“The Video Game History Foundation is a 501©3 non-profit organization dedicated to cataloging, digitizing, and preserving the history of video games.“
Checkout “The Video Game History Foundation” (VGHF) website at GameHistory.org
It is of course also possible to follow it on Facebook and Twitter
https://www.facebook.com/gamehistoryorg
https://twitter.com/gamehistoryorg
Video Game History Foundation is a new non-profit organization similar to the Internet Archive but with sole aim to preserve and archive the history about video games and around video game culture.
https://gamehistory.org/what-were-doing/
This news is relevant here because RetroPlayer metadata scrapers and The Video Game History Foundations main goal is to digitalize and archiving everything which means that Kodi will probably be able to scrape from their online public library, such as digital high-resolution box art and other artwork scans, as well as high-quality information data about classic video games, including old reviews from the time-period of original release, old marketing ads and commercials/trailers/teasers, and the story behind each games. Some day they might even have copies of actual game ROMs available for download from their website, (which again is similar to Archive.org Internet Archive).
Note! Founding of this new non-profit organization will mainly come via pledges from nostalgic retro loving video games fans like ourselves done via Patreon, see:
https://www.patreon.com/gamehistoryorg
“The heart of the Foundation is its digital library, an online repository of artifacts related to the history of video games and video game culture. The ultimate goal is to create a searchable, organized, always-online archive of verified, high-quality material that is accessible to researchers and historians as a public education resource.
A sampling of the types of materials we’re already adding to the library include: •High-resolution, lossless scans of game packaging and documentation.
- Playable binary code that has been verified as clean and untainted.
- Marketing and PR material, including press kits, “preview” screenshots of games, trailers, vintage slides, and advertisements.
- Periodicals, newsletters, and other printed resources.
- Internal documentation, notes, source code and assets, and related materials from game creators and publishers that offer behind-the-scenes insight into how games were made and sold.
- Digitized video, including sales videos that were never before available to the public.
Due to time constraints, the current primary focus of the archive is to preserve the information that we consider the most volatile: data stored on media formats not meant for long-term storage (CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, EPROMs, magnetic disks). Our secondary focus is on archiving rare materials that are difficult to obtain or, in many cases, one-of-a-kind.
The Video Game History Foundation Digital Library is an ongoing work-in-progress that will take some time to complete. In the meantime, we’re mirroring curated “special collections” and posting them on our blog. “
“The primary focus of the collection-to-date has been on video and PC game-specific magazines and periodicals published in the United States between approximately 1981 and 2000.“
“The Video Game History Foundation is not a museum, and we have no current plans to become one. But the conservation of physical items is every bit as important as digitizing them, so we work closely with the major video game museums and archives to make sure artifacts have permanent homes. “
“One of our core beliefs is that historians are missing many of the tools needed to tell the stories of video games, so we felt that collecting an extensive group of digital artifacts related to one subject matter might go far in “open sourcing” telling that subject’s story.“
IGN Save Point interview with Video Game History Foundation founders
PS: I’m not affiliated with The Video Game History Foundation in any way. I just read about it on Engadget then Polygon and thought that it could become great for Kodi:
https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/27/vide…oundation/
http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/27/1475270…foundation