Fresh from its acquisition of quite a bit of Square Enix IP, Embracer Group has announced it has founded a program aimed at video game preservation.
As reported by PC Gamer, the program is called the Embracer Games Archive, the program’s goal is to “archive and save as much of the videogames industry as possible.”
Embracer says the archive currently boasts “50,000 games, consoles, and accessories” which it has stored in a vault in Karlstad, Sweden. It has already put a team on managing the collection.
Though not currently available to the public, historians, or researchers, Embracer says it has begun construction on a database cataloguing everything in the collection. This database will then be made available to researchers and academics, and will eventually be available to the general public in some fashion. Exactly how much of its database Embracer will make publicly available, and if any of it will be playable, remains to be seen.
That’s a hurdle the archive will need to overcome, or at least provide greater clarity on. Academic access is valuable and represents an important step forward in the ability to study and understand video games as a medium, but public access is important too. Video game preservation projects like this are surprisingly few and far between, outside of private collectors and community-led museums. If the Embracer Games Archive, or even just a version of it, were to become available to the public, either online or in person, that would be a significant argument for the preservation of the industry’s history that even the major publishers would find hard to ignore.
That point aside, it’s heartening to see a major talent hub put resources behind a project like this. A net positive for an industry that is often all too ready to forget the past in its relentless pursuit of the next big thing.
[PC Gamer]
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