There's a lot of talk mainstream about game preservation, and there was even a GDC talk about it this week. But I always wondered, how does one from the general public get their hands on a piece of gaming history? For example, animation enthusiasts have for years been able to purchase hand-painted animation cells, and there's a healthy supply available mainstream on Ebay where these have been acquired from closed animation studios. I myself have some choice cells from shows of my youth. But a search for "game design documents" on Ebay comes up fruitless. That's a general, somewhat oversimplicated example, but it seems like if someone wanted to get their hands on concept art, drawn level maps or discarded game design documents they'd have to do nothing short of dumpster diving. Which, I could kill myself now for not doing that when I worked in the same complex as Konami USA back in the late '90s... I know Steve Lin mentioned on a BIMP episode he was able to obtain a lot of documents from a publisher via auction. But does anyone know of any ways the layman can partake and maybe grab a nice one-of-a-kind gaming souvenir from behind-the-scenes of a childhood favorite game or studio? Is there a good guide/sticky to read or some good places to look for these types of items? Sorry mods if this should belong elsewhere...
The issue in modern times is (as a dev I speak) that all is done digitally. Aside from some quick throw away disks in rare cases and prints of concept art that in most cases end up artists portfolio site anyways there are no real souvernires. Apart from development hardware in case of console games or some quick physical prototype (which becomes a rarer practice I feel) and those aren't much more than your phoned in art and crafts project at best after use.
