a world that is increasingly hostile towards those who are not white cishet able-bodied men, ignoring the circumstances of those who make this and other work possible is not just convenient blindness, it is complicity. The silence coming from so many, particularly in the USA, is deafening just as it is sickening. You may not be under threat right now from this administration, but people's livelihoods are being threatened if not taken from them.

I alluded to it above, I am not able to safely travel into the United States as a non-binary trans person. That is no longer me being careful, it is a fact. Trans children are being denied life-saving health-care. Immigrants are living in fear of deportation and being deported. Social safety nets are being dismantled and effecting not just those in the USA, but those around the world thanks to changes at USAID. Proposed changes to health care and Medicaid will kill those with disabilities, with chronic illness, with something as 'mundane' as diabetes or asthma.

In the past, I have been called 'one of those queer pronoun people with bad takes'. People loathe me for covering topics like sexual violence and the repression of women with the slightest bit of sensitivity. People consume my work but hate the creator of the work. In a more hospitable world, I could take that. No more.

If you have a problem with me or my identity, with all sincerity, never look at my scans. Never read my articles. Fuck off. The same applies if you have a problem with any minority group. If you are not the slightest bit sympathetic to children or your disabled neighbours dying, or your immigrant neighbours being forcefully removed from a place they now call home, fuck off.

It is so easy to do nothing, and I am but one person on the Internet, living in a different country from those facing the most harm. I implore those who are not being impacted to start making an impact. Please. Call your representatives, even if you feel it's screaming into the void. Donate to the ko-fi or Patreon or GoFundMe of someone facing medical debt, or who needs to afford gender affirming care. Give to mutual funds. Get involved with local organisations. If the well-being of your fellow human is not enough of an impetus, consider this. When the curators of games history are jailed, killed, denied health care, it will not just be human lives that are lost, but the history you purportedly care about so much as well.

In the simplest terms, if you like learning about games history, do the very least you can and fight so that we can keep providing it to you.