Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s. Some of them have found their way online thanks to preservationist efforts, but most are seemingly gone forever. (I’m talking about the particular magazine I read as a kid, many others have complete or near-complete collections available online in the form of scanned hardcopies.)
Do the publishing houses keep a digital copy of every magazine they release? If so, why don’t they release them? They could probably charge a fee to download them, like other digital magazines do, but of course it’d be great if they just shared them for free for historical purposes on the Internet Archive or something.
It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to not keep masters of these publications forever, no? 🤔 The raw files probably take up a few CDs’ worth of space for the entire run of the magazine. Big assumptions on my part, I have no clue how any of it is done!
So:
- Do they retain the files forever?
- If so, why might they not be shared 20 or 30 years later?
Cheers!
Hoping to hear an answer to this.
As someone who saved literal cases of gaming mags from the 90s-00s I’m ready to part with them hoping someone else will go through the effort to scan them and make them available. I just don’t have the time or resources for that project and I’ve got a storage unit FULL of gaming gear that I need to empty. It’s hard enough to go through the games and hardware, I just want to get rid of the boxes and boxes ofabysls and magazines but I don’t want to trash them.