In addition to old books, films, sound documents … are jukeboxes, Game Boy or Magnavox Odyssey from the USA: With around 20,000 video game objects that have survived, the National Library of France in Paris has one of the largest collections of its kind , a “cultural heritage of its own” that it carefully preserved.
To access the video game treasures of the National Library of the French Republic, you must go to one of the four towers of the François Mitterrand Library (named after the former President of the French Republic, 1981-1995), 79 meters high and each 22 stories high, in the south-west from Paris. With the obligatory accompaniment of a curator to pass the various security checks.
For the BnF, the video game is as valuable as the other types of preserved documents
Among the gramophones and jukeboxes of the Reserve of Charles Cros (French poet and inventor of the 19 Sega Saturn and especially the very rare Magnavox Odyssey marketed in the USA in 1972.
“We keep these consoles so that future researchers, ten or even a hundred years from now, can understand how we were able to play these video games, what devices were used,” explains Laurent Duplouy, head of the multimedia department, the AFP department of the National Library of France (BNF ).
“For the BnF, the video game is just as valuable as the other types of preserved documents. We give it the same attention, it is a cultural heritage in its own right,” he adds.
BnF’s still fairly confidential mandate, the collection and preservation of video game heritage, can be explained by the 1992 law on the “legal deposit” of multimedia documents.
Although the text doesn’t mention video games directly, it did include interactive software in this preservation system, and with it video game productions. Each game title or version must be deposited with the BnF in duplicate: one for preservation and the other for inspection.
With a team of 20 people dedicated to this task, collection managers, storekeepers and also engineers, the BnF manages to collect 2,000 documents of this type every year.
dematerialization
After the consoles, go down a few floors to discover the thousands of games stored in the preservation galleries, immersed in darkness and protected from humidity at a constant temperature of 19 degrees.
Newly packaged in neutral boxes, each game has its rating, which must be indexed in the library’s general catalogue.
From Adibou, the famous educational game, to the first Tomb Raider work that made the character Lara Croft famous around the world, to the latest episodes of the adventure game Assassin’s Creed, all genres are represented on all possible media (cassettes, floppy disks , CD-ROM, etc.).
But how do you keep these games forever when physical media deteriorate over time and are threatened by technological obsolescence?
Thanks to the digitization of analog games and “emulators”, this software developed by communities of enthusiasts that allow old games to be played on newer computers, explains Laurent Duplouy.
“We have two engineers in the multimedia department constantly monitoring these issues to find emulators, get them working, and check them against our collections,” he says.
Another topic for the curators of the BnF: the dematerialization of games (“cloud gaming”), which is increasingly establishing itself as the dominant video game model, such as the gaming phenomenon Fortnite, which is only accessible online on its own platform and via regular updates.
“We are in negotiations with publishers and certain platforms to find a way to restore legal deposit games in their dematerialized form,” assures the manager, admitting the technical limitations of this new model.