December means it’s time for our annual Winter Fundraiser! As many of you know, we like to “go big” during the holiday season, and this year is no exception!
All of our events this year are on YouTube, so we thought we’d embed them all in one convenient location.
December 2nd: VGHF Winter Fundraiser 2025 Starts Now!
This video marked the beginning of our Winter Fundraiser! It was a time to reflect on the year that was, and to preview all of our events for the remainder of December (meaning, the things on this page!). Check out the companion blog post for a deeper look at our 2025 accomplishments.
December 5th: The MaxiVision Challenge!
This wasn’t a planned event, we improvised this as a little bonus! We hit our initial fundraising goal earlier than we expected, so to celebrate, we uploaded this capture of a rare VHS tape for an infomercial that sold a game cartridge. There was one big problem though: the cartridge never came out! The video itself is fun, but this was a way for us to show off our new VHS capture technique, which is outlined in this post.
December 8th: Public Debut of Our GDC Lecture
Frank’s lecture and call-to-arms on taking responsibility for preserving video game history was relegated only to attendees of the 2025 Game Developers Conference – until now! This is a must-watch for anyone interested in the state of institutional game preservation – or anyone who wants to hear some fun VGHF stories.
December 10th: VGHF’s First Video Game!
Presenting our first fundraiser video game cartridge! We recovered and rebuilt a completely unknown prototype for the NES from its original source code. Its creator donated the rights to us, Mega Cat Studios donated their time to finish and refine it, Lost in Cult donated a new cover painting, and iam8bit donated their profits on manufacturing and selling it. It’s game preservation that funds more game preservation! A perpetual preservation machine!
December 15th: The Secrets of Sega Channel
Don’t just watch TV – play it! We can’t wait to debut our documentary on the history of The Sega Channel, as told through the massive amount of material we were able to preserve over the past year. You’re not going to want to miss this.
December 17th: Live Dumping Mystery Prototype ROMs – Again!
We did this earlier this year and it was a hit. And wouldn’t you know it – not only did we get another pile of mystery EPROMs, we got TWO new mystery piles, specifically from Sony Imagesoft and Atari Games (in its Tengen and Time Warner Interactive days). We peeked just a little bit and we guarantee there are newly discovered, unreleased games in here!
December 25th: How The NES Was Born
2025 is the 40th anniversary of the NES, and we’ve spent a lot of this year revisiting its history and piecing together just what happened to bring this remarkable system to market – and how it changed video games forever. This video reframes the history of the system and may just be the final word on how the NES came to be.