When it comes to video game history, a lot of artifacts come to mind: console systems, game cartridges, source code, concept art, merchandise, media assets, magazines… but a lot of the archiving happens after being rediscovered, and it takes a lot of work to understand the context behind the material. Being able to dig through and interpret that work is a dream for many archivists and video game “archaeologists”.
I was always fascinated not only by the narrative of a game, but how it worked. How does one make a game? So I studied computer science. But after my first internship and programming for a while, I realized I wanted to know the bigger picture. So I applied to be an associate producer. It was a grueling position, but I had such a great time collaborating with the dev team, and I enjoyed leading projects toward gold master.
At every milestone, it was satisfying to see our hard work meet the goals we set for ourselves, and seeing that evolution, how things got better, how things completely changed, is something that, as a producer, I have always wanted to remind my team. The hours of work and effort that was put in to meet ever-changing goals, and sometimes, goals that did a full 180 and seemed near-impossible. Wouldn’t it be nice to pull up playthrough videos, art or sound assets at a certain milestone and compare those changes with the final product?
Game developers work against estimated schedules with buffer room to deliver on them. That buffer room doesn’t include cataloguing and indexing their latest files in a discoverable way. I wish I had the time to archive in a way that would remind production teams of the things they made at pre-production, vertical slice, for E3, special moments in time to see how far they’ve come. I want people to be able to jump into a project archive and quickly pull up a build from a particular milestone and playtest it. I want to quickly pull up assets used in those milestones, and see what changed without going into the build. I want people to really understand how difficult it is to make a game.
Is it worth it to look forward to looking back?
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