“I was working at Stanford University archiving their video game collections — they had all of these games donated to them — and I thought, even Stanford is still figuring out what to do with all of this,” Kaltman said in a public statement.
A self-professed video game enthusiast, Kaltman said he found the technology for restoring and recovering historical video games for archival purposes inadequate, because the only options for citing specific places in those games were screenshots or video recordings. Working with fellow assistant professor and grad school colleague Joseph Osborn, Kaltman used emulators, or programs that allow new computers to run legacy software, to create a system he calls “The Game and Interactive Software Scholarship Toolkit” (GISST) that allows users to “bookmark” and share specific places in older games. Clicking on one of these bookmarks allows a user to play the game from that moment.
“Sometimes you’re talking about a level or a specific encounter within a computer game, or an interface, and it’s better to show somebody a video instead of an image,” he said in a public statement. “Or better yet, they can just play the game themselves.”
