It took them over 22 years and "tens of thousands of dollars" to collect all the PS2 games, scan the manuals and edit the scans.
An enthusiast nicknamed Kirkland has recently shared a huge collection of PlayStation 2 manuals published in 4K resolution as PDF files. According to the collector, it took them 22 years to purchase all the PS2 titles published in the US which also cost them "tens of thousands of dollars."
The set of PS2 manuals is published in the public domain and contains over 1900 games as well as about a hundred artbooks, mini-guides, and comics. The total size of the archive with scans is 17 GB, but before the compression, it was even bigger – 230 GB.
Apart from spending 22 years collecting the games, as Kirkland shared, they also spent 8 months scanning the manuals and "hundreds of hours" editing the scans. The collector believes that their scanning method is not entirely perfect. In the future, they would like to use an AI image upscaler that could reconstruct text and images.
Here are some examples of manuals for various PS2 games:
God of War
Batman: Vengeance
Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy
Mortal Kombat: Deception
You can find more manuals collected and scanned by Kirkland here.
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