Physical game manuals are hard to come by these days, especially as the industry begins to focus heavily on cloud streaming and digital-first infrastructure. But if you remember the good old days, when game boxes came with clunky booklets you could peruse before plunging into your final purchase, a The game protector named Kirkland is trying to preserve that nostalgia for posterity by creating high-quality scans of the manuals of yesteryear. In fact, he just finished uploading his complete set of manual scans of the US PlayStation 2.
Launched in the US in October 2000 – 22 years ago this Wednesday – Sony’s PlayStation 2 was one of the most popular consoles of all time. With more than 4,000 games published worldwide and around 158 million units sold worldwide, almost everyone had a PS2. games like Jak & Daxter and Smart Cooper helped popularize the console with kids and tweens, while titles such as Metal Gear Solid 2 and Onimusha continued the growth of a more “mature” market. Devil May Cry 3, Final Fantasy X, Kingdom Hearts, Ratchet & Clank, Silent Hill 2 (which is now being made new), Eyes, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3– the list of PS2 hits goes on forever, all bangers.
My favorite aspect of buying a new PS2 game was always reading the manual to see what tips, tricks and the occasional cheat I could use. While that time is long gone, Kirkland now has just over 1,900 of them stored and uploaded every single US PS2 manual at Archive.org in full 4K resolution
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Each manual is just as cool as you might remember from the ’00s, with the high-quality scans emphasizing the often eye-catching art. It really is a portal through time! I mean browse the manual for Square Enix Musashi: Samurai Legend (one of my favorite PS2 games of all time) fills me with nostalgia and takes me back to my grandmother’s house, staying up til 3am smashing racquets as the protagonist, Miyamoto Mus ashi, in crop tops. Apparently not much has changed for me.
“The goal is to create some awareness of wildlife conservation efforts,” Kirkland said my box. “So many of the games we grew up in shaped how we saw and experienced the world. Of course, as we “grow up,” we turn to other things, but many of us yearn for those things and want our children to enjoy what we’ve been doing. The whole read the books your dad read deal. And great effort has been made to preserve games: VGHFthe Strong museumand grassroots efforts like MAME, redump.org, No introductionand Cowering’s good tools before. I always thought, ‘This is great! We will have all preserved. But without the manuals, we won’t know how to play them.’”
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Unfortunately for the manuals, scanning can be a pretty crude process. “My process is terrible. I pull out the staples and run almost everything through mine Epson DS-870 sheet scanner. As a die-hard perfectionist, using a document scanner is disappointing for the quality but a necessity because of the volume,” he said. I spent seven months scanning SNES manuals and only got as far as the letter “E” with three flatbed scanners. With this setup I was able to scan almost 75,000 pages in the last year alone.”
After the tedious work of scanning each page, Kirkland used a variety of apps — like Adobe Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, Textpad, and PDF Combiner Pro — to make them as clean and pristine as possible before merging them all into Archive.org Both were uploaded 2K and 4K resolution. “I’ve spent entire summer vacations scanning manuals only to throw them away because I got better equipment or better workmanship,” he said. “Many long nights.”
Kirkland said he lost about $40,000 on his US PS2 collection by systematically buying every US release over the course of 22 years. “I snagged new releases when they dropped to $20 for about the first 800 releases, then I started picking up used sports games in good condition, and then I hunted down the weird variants (which never ends).”
Kirkland’s 4K US PlayStation 2 scan set is probably the largest and highest quality collection of video game manual scans publicly available, but to him it doesn’t really represent “archive” quality.
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“I’m considering this as ‘functional preservation’ for now,” he said. “Ever since I opened the staples, I can always toss them on a flatbed cart for proper preservation. But then it goes back to my perfectionist nature. What is “good enough”? 2400 dpi at 48-bit color (over a gigabyte per page). When will we archive ink instead of images? There is no easy answer to that.”
Perhaps further advances in technology will eventually make the task easier.
“In the future, I would like to have an AI that can really reconstruct the text and images as they were intended, correct deskewing and properly descreen without blurring line art,” he said. “So nobody really wants a 600dpi scan with staple holes and black borders, they just want the polished, finished project.”
Of course, getting there requires an incredible amount of work on the part of the archivist.
While completing over 1,900 manual PS2 scans may seem like a lifetime’s work, it’s actually just another milestone for Kirkland. He is previously completed the full set of US SNES manuals in 2K (collecting the scans cost him $8,000) and is about to crack SNES 4K, Atari 2600and game boy. “I’ve scanned about 300 of the original PlayStation manuals over the past few weeks,” he says casually, as if it’s nothing.
Kirkland says he has about 7,500 manuals on hand, of which about 3,000 have survived. He just wishes this work didn’t have to fall on the backs of unusually motivated individuals like himself. “In a perfect world, companies would release their original artwork that is sent to the presses for preservation,” he said. “But so many of these have been lost over time through history and hard drives.”
But working together comes with its own challenges.
“Right now it’s mostly solo – which I’ll hopefully change as I move on to systems that I can’t 100% achieve,” he said. “I’ve been burned from collaborations in the past, so I was a little wary of other projects, hoping to have a little more control over quality and direction.”
The work is tedious and many of the manuals most in need of preservation are in private collections or be jacked up in price by “investors”. However, Kirkland plans to continue his scanning projects because he believes this work simply needs to be done before it becomes impossible.
“The internet has had 25 years to make this happen and all we have are the same scanned manuals from 2004 that look like they came from a fax machine, or like disabled NES manuals because NintendoAge vintage car were so paranoid that people would want to fake their expensive holy grails that they fetched $5 at a flea market even in the ’90s. It just doesn’t sit well with me that you have to pay $200 for the privilege of reading a Chrono trigger Manual that is actually legible.”
