In an ever-growing digital world, video game preservation is becoming more of a challenge. While other art forms have spent decades, even centuries and millennia working to preserve, the video game industry is still fairly young and has room to grow in this department. There are many mysteries about the history of gaming because of this. The Video Game History Foundation is working on a new project to preserve the "raw materials" of video games, and it is called the Video Game Source Project.

In a post about the project on the site, Frank Cifaldi (founder of VGHF) talked about the importance of the project, why it exists, and the fact that the first game that the foundation will dive into is The Secret of Monkey Island. The project is designed to preserve the actual source code of games, but it will go even deeper than that.

RELATED: PlayStation Classic Uses Open Source Emulator

A game in development will have art assets and concepts, written documentation, and even correspondence between the team about the project. All of that is worth preserving. Cifaldi believes that this is important not only for general preservation but to help with future releases of classic titles. "Remastering a game, or even porting it to another platform, is nearly impossible without it (source code)."

monkey island game

In the video game industry, the preservation and documentation of source is what allows a game to survive past its initial release

Founded in only 2017, the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) has a mission of preserving and celebrating the history of video games, and then teaching that to others. Earlier this year the VGHF was able to discover an unreleased NES game on floppy disks and bring it back to life.

MORE: The 10 Rarest NES Games Ever (And The Story Behind Them)

Source: Gamehistory.org