Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES

The Super Nintendo classic started life on the 8-bit NES. That version was considered lost…until now.

The Sega-Gremlin Marketing Video Archive

Nearly a decade before they did what Nintendon’t, Sega’s marketing still managed to break new ground…even when it was really cheesy.

The Media vs. Death Race

Over 15 years before Mortal Kombat, Exidy’s destruction derby caused video gaming’s first moral panic.

A Video Game By Any Other Name

Before they knew to call them “video games,” writers had to resort to all kinds of colorful descriptions.

Pixels In Print (Part 1): Advertising Computer Space – The First Arcade Video Game

To advertise the first commercial video game, marketers took inspiration from an unlikely source.

From the Game Informer Archives: Lost NES Games!

Singing raisins, flying firemen, and a Dracula who loves Reebok sneakers.

The time I excavated a Power Glove dinosaur

So after yesterday’s discovery of an undocumented Spinnaker game hiding in a pile of 90s GIFs (you did read that, didn’t you?) I was inspired to dig a little further into the GIFs Galore CD. And what I found, and brought back to life, was a lost Power Glove dinosaur. Sort of. Let’s back up…

TFW a Twitter bot solves a video game mystery

Something pretty fun happened yesterday that I wanted to share with you all: a bot on Twitter accidentally provided the clue that finally solved a 28-year-old mystery about a DOS game that never shipped. Yesterday, the VGHF Twitter account was tagged in a thread by @awesomonster, who was frantically trying to figure out the origins…

Nintendo’s (First) Lost Donkey Kong Game

Thanks to a VERY GENEROUS donor, we were recently able to acquire something of a holy grail for me and my scanner: an original 1983 promotional handbill from Nintendo, advertising the games that were slated to be coming soon to the Famicom. The flyer is historically important on its own, as what might be the…

In Search of the First Video Game Commercial

How do you explain video games when video games don’t exist yet?