The video game journalist Danny O’Dwyer (37) publishes documentaries about the history of games and provides insights behind the scenes of the gaming industry on his YouTube channel Noclip. Now he saved boxes of recordings from the garbage dump.
What is this channel? Noclip publishes documentaries about crowdfunded video games. The channel shows the origin stories of games and interesting anecdotes from the games industry.
So it’s not surprising that founder Danny O’Dwyer was interested in a tip: A media company in San Francisco has a huge collection of tapes that he’s sure he’d like to see. The recordings would also be on the verge of being simply disposed of.
O’Dwyer rented a truck and soon drove back to his studio with cases of videotape. Since then, he and his team have saved more footage from ending up in the trash or rotting in some storage room.
Now he has what he says is one of the largest collections in video game history – but the real work has only just begun.
How gamers went from “unkempt basement kids” to real culture
More than 10 years of gaming history
What are these recordings? The boxes contain countless video cassettes in different formats: Among them are well-known formats such as VHS, but also rare formats for professional use that the YouTuber has never heard of before.
There are thousands of hours of footage on the tapes from the 90’s to around 2010: trailers, interviews, gameplay footage, and behind-the-scenes footage of the gaming industry.
In a time before many people had access to high-speed Internet, such videos were circulated on TV or a few gaming websites, O’Dwyer said. The assets for this were not transmitted in digital form, but on just such tapes.
What is special: the material on the cassettes has largely been forgotten or was never intended for the public. O’Dwyer says he’s already found an interview with legendary developer Hideo Kojima that’s said to have been deleted from the internet 10 years ago.
In addition, the videos were heavily compressed for publication on websites with the technical possibilities of the time. The tapes now have the highest quality version of the E3 2009 press conference, according to O’Dwyer.
We have included Noclip’s English-language video on the collection here:
Do you remember back then…?
What does he intend to do with the recordings? O’Dwyer and the Noclip team plan to review all of the tapes and digitize “historically valuable” recordings to make them available online.
A dedicated YouTube channel already has “never seen” presentations of games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights, which are said to have been unveiled behind closed doors at E3 2001.
The raw files are also published in the Internet Archive.
This reappraisal of video game history, which was almost lost, is not only a massive undertaking, but also requires a lot of time and the right equipment. Some devices needed to play the old formats are quite rare and most importantly expensive. They are also so heavy that shipping costs a lot of money, explains O’Dwyer.
For the creator and his team, however, it’s all worth it to be able to create a “living, breathing archive” that anyone can interact with. After all, there’s no point in having a museum if people can’t walk around in it, O’Dwyer said (via BBC).
The YouTuber is certain that real treasures can be found in the recordings: “I already know that there will be some things hidden in this collection that will really shock and excite the entire video game scene.”
However, O’Dwyer is not only concerned with these big moments, but also with the small ones. The moments that have someone send a link to a cousin or old friend with the message, “Remember when we used to play that?”
race against time
What difficulties are there? Like all analogue media, the cassettes have a kind of expiry date. With each passing year, the tapes have continued to be damaged, O’Dwyer said. The process continues with every day they spend in the boxes at the Noclip studio.
Some recordings are already too badly damaged to be played, says the YouTuber regretfully. So the Noclip team must hurry to digitize the videos before more are lost forever.
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