Thanks To Fair Use, One Man Is Trying To Preserve Old School Video Game Manuals

Culture

from the preserve-art dept

We have discussed at some length the intersection of copyright laws and antiquated video game preservation. Going back at least a decade now, most of that focus has been on whether the use of emulators and the digitization of games that no longer have systems to run them ought to qualify as fair use. You can couple that with the more recent trend of some museums with a focus on the art of video games seeking to get exceptions to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules in order to preserve both offline and online games that might otherwise be lost to the ether. When viewed properly through the lens that copyright law exists for the purpose of promoting more culture, not less, it should be immediately obvious that preserving culture in this manner is one of the chief aims of fair use and copyright law in general.

But it’s not just the games themselves being preserved by fair use provisions. One dedicated man has led a six year effort to digitize and preserve the game manuals for every Super Nintendo game ever created.

In some cases, they’re lost forever! Other times, we’re lucky to have folks like Peebs, who devote an incredible amount of time to collecting, cataloguing and then ensuring manuals to every Super Nintendo game ever released are scanned and uploaded, so that future generations can enjoy them as much as we did.

For the last six years he’s also been hosting a Twitch channel, where he’s been slowly trying to beat every single Super Nintendo game. A lot of the time, in order to complete a section or just look something up, he’d need to consult the manual. “It didn’t take long to realize that most of the time when I went to look for a scan of a manual for control schemes or just backstory, they mostly either didn’t exist or they were all scattered to the far corners of the Internet,” Peebs says. “There was a severe lack of organization: mislabeled files/links, old defunct websites with broken interface/files, incomplete scans, etc.”

Now, I do not expect everyone to particularly care about the preservation of old video game manuals. I do, but then I’m precisely the right target audience for this sort of thing. Cartridge console gaming was a thing at the exact right time in my youth and I loved going through the manuals for games. The art, instructions for play, backstory, and detailed explanations for the setting were part of the fun of buying a new game. If you’re of the tabletop gaming sort, think of it as a truncated version of going through player handbooks and monster manuals.

But even if you don’t give two poops about video game manuals from the 90s, it’s still important to recognize that fair use is what enables this sort of preservation. This sort of non-commercial categorization and preservation, frankly the kind of thing that museums do, would certainly run afoul of copyright law otherwise. But thanks to his efforts, Peebs nearly has every manual available to anyone, free of charge. And a grateful clique of the gaming community is actively trying to help him complete his goal.

There were around 600 manual scans available on the SNES Manual Archive when it opened to the public in September 2020. Since then, a community has sprung up around the project, with fans around the world eager to help out with their own submissions.

“I got approximately 20 scans sent in on the first day, and since then I’ve received about one per day,” Peebs says. “People have started letting me know when they buy a manual so I can mark it off as incoming so other people don’t buy the same thing. I’d say we probably have a total of another 15-20 manuals in the mail from people around the world right now that will be scanned and uploaded when we get them.”

That leaves just over 100 manuals, at least for Western games or versions of games. Though the project is looking to expand its Super Famicom collection in the future. “The support of people contributing to the project has been super surprising and I’m very thankful for every manual that has been submitted.”

There have apparently been no game publishers, nor Nintendo itself, coming by to lob copyright shots at this project. That’s a good thing, so clearly an endeavor of appreciation of the art in these manuals this project is. One hopes that, with this new notoriety Peebs is receiving, he isn’t suddenly forced to confront just how much fair use protection his project has. To have this part of gaming culture under threat just because copyright would be a shame.

Filed Under: archives, copyright, fair use, manuals, video games
Companies: nintendo