I have a lot of big plans for my game history and digital preservation work this year. As I wrote last week, 2023 was a rough year in many ways, but I'm also immensely proud of the work that I did manage to complete.
Once again, I'll have a lot of other things going on this year. After taking some steps toward social transition last year, I have my HRT consult this Tuesday. I also have a job that I love where I'm working through some fairly complex system architecture problems. Even under ideal circumstances, transition and a demanding full-time job would take up a lot of my time. But we also currently live in a world where trans folks and libraries are under attack. My health and safety come first, and my work at Archive takes higher precedence than my personal passion projects. I would rather slow down my pace on these projects than wear myself down trying to do more than I can handle. The resulting work will be better, too.
These plans are likely to spread over several years. I don't think I'll come close to everything I'm mentioning here this year, but I want to do all of these things eventually.
The PlayStation Experiment
I'm currently working on episode 2 of the PlayStation Experiment. I recorded my voiceover for Motor Toon Grand Prix plus brief intros and outros today. At this point, I have almost all the raw materials needed to start assembling the episode except for the King's Field segment.
I've been thinking about my goals with videos going forward and came to some conclusions. The first is that I enjoy going deep in my reviews. I wasn't really sure when I started out how much there would be to talk about with launch PlayStation and Saturn games, but I've found that I have no shortage of things to say. With games like Ridge Racer and Virtua Fighter, the games themselves are very simple, but there's a ton of important historical context that tends to get compressed down to a few talking points that aren't really that accurate (e.g. the retroactive view of the Saturn Virtua Fighter port is that it was disappointing when it was actually pretty well-received at the time). Then there's almost nothing about more obscure games like WanChai Connection. Telling the stories of these games and how they fit into the greater whole in the gaming landscape of the time has been very satisfying.
The second is that my plans for the next several years are to focus on the transitional period during the early 90s when games moved from cartridges and floppy disks to CD-ROMs. I don't think there's been nearly enough in the way of serious historical work around this era. After I finish PlayStation Experiment 2, I'm going to move on to PlayStation Experiment 3, which will round out the December 1994 PS1 games. Then I'm going to focus for a bit on non-PlayStation topics. I want to start chronogaming series on 3DO, Jaguar, 32X, and PC-FX to fill in the rest of the big 1993 and 1994 console launches, but I'm not sure yet what which will come first. I also want to fill in some early multimedia gaps on computers and 16-bit consoles. I'd like to eventually get caught up to 1995, then I'll just cycle between platforms and keep going chronologically.
Game Mag Print Ads
I really want to carve out some time for Game Mag Print Ads this year, maybe even taking a break from videos to do some dev work to make it better and build out the web frontend "museum" that I've been envisioning. Worst case, I still want to add some more ads, because there's basically an infinite pile of really good ads out there left. But I will be doing some major improvements at some point.
Rando Chrontendo
For the most part, I don't do much with Rando Chrontendo except maintenance and adding new episodes, but the one thing that folks occasionally ask me to do is add the current chapter title as additional context to the episode name/number and timestamp in the alt text. It's not that much work to do, but if I do that, I want to do it right. What I think I'm ultimately going to do is move it from a pretty basic script to a full CMS (like Game Mag Print Ads) so I can store metadata in something better than a JSON file. I do also have another idea for a bot that could use this same framework, so I'd like to build out some common functionality for all my bots to share. This is another one of those things that's not too hard, but requires that I set aside some time.
Preservation
I should be able to preserve the last of the Byron Preiss Multimedia 21st Century Classics CD-ROMs soon. After that, I'd really like to focus on something that ties into my video work plans: Getting high quality scans of 3DO game boxes, manuals, and other promotional material. The 3DO game discs themselves are all in Redump at this point (afaik), but a lot of the printed material hasn't been well-preserved.
I'm also going to continue to look out for any other multimedia obscurities that haven't been dumped at all. I know there are a ton of completely undocumented Photo CDs, for example, and there are probably more CD-ROMs that haven't been dumped just because they're hardly documented at all unless you dig through magazine scans.
Anyway, I hope I get a lot of good stuff done this year, and also I hope the American political landscape doesn't get so fashy that I need to leave the country.