A game preservationist named Kirkland has just finished uploading a complete set of PlayStation 2 manual scans to Archive.org (as reported by Kotaku). This marks one of the biggest and highest-quality collections of PS2 manuals available online.
In the past, Kirkland uploaded a complete set of US Super Nintendo collections, but they've since turned their attention to other consoles as well, as evidenced by this latest effort. This will come as great news for those who enjoy skimming through the manuals of their favourite PS2 games. But there's also another more serious reason behind this undertaking.
As Kirkland tells Kotaku:
"The goal is to raise some awareness for game preservation efforts. So many games growing up shaped how we looked at and experienced the world.
Of course as we ‘grow up,’ we move to other things but there are a lot of us who have nostalgia for these things and want our kids to be able to enjoy what we did. The whole ‘read the books your father read’ deal. And there have been great efforts to preserve games: VGHF, the Strong Museum, and grassroots efforts like MAME, redump.org, No-Intro, and Cowering’s Good Tools before that. Which I always thought, ‘This is great! We’re going to have everything preserved. But without the manuals, we’re not going to know how to play them.'"
According to Kirkland, this project hasn't exactly been easy, or cheap. He tells Kotaku that he spent $40,000 to amass this impressive collection of roughly 1900 manuals. He also gave the publication a quick insight into the time-consuming process:
"I pull the staples and run most everything through my Epson DS-870 sheetfed scanner. As a die hard perfectionist, using a document scanner is disappointing for quality, but a necessity due to volume. I spent seven months scanning SNES manuals and only made it to the letter ‘E’ using three flatbed scanners. With this setup I’ve been able to scan almost 75,000 pages in the last year alone.”