Old books, films, audio documents… and also vintage video game consoles: with around 20,000 video game objects stored, the National Library of France (BnF) has one of the largest collections of its kind, a “separate cultural heritage”. which she carefully guards.
To access BnF’s video game treasures, you must go to one of the four towers of the François-Mitterrand library in Paris. With the imperative accompaniment of a curator to pass the various security controls.
Among Charles Cros’ spare turntables and jukeboxes, two display cases house a dozen emblematic consoles from the history of video games, such as the famous Nintendo Game Boy, Atari Lynx, Sega Saturne and especially the very rare Magnavox Odyssey, marketed in 1972 in the United States United.
“We keep these consoles to give future researchers, in tens or even hundreds of years, to understand how we could play these video games, what were the devices used,” explains to AFP Laurent Duplouy, head of the department. multimedia for dedicated department of the National Library of France.
“For BnF, the video game is as precious as other types of archived documents. We attach the same importance to it, it is a cultural heritage in itself”, he adds.
Still a fairly confidential mission of the BnF, the collection and preservation of video game heritage can be explained by the law on the “legal deposit” of multimedia documents, dating from 1992.
If the text does not directly mention video games, it has included interactive software on this storage device, and therefore, by extension, video game production.
Each game title or version must be deposited in BnF in two copies: one for safekeeping and one for consultation.
With a team of 20 people dedicated to this mission, collection managers, storekeepers and also engineers, the BnF manages to collect 2000 documents of this type every year.
– Dematerialization –
After the consoles, go a few floors below to discover thousands of games stored in the storage galleries, immersed in darkness at a constant temperature of 19 degrees and protected from humidity.
Repackaged in neutral boxes, each game has its own rating to be indexed in the general library catalog.
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From Adibou, the famous educational game, to the first Tomb Raider opus, which made the character of Lara Croft famous all over the world, through the latest episodes of the adventure game Assassin’s Creed, all genres are represented in it all possible media (cartridges, diskettes, CD-ROM, etc.).
But how do you keep these games going forever when physical media degrades over time and technological obsolescence threatens them?
Thanks to the digitization of analog games and “emulators”, this software developed by communities of enthusiasts allows old games to be played on the latest computers, explains Laurent Duplouy.
“We have two engineers in the multimedia department who are constantly monitoring these issues to find emulators, make them work and match them with our collections,” he says.
Another future challenge for BnF curators: the dematerialization of games (“cloud gaming”) which is increasingly becoming the dominant model of video games, such as the phenomenon of the game Fortnite, accessible only online on a dedicated platform and through regular updates.
“We are in negotiations with certain publishers and platforms to find a way to recover games with legal deposit in their dematerialized form,” assures the manager, acknowledging the technical limitations this new model presents.
