The following is part of our 25-day Holiday Countdown Calendar! Every day from December 1st through the 25th, we’re posting a cool game history treat, daily updates from the VGHF, giveaways, and more! To make sure you don’t miss a day, sign up for our email list:
This is all part of our annual Winter Fundraiser donation drive, where we ask those who are able to generously give what they can so that we can continue thriving. If you’re able to make an additional one-time charitable contribution, this really is the best time to do so, as your donations will be DOUBLED thanks to a generous group of sponsors! Head on over to gamehistory.org/donate to learn more and give today.
Today, we have a classic game documentary for you — at a quality it has never seen before!
For the last year, we’ve been working with Cyan, the creators of the Myst series, to digitize hundreds of video tapes from their collections. We’ve already found some amazing footage, including the original live-action recordings used in Riven: The Sequel to Myst.
We also found the original master copy of The Making of Riven, a 13-minute documentary that was included with the game. The video that shipped with Riven was heavily compressed, but the version we found on a Digital Beta tape is an incredible bump up in quality. Look at this before-and-after!
We’re still processing Cyan’s massive collection, and we can’t wait to share more when we launch our digital library next year (more on that later this month!). But for now, please enjoy this newly remastered version of The Making of Riven! Our huge thanks to Cyan for opening up their vault for this exciting project, and thanks to our friends at Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound for their expert digitization.
Preserving objects like this costs money. Digitizing Cyan’s tape collection cost us nearly $7,000, and that’s just for the digitization part! It doesn’t take into account all of the time it takes us to find collections like these, arrange a donation, sort and catalog it, or even the hosting costs to digitally preserve it in our collection and make it available.
If you appreciate preservation work like this and want to see more, we’re in the middle of our annual Winter Fundraiser, which is what we use to determine what projects we can tackle next year – projects just like this one! If you’re able to give right now, our sponsors are matching every dollar, which means your contributions are DOUBLED.
Today’s Sponsor
Today’s sponsor is iam8bit! Based in Los Angeles, iam8bit makes incredibly cool video game merch, soundtracks, and other premium goodies.
They’ve offered to DOUBLE every dollar put toward our goal this year, up to $3,000! So your $5 becomes $10! Your $10 becomes $20! Your $3,000 becomes $6,000! (you can’t knock us for trying…)
More treats coming tomorrow!
Come back tomorrow to see a 1980s Nintendo console that might have changed video game history forever…had it been released.
You can see tomorrow’s post right now! Members of our Patreon who support us at $5 or more per month get to travel through time and see our daily calendar entries one day early! Christmas comes early for our beloved team of time bandits! Memberships at higher tiers also include access to our Discord community, monthly hangout calls with VGHF staff, and more!
Help spread the word
With the future of social media becoming more uncertain by the day, we’ve had a hard time in 2023 keeping people engaged and excited about the history of games! If there are people or groups in your life who might appreciate the work that we do, it would mean a lot if you helped spread links to this or any other content on the website.