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Talked with a librarian about game preservation and it hit me different
She told me games disappear if nobody plays them, and now I'm going through my old boxes of games from the 90s to log rulebooks on BGG before the paper crumbles away - has anyone else found old game instructions that were completely lost to time?
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the_viola2d agoMost Upvoted
Oh man, the crumbling paper thing got me. I found a copy of Hero Quest rules from 1990 that was literally held together with yellowed Scotch tape. My handwriting from age 8 was on the back of one page trying to "improve" the undead movement rules. Real genius stuff. Made me realize how many games just vanished because nobody saved the weird little foldout pamphlets. Bet there's ten different Monopoly house rules rotting in landfills right now.
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amy_reed792d ago
Is it really fair to call them "lost" though? I see it differently @the_viola. A lot of those house rules and scribbled notes are still alive in peoples memories. My dad had a dozen ways to play Risk and none of them were written down. He just taught us and we passed them along. Those Monopoly rules you mentioned might be gone from the landfills but they live on in how families actually play the game. Plus I think the internet saved a lot of that stuff. I found someone's scanned Clue variant from 1975 last month. The paper crumbles but the ideas stick around longer than we give them credit for.
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