Help preserve Super Mario RPG history!

About this project

My goal is to get as much print media covering SMRPG (both the 1996 and 2023 releases) scanned, archived, and available to the public as possible.

I am an alumnus of the University of Toronto, and still live near its downtown campus. The university is home to several book scanners, including one serving the Internet Archive.

After visiting the Internet Archive’s HQ during a vacation to San Francisco in 2023, I became highly invested in their mission. Then after searching their collection for magazine articles about Super Mario RPG, I had a difficult time finding much in the way of Japanese sources. Therefore, I’ve decided I want to be the change I wish to see.

I am collecting information about magazines with information about Super Mario RPG (whether it be full features or just news snippets), as well as other print media (such as game guides). I have been informed that as an alumnus of U of T, I am welcome to use their book scanners for a small fee.

I would like to purchase as many of these magazines as possible, except for those which are already available online. I will then take them to be OCR scanned and publicly released on archive.org, and then subsequently donate the physical copies to any organization or library that would be interested in having them (such as the Video Game History Foundation for example, if they would be interested). If no org wants the physical copies, I will keep them in my own possession.

I can’t do this on my own: print media is expensive, and it’s even more expensive to ship it from Japan to Canada.

Cost breakdown

I drafted up a table of Japanese print media sources containing Super Mario RPG information that I was able to find for sale on merchant websites, and summed up the lowest cost per item (in reasonable condition) that I could find at the time. This totaled up to ¥116,107. The exchange rate between yen and Canadian dollars fluctuates often, but at the time of writing, this comes up to $1100 for the materials alone.

Because this figure is assuming that I would still be paying the lowest listed price at the time of drafting the table, the rest of the $2000 figure accommodates for some of those magazines being relisted at an unexpectedly higher price, or finding more instances of print materials that are not currently covered by my table.

The $2000 figure also is meant to cover the cost of shipping the materials from Japan to Canada. Magazines are heavy when you start stacking them up, and shipping heavy parcels is expensive. These will have to come in the form of multiple overseas shipments, assuming I go with the least expensive option offered by my proxy service.

Finally, the figure also is meant to cover fees incurred by the use of a proxy service in order to purchase the materials. These fees typically include the cost of shipping the item to the proxy's headquarters before making their way to Canada.

Your name on Gofundme is "some gamer". Why should I trust you with my donations?

My online handle is pidgezero_one, and I've been an active member of the Super Mario RPG fan community for quite a long time. Most of my exploits surround speedrunning, reverse engineering, and game modding, but also SMRPG's development history. You can see examples of my contributions here and here.