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Introduction
When I started doing scans of my video game collection I joined the VGSC (Video Game Scanning Collective) project. One of the first thing I asked the senior members is if they had any kind of checklist of what was already scanned and what still needed to be scanned. Unfortunately nobody could come up with anything like that.
At the time I naively thought that such a thing was easily doable and started working on my own scanning checklist in the form a spreadsheet. This is when I understood how colossal of a task that was. Not only did I have to account for every games but also for every languages, editions, reprints and revisions. This is only for game covers and boxes, if I wanted to include instruction manuals, cartridge labels, inserts and more (which I did) then I also had to account for every variations of these as well.
Now that I knew what kind of data I wanted to gather I quickly ran into a new problem. How can I differentiate between different variations of a certain cover, manual, CD, cartridge etc? Some are really easy to differentiate, for example a Playstation 1, black label vs. a greatest hit or a Nintendo original printing vs a Player's choice are really easy to tell apart visually. With that said, some covers have very minimal visual differences despite not being the same.
Thankfully, there tends to be markings that uniquely identify these different assets, these markings or “part numbering systems” are unfortunately different across licensors, developers, publishers, distributor or manufacturers. They, however, tend to follow common patterns or some kind of logic.
In this guide I hope to transmit my knowledge about these different part numbering systems, where to look for them on products, how to interpret them, what can be done with them and how you can help in the cataloging effort.
The end goal
The ultimate goal of video game cataloging would be to build a public and centralized repository of every piece of video game related media ever created tangible or not. CD arts, cartridge labels, inserts, advertisement, merchandise, posters, story displays, hardware, cover, boxes, everything! This will probably never happen but we can strive toward that goal.
Who might benefit from such a repository?
- Video game historians
- Video game archivists
- Video game collectors
- Video game enthusiasts
and many more
How this guide is structured
This guide will first cover topics that are universal to any cataloging effort regardless of what is being cataloged. This will cover topics such as how to read and interpret UPC barcodes.
Then there will be a similar page that covers universal topics about hardware cataloging since this is a very specialized topic.
Next, there will be one page per major licensor like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sega, Sony, Bandai, Atari etc. Within each of these categories there will be a page for each system they released (for example: Nintendo 64, Playstation 2, Xbox 360 etc.)
Each system will also have a separate page concerning hardware cataloging for that specific system.
Finally I plan to have a that describes every publisher part numbering system. These systems are often applied by publishers. If one of those system is instead specific to a developer or distributor then a page will be created accordingly.