So I’ve got this massive stack of Famitsu Xbox issues. I’d like to scan them and share them as PDFs for everyone on the Internet Archive but uhh I guess I need the motivation?! It takes about 3 hours to scan each issue and there are 20 so that’s a lot of work. There is some cool stuff in these magazines, like advertisments and promotional material, as well as some deep insight into the hardcore Japanese Xbox community from late 2002 to mid 2005 (did you know that KOTOR and Morrowind were heavily requested localizations but never happened?!). Almost none of this material currently exists in any form on the internet.
I was thinking if I could raise at least $100USD it’d be worth it. So if 10 people pitch in $10 we can make this thing happen. Just post in this tread if you’re down!!
So yeah I’ve decided scanning 40+ magazines in their entirety is way too much work. I’m gonna pivot this project to just scanning all the covers and advertisements. This’ll be way more digestable and people could link it around (visions of Kotaku article “this is how xbox games were marketed in japan”). Then maybe if it gets a lot of attention from like Frank Cifaldi or someone and people send me a million dollars I’ll go back and scan the magazines fully.
I’ll start this pretty soon, so uhhh please look forward to it!!
I wish scanning services were cheaper. I had a bunch of artbooks scanned to PDF (limited space, bad dust allergies) and the quality was surprisingly decent but the price totally snuck up on me; you really don’t appreciate just how many pages these books and magazines of ours have until you’re paying per.
Then at the end of the month I’ll put all these + everything left over in their original 600dpi resolution into a .zip and post them on Mega or something.
I think based on this website that the xbox always had a really tiny audience, there was just a fairly large bubble, early on, of people that bought it for dead or alive and probably sold it back after a couple months
