The games of today are filled with thousands of images, sounds, and videos to immerse the player in the environment. Most game developers choose to store all these resources in large archive files, which groups the files together and allows other features like compression. However, placing the files in an archive provides an inherent drawback: players can't view or edit the resources.
In the past, a programmer who owns a copy of the game would usually write a program to extract all the files from an archive, and releases the tool on the internet. While this is fine in small doses, there are some unfortunate problems that arise, such as:
 | The program is often run from the command line, which is unfriendly for most users. |
 | You need a separate program for each game. |
 | Many of them only extract files, they do not allow you to create or edit existing archives. |
 | Not many programs for editing archives on other platforms like Playstation or Xbox. |
Game Extractor is a program that allows extracting and editing of the archives in over 1000 games. Every game archive is handled exactly the same way - once you know how to use Game Extractor on 1 archive, it is the same for all other archives. Game Extractor sports a simple user interface that is capable of many advanced features such as modifying archives, extracting files, showing previews of image and audio files, and a scanner to look for files in unknown or unsupported games.
The design of Game Extractor was focused on extensibility - almost everything is a form of plugin that can be added or removed with minimal (or no) changes to the main program. Plugins make it quick and easy to extend upon the functionality of Game Extractor, and anyone can download the source code and write plugins themselves. Some of the common plugins are:
 | Archive Plugins tell Game Extractor how to read and write a particular archive. |
 | Side Panel Plugins provide the interface and the "building blocks" of functionality, such as reading archives, renaming files, and showing previews. |
 | Viewer Plugins describe how to open a file preview, draw a thumbnail image, and how to convert a file into a different format (such as converting a BMP image to a JPG image). |