Archive game videos exposed?

So I wanted to do a little pointing at the Internet Archive's Game Videos Archive, since I mentioned it briefly in the linklog, but didn't elaborate - it's been a lot of work to put together for me and (mainly) for lots of amazing contributors. There are actually a bunch of collections within the main hubpage, so let's check em out.

I may have mentioned the Machinima collection before, but it's now got more than 300 movies, with good metadata from Henry Lowood and others at Stanford - amazing stuff including the Soldats San Merci Battlefield 1942 series, and, obviously, Red Vs. Blue. Much of the catalog was grabbed from Machinima.com, so many thanks to Hugh Hancock for that.

The Speed Runs collection is shaping up to be amazing, too, thanks to the tireless work of Nolan 'Radix' Pflug from the PlanetQuake Speed Demos Archive. Over 100 movies showing games being completed as swiftly as possible - there's even captured movie versions of the original Doom Ultra Violence speed runs, as well as great stuff like Super Mario Bros in 5 minutes and 10 seconds, and many newer and more surprising titles.

One collection we got out of the blue is the Video Game Previews collection from Video Pipeline, a now-defunct company who provided video footage of the latest games to game stores and suchlike. There are over 2,000 movies from 1993-2003 in all, and some great stuff, including the canned N64 version of Eternal Darkness, semi-insane live-action ads for Boogerman, and a wealth of other material - particularly good since most commercial gaming sites only have video back to, say, 1999 or 2000.

The other game-related video material is on a smaller scale, but still worthy - this includes game/software longform EPKs, including goodness like the Riven B-Roll footage, the Pyst EPK (OK, maybe John Goodman singing a Myst pastiche interminably isn't THAT much goodness), and the previously-mentioned Neverhood making-of. Also just being added to is the high score/skill-based replay collection, such as playing GigaWing 2 without smart bombs - crazy stuff.

Finally, we have the CLASP Classic Software Preservation page, which is still heavily in Beta, waiting for an abstraction of the Archive.org site so it can handle uploads from 'software'-related collections in a much easier fashion. But, if you look at the details page for Dungeon Master on the Amiga, you can see what we're trying to do - using the DMCA exemption to do good-quality, private archiving of important game software. We'll have to see how we can progress this - there's already been some interest in it, anyhow.