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"You don't understand a game by playing it."

Frank Cifaldi

The Videogame Morgue File is a collection of materials intended to give videogames context.

Our aim is to build an archive of information, links and media that can be of value to researchers of videogame history, bringing scattered, hard-to-find resources into one place.

What's with the name?

"A morgue file originally was a collection of paper folders containing old files and notes kept by criminal investigators, as well as old article clippings kept by newspaper reporters, in case they became of later use as a quick reference collection."

What belongs here?

• Design documents
• Advertisements
• Trade press
• Newspaper clippings
• Reviews
• Interviews
• Talks
• Histories

In general: if it's relevant to a videogame, and it's not made of code, there's a place for it here.

Upload policy

The nature of videogame research is such that the entire field falls under current copyright terms, and this will remain the case for decades. Nearly all of the material we study — whether advertising, press coverage, or fan reaction — is still technically under the legal ownership of some company or individual. Whether this material was originally provided voluntarily, and under what terms that might have been, is usually unknowable; for the majority of materials, clearing the copyright is impossible.

So unlike some wikis, the Morgue File can't implement a blanket ban on copyrighted material... but we should try to stay on the right side of fair use. Please follow these guidelines:

1. If it's practical, link to large files (videos, etc.) at their original locations instead of uploading them here. (But resources do vanish... so it's not a bad idea to keep a copy!)
2. If a resource no longer exists at its original location, or was never officially made available online, try to find it at the Internet Archive and link to that copy.
3. If there's no other copy publicly accessible online, please consider its copyright status.
4. Do not upload anything that's still available commercially. Instead, add the metadata (title, author, etc.) and describe the contents. Optionally, link to a place where you can buy it.
5. If it's no longer being actively sold, consider whether it would be fair use to excerpt it.
6. Don't upload more of a resource than is relevant to the topic. Pages, not entire magazines. Segments of a podcast or show where a subject is discussed, not the whole thing.
7. Attribute uploads with their original publication details and the URL/site/library where they were found.
8. Don't upload any materials known or likely to provoke DMCA takedowns.