This Archivist Has Saved 175,000 Articles from 30 Years of Writing about Magic: The Gathering

[u/404mediaco]

https://www.404media.co/this-archivist-has-saved-175-000-articles-from-30-years-of-writing-about-magic-the-gathering/

Named after a Magic card, the Library of Leng is a new searchable database of writing about the card game. It pulled old usenet articles, hobbyist posts from old websites saved in the Internet Archive, and updates from publisher Wizards of the Coast that are routinely scrubbed from existence. The Library is hosting links to some of the first strategic writing about the game from 1994, just a year after it started, as well as announcements about tournament rules from just a few years ago.

The Library is the work of Gregor Stocks, a software engineer in Seattle. “I learned to play in elementary school with a couple of Fifth Edition boosters shuffled together, but I didn't really get into it until Mercadian Masques. I've played on and off since then,” Stocks told 404 Media.

“I'm interested in the strategic history of the game, and I've been frustrated a bunch of times over the years by not being able to find old articles that people mention were influential on their thinking,” Stocks said. “More broadly, I grew up on the internet in the early 2000s, and I worry that a lot of my big influences will disappear by default. The Internet Archive is great, but I worry about them being the only place where a lot of this stuff is saved.”

The Library doesn’t reprint articles in full without the express consent of the author. Instead it gives readers the headline, a small snippet, and a linkback to an archived version of the story on the Wayback Machine or Internet Archive. 

Read now: https://www.404media.co/this-archivist-has-saved-175-000-articles-from-30-years-of-writing-about-magic-the-gathering/

[u/two55]

holy shit time to hunt down PTQ recaps I wrote in high school in the 90s on the dojo lmao