The Video Game History Foundation Finally Opened Its Library
After years of promising a public archive, VGHF put a working one online in early 2025. Here is what researchers can actually access, and what it deliberately leaves out.
The Video Game History Foundation is best known for its 2023 study, run with the Software Preservation Network, that found roughly 87 percent of a 1,500-game sample of pre-2010 US releases was out of print. That study was an argument for why preservation mattered. On January 30, 2025, VGHF opened something closer to an answer: the VGHF Digital Library, free to browse at library.gamehistory.org.
What is actually in it is not playable games. It is the paper trail around them. At launch, the library held more than 30,000 curated files, including over 1,500 full-text searchable, out-of-print video game magazines, along with development assets, concept art, and promotional material that had mostly existed as single physical copies in VGHF’s own collection. Six featured collections anchored the early-access launch: general games-magazine scans, a run of E3 show directories, a set of GamePro Press CDs sent to outlets in the CD-ROM era, promotional materials from FromSoftware, the personal professional archive of Mark Flitman, a former producer at Konami and Acclaim, and documents and video from Cyan, the studio behind Myst.
The scope is deliberate. VGHF’s 2024 push, as part of the US Copyright Office’s triennial DMCA rulemaking, to let libraries and archives share preserved playable games remotely with off-site researchers was not granted; the existing in-person-only exemptions were simply renewed. Rather than wait out another three-year cycle, VGHF built a library out of material that never needed a circumvention exemption in the first place: magazines, art, internal documents, nothing that requires bypassing a game’s own copy protection to read.
That makes the library a narrower resource than “play any out-of-print game legally,” which is still not something any US institution can offer the general public. But for the specific job of historical research, it is a genuine, searchable, free archive that did not exist a year earlier, and it is organized by a nonprofit built specifically for this, not a fan wiki or a single collector’s personal site.