A group of passionate archivists are trying to make the Library of Congress the standard-bearer for video game preservation. It won’t be easy.
Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation
Wikimedia Commons/USCapitol
Dave Gibson can tell you about some of the weirdest video games ever released: A 1995 Mac game narrated by David Sedaris, for example, or The Catechism Game, which touts itself as "The first and only Church Approved Catechism Game for Catholics!", or better yet, 'N Sync Hotline, a 2001 PC game that came bundled with a cordless phone capable of delivering special bedtime messages from Justin Timberlake and Joey Fatone.
As a moving image technician at the Library of Congress' National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Gibson — along with a few colleagues — sorts through all of the games coming in for copyright, parses private donations, and can wax proudly about the rare jewels of the Library's game collection.
In other words, if there's a video game Librarian of Congress, it's probably Dave Gibson. He's the expert. And yet, he only spends a quarter of his time working with games.
No, the work of game copyrighting and archiving at our country's signal institution for cultural preservation is not done by a dedicated full-time staff. Instead, it's the passion project of a handful of archivists who want to be the new standard-bearers in the preservation of video games. Indeed, the state of video game collection at the Library is something of an expression of the liminal state of video games in American popular culture writ large. The Library recognizes the cultural importance of video games, but only devotes four people part-time to their archiving; Game companies insist that their products are the medium of the future, but don't trust archives with their source code; Collectors sell their troves on Craigslist and eBay rather than considering donation.
Even to get to this point, though, has been a journey in and of itself.
BuzzFeed/Joseph Bernstein
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