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"You can't understand a game by playing it"

Frank Cifaldi

The Video Game Morgue File is a collection of reference material to provide context around video games.

The aim is to build an archive of information, links and media of value to researchers of video game history, bringing resources that are currently scattered across the internet into one place, for every game ever made.

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
• Advertising
• Trade press
• Newspaper clippings
• Reviews
• Interviews
• Retrospectives

And all of this is medium-agnostic: whether it's text, graphics, audio, or video, it's all good.

Upload policy

The nature of videogame research is such that the entire field falls under the current term of copyright, and nearly all of the material we study — whether advertising, press coverage, or fan reaction — is still technically under some company or individual's legal ownership. 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 simply impossible.

So unlike most 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.

1. If it's possible, please link to large files at their original locations instead of uploading them here.
2. If it was never officially made available online, or no longer exists at its original location, 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. If it's no longer being actively sold, consider whether it would be fair use to excerpt it.
5. Never upload more than is relevant. Pages, not entire magazines. Segments of a podcast or show where a subject is discussed, not the whole thing.
6. Don't upload any materials with a known history of DMCA reaction or other litigation.