VGHF Magazine Library: 5,000 Magazines, 600,000 Searchable Pages

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VGHF Magazine Library

Video Game History Foundation. Browser. Browse it here.

I went in to check one fact about an old EGM review and surfaced an hour later. The magazine library passed 5,000 issues this September, nearly 600,000 pages covering 1981 to 2026, and every page is text-searchable. It is the closest thing gaming has to a public library of its own press.

  1. Search is the whole game. Type a game title in quotes and you get every contemporary review, preview, and rumor written about it, scanned from the actual pages. Wikipedia noticed before I did: the archive is already the preferred reference for out-of-print magazines there, with over 500 citations. When the encyclopedia cites your hobby library, the OCR works.

  2. Two thirds of it was scanned by volunteers. The Foundation digitized about a third itself; the rest came from Retromags, Out-of-Print Archive, Sega Retro, AtariAge, Gaming Alexandria, and alumni from EGM, Game Informer, and Game Developer. One Patreon member alone contributed 157 scans. This is what preservation looks like when no company will pay for it.

  3. The newest wing is Japanese. The pilot is a full run of Neo Geo Freak from 1995 to 2000, donated by a community member, with OCR that handles vertical writing and search that copes with no spaces between words. Volunteers indexed the major articles in English instead of machine-translating 10,000 pages. Another 70,000 pages are queued behind it.

  4. The honest caveats: it runs on Preservica and loads slowly, some items are marked Not Available for rights reasons, only select files download, and you cannot play games here. US copyright law blocks that part, and the Foundation says so plainly while it fights to change it.

Play it if: you ever argued about a review score from 1997 and want the primary source. Skip it if: you came for playable ROMs, this library holds paper, not cartridges.

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