Introducing the Video Game Source Project
Video game source code and other source materials are inarguably the best resources for those studying how a game was made. And yet the availability of these materials is scarce at best, with few examples available online and even fewer in institutional archives. Worse, historical source code from the earliest days of the medium is being lost by the day.
We’d like to change that. Today, we’re announcing what we’re calling our Video Game Source Project, the VGHF’s most ambitious initiative to date. It’s a wake-up call to preserve this endangered resource, a call to arms to locate it and make it accessible, and a forward-thinking vision of a world in which using this material as an educational resource is commonplace.
Simply put, when we refer to a video game’s “source”, we mean the raw materials used in its production, including but not limited to source code, art, documentation, and records of correspondence (think emails, letters, or, as is the case for some repositories in our archives, faxes).
