Archivist “Kirkland” Archives All US PS2 Game Manuals; Working on More Consoles

ps2 game manuals

Archivist Jonathan “Kirkland” Grimm has uploaded a massive collection of 4K-resolution scans of all the PS2 game manuals released in the United States. Having previously archived SNES and Atari 2600 game manuals in a similar fashion, he is currently working on doing the same for PS1, NES, SNES 4K, Xbox, Odyssey 2, and more.

Kirkland built up a staggering collection of over 1900 US PS2 game manuals by buying all the associated releases over a period of 22 years, which cost him about $40,000. Using an Epson DS-870 sheetfed scanner, he scanned over 58,000 game manual pages resized at 96 DPI, and his finished collection came out at a whopping 230 GB filesize prior to compression (17 GB after).

This may sound like a singular, incredibly impressive achievement, but is by no means the first for Kirkland: he has previously created a 2K-resolution scan archive of all US SNES game manuals (acquiring which cost him $8000) and has also uploaded a 4K-resolution collection of international-release Atari 2600 game manuals. His current collection of game manuals across all consoles numbers at around 7500, of which about 3000 have already been archived by him. He hopes that overseas archivists, especially those based in Europe, will take an interest in his work and offer their services in archiving regional game manuals.

You can find all of Kirkland’s current archives at his archive.org author page.

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