Our 2024 in review

Building and growing

With your help, 2024 was a big year for building capacity at VGHF. That means we’re figuring out how to scale up our operations to take on bigger projects and new challenges. We’ve invested in new tools and skills to help us do our jobs more efficiently, and we’ve expanded our physical footprint to help us add even more rare materials to our library!

New collections that came into VGHF this year include:

• The David Marsh collection, with source materials from the making of Shadowgate, Uninvited, Deja Vu, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, and more games from ICOM Simulations.
• The Craig Stitt collection, featuring original art from the artist and developer of Spyro the Dragon, Ratchet & Clank, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
• The William Volk papers, filled with behind-the-scenes documents and correspondence from the former vice president of technology at Activision.
• A collection of rare FromSoftware promotional material, donated to the library by FromSoftware fan Kris Urquhart.

Leading the call for game preservation

This year, we supported the Software Preservation Network in their effort to reform copyright law for video game preservation. At a hearing with the U.S. Copyright Office in April, our library director testified that most games are at risk of being lost—and that our allies in the game industry agree the law should change.

While we didn’t win this round, we’ve already changed how people are talking about game preservation. Our headline-making fight to fix game preservation in libraries and archives has alerted the industry to how serious this problem is. Everyone from fans to academics to game companies have told us they’re paying attention.

We’re starting to make a difference, and with your support, we’re not backing down.

Celebrating game history in public

As part of our mission to celebrate the history of video games, we bring the history to people who want to learn about it. In 2024, we ran pop-up exhibits at the Game Developers Conference and Portland Retro Gaming Expo. At GDC, we spotlighted lesser-known voices from outside the game industry, like Wabbit developer Van Mai and media artist Toshio Iwai. And at PRGE, we took a deep dive into a single year: 1994, a critical point that we dubbed “the year games grew up.”

Spreading the word across the country

Our team traveled across North America to present about the history of video games and the challenges facing game preservation. We went everywhere from retro game cons to academic symposiums to library conferences—including an event in Canada! Check out the interactive map of where we went in 2024.

Helping collectors preserve rarities

We work with private collectors to preserve rare items in their collections and make them accessible. This year, we helped digitize and document two especially exciting items:

• A film commercial for the Mego Time-Out, one of the earliest ever commercials for a Nintendo product to air in the United States.
• An unreleased version of Tarzan for the Atari 2600, a technical marvel that would’ve been one of the highlights of the platform if it was released.

Helping game history researchers

This year, we also supported the broader video game history community! Back in May, we helped ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories raise nearly $10,000. With all that money, they’ve been able to commission new, original research for their free, peer-reviewed journal. We also helped the researchers at the University of Washington iSchool secure a $250,000 grant to study the accessibility of “critical” titles from gaming history. Whoever is advancing the field of game history, we want to lend a hand.

Helping the industry tell its history

Archival materials from the Video Game History Foundation’s collections were used in three commercial games this year: Tetris Forever and Worms: Armageddon – Anniversary Edition by Digital Eclipse, and the remake of Riven by Cyan. We’re not just preserving game history: We’re helping the game industry celebrate its own story.

The Video Game History Hour is back!

The Video Game History Foundation’s podcast is returning for Season 2! We’re back with a new rotating cast and another round of chats with game historians and people from gaming history—including our first ever “field episode” doing video game archaeology live at a game studio!

Guests for this season include:

• Benj Edwards and Jose Zagal, co-authors of Seeing Red: Nintendo’s Virtual Boy
• Rand Miller, co-creator of Myst
• Katrin Auch and Dan Amrich, former staff at GamePro magazine
• Marylou Badeaux, publisher of Computer Entertainer newsletter (1982–1990)

New for Season 2: The Video Game History Hour will feature your questions! Join our Patreon community Discord to submit questions for our next episodes. Patreon members will also get access to exclusive bonus episodes about events and other VGHF adventures.

Season 2 of the Video Game History Hour premieres in early 2025, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Our digital library launches Soon™

At the very moment you’re reading this, we’re finalizing our plans to launch the VGHF Library in early access. We needed a little longer than expected, but we’re planning to open the library in early 2025.

This year, we spent time learning how to digitize our collections faster and make them even more useful for research. So far we’ve already ingested about 30,000 files into our library system, including press kits, event ephemera, rare behind-the-scenes materials, original artwork, and thousands of out-of-print game magazines, many of which will be full-text searchable for the first time ever.

After beta testing this summer, we also decided to take some additional time to rework the user experience of the library portal. With the new features we’ve added, we are confident that the library will be a game-changer (pun intended, sorry!) for video game history research.

We know you’ve been waiting for this, and we appreciate your patience while we make sure we’re delivering the best version of the library we can. We’ll share an update about the early access launch of the library very soon once we’re ready.

A lost piece of Nintendo history

We also recently helped recover a long-lost Nintendo project, and we’re doing our homework documenting it as thoroughly as we can. We’ll have our full report early next year, but for now, we’ll leave you with a little teaser…