Save Yourself: Game History is in Your Hands

The podcast addresses the challenges of preserving video game history, emphasizing the need to move beyond individual efforts and towards industry-wide, organized preservation. It highlights the gap between industry practitioners' desire to preserve their work and the values of professional historians, who focus on broader social, cultural, and economic contexts. The discussion uses the contrasting archival collections of Sierra Online and Broderbund to illustrate the importance of comprehensive documentation, including internal communications and financial records. It critiques the over-reliance on the internet and crowdsourcing for preservation, advocating for industry bodies to fund historical preservation efforts, drawing parallels with the film industry's Academy Film Archive. The podcast concludes with practical advice for individuals to start preserving their work by physically archiving materials in boxes.