We hope this guide will help you in your efforts to create archival quality scans of video game media, such as boxes, covers, manuals, carts, discs, and more.
This guide focuses on getting high quality output from scanners and also goes over standards that are used by VGSC (Video Game Scanning Collective) for their archival scanning project.
The goal is to not cut corners, and avoid the need to re-scan items in the future by getting you the best scan possible with good scanning hardware NOW. Based on our research, current scanning hardware and software is fantastic for our purposes, and it’s unlikely scanning will greatly improve in the near future with regard to discernible quality. Therefore, we feel it is as good a time as ever to start scanning.
However, we want to clarify that preservation of analog data is by definition a lossy process. And that's ok.
If you have items you are willing to have scanned but don’t have the time or capabilities to scan them, please let us know in either the Gaming Alexandria Discord in #scans, or the VGPC Discord in the #scans_vgsc channel. Other scanning volunteers may be happy to help scan your items and return them to you. We’ll likely even cover the shipping charges both ways.
This is a project sponsored and maintained by Hit Save!, a registered 501©(3) non-profit dedicated to the preservation of video games, their history, and related physical and digital materials.
Many people have worked together to come up with the various methods and knowledge contained in this guide. Here's a list of them below -
bigmanjapan
Wietse van Bruggen (Densy)
Dustin Hubbard (Hubz)
Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation)
Jonas Rosland
Joseph Redon (Game Preservation Society)
Kirkland
Noah Bacon
Sczther