Old books, films, sound documents but also vintage video game consoles: with around 20,000 preserved video game objects, the National Library of France (BNF) has one of the largest collections of its kind, a
"cultural heritage in its own right"
which she carefully preserves.
To access these video game treasures, you have to go to one of the four towers of the François-Mitterrand library in Paris.
With the imperative escort of a curator to cross the various security checks.
In the middle of the gramophones and jukeboxes of the Charles-Cros reserve, two windows house a dozen emblematic consoles in the history of video games, like the Nintendo Game Boy, the Atari Lynx, the Sega Saturne and especially the very rare Magnavox Odyssey, marketed in 1972 in the United States.
"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 was the equipment used"
, explains to AFP Laurent Duplouy, head of the service. multimedia to the dedicated department of the National Library of France.
The Magnavox Odyssey, marketed in 1972, is the first home console in history.
BERTRAND GUAY / AFP
“For the BNF, the video game is as precious as the other types of preserved documents. We pay the same attention to it, it is a cultural heritage in its own right,”
he adds.
Still quite 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 mention video games directly, it has included interactive software in this conservation device, and therefore by extension video game productions.
Each game title or version must be deposited at the BNF in two copies: one for preservation and the other for consultation.
With a team of 20 people dedicated to this mission, collection managers, storekeepers and also engineers, the BNF manages to collect 2,000 documents of this type each year.
New storage media
After the consoles, head a few floors lower to discover the thousands of games stored in the conservation galleries, plunged into darkness at a constant temperature of 19 degrees, and protected from humidity.
Repackaged in neutral boxes, each game has its rating to be indexed in the general catalog of the library.
From
Adibou,
the famous educational game, to the first opus of
Tomb Raider,
which made the character of Lara Croft famous all over the world, passing through the latest episodes of the adventure game
Assassin's Creed,
all genres are represented on all possible media (cartridges, diskettes, CD-ROM, etc.).
Read alsoIn France, the video game press loses life points
But how do you keep these games forever when physical media degrade over time and technological obsolescence threatens them?
Thanks to the digitization of analog games and "emulators", this software developed by communities of enthusiasts who allow old games to be played on recent computers, explains Laurent Duplouy.
"We have two engineers in the multimedia department who constantly monitor these issues to find emulators, make them work and match them with our collections,"
he explains.
Another future challenge for the curators: the dematerialization of games (“cloud gaming”) which is increasingly becoming the dominant video game model, like the game phenomenon
Fortnite,
accessible only online on a dedicated platform and through regular updates.
"We are in negotiations with publishers and certain platforms to find a way to recover games on legal deposit in their dematerialized form"
, assures the manager, admitting the technical limits posed by this new model.
SEE ALSO
- Dedicated to the writer Haruki Murakami, this library with dreamlike architecture will open in Tokyo
