The Video Game History Foundation has had a busy year! Thanks to your support, we’ve been working on new projects, recovering rare materials, and advocating for the future. Here’s what we’ve been up to over the last six months.
Bringing history to the industry
We ran the Game History Gallery at the Game Developers Conference, a new interactive game history exhibit on the show floor. Our exhibit showcased unique voices that came from outside the games industry, as well as a gallery of artifacts from game history. We wanted the developers at GDC to start thinking more about what “game history” means, and we were thrilled with the results.
Meanwhile, VGHF executive director Frank Cifaldi addressed the audience at the 2024 Independent Game Festival Awards to call the game dev community to action: History is in your hands! Frank talked about our groundbreaking game availability study and asked developers to think about how their stories—and the stories of their colleagues—would be remembered. “You’re the curator of your own story,” Frank said.
Fighting for a better future
We made headlines in April when VGHF library director Phil Salvador testified to the U.S. Copyright Office to support a new copyright exemption for game preservation in libraries and archives. This was part of a three-year push for copyright reform we’ve been working on with the Software Preservation Network. In this high-stakes hearing, we took on copyright lobbyists and made a strong case for fixing the law to make game history more accessible.
Our petition even garnered support from Antstream Arcade and Limited Run Games, two of the major companies re-releasing classic video games. They agree: Changing the law will help game preservation without hurting the game industry.
We’ll know the results of our petition this fall. In the meantime, you can read about the hearing on Ars Technica.
Building bridges
We spoke at Toronto Games Week and connected with the growing community of Canadian game preservationists, who are working with important collections like the late Syd Bolton’s game library and the tapes from the TV show Electric Playground. Learn more about what they’re up to.
We helped raise over $9000 to support ROMchip, a non-profit journal for game history. By meeting their goal, ROMchip is able to commission original game history research!
We’ve expanded!
The Video Game History Foundation has a new space for processing our collections! We’re taking everything out of our storage units and bringing it on-site so we can work through it faster. And as part of our processing work…
We’ve solved scanning
We invested in new tools, technology, and techniques to scan paper better, faster, and cheaper, as part of our video game magazine preservation work.
We can scan hundreds of pages in minutes at archival-level quality. And with our state-of-the-art OCR tool, even the wackiest ’90s magazine layouts will be full-text searchable in our library. We’ve already scanned 300+ items since May, with more on the way.
New archival finds
We’ve been able to recover rare materials from game history, including Nintendo’s first US commercial.
New archival collections coming from Craig Stitt (artist for Sega and Insomniac Games) and ICOM Simulations!
We helped rescue another lost game
Taarzan for the Atari 2600 was shelved after the 1983–84 video game crash… until now! Read more in our blog post.
We helped bring a classic back to life
We recovered source material for Cyan, creators of the Myst series, that they used in their new remake of Riven! With Cyan’s blessing, these videos and more are coming to our digital library.
We’re not stopping there!
All our scanning and collections work supports our upcoming digital library, where you’ll be able to access game development materials, magazines, and more.
The digital library is the start of our vision for the future of game history research. Stay tuned for more updates, but in case you missed it, you can watch our demo that we shared in December.
We’re also working on bringing back the Video Game History Hour podcast! Join our Discord (exclusive for Patreon subscribers) to get the latest details, and maybe even ask an audience Q&A that ends up on the show!