We're heading to PAX West 2025!

Hey folks in the Pacific Northwest: We're going to PAX West 2025 this weekend!

Frank is doing two panels, which will be streaming on twitch.tv/pax.

• Launching the NES: A 40-Year Retrospective, with our friend Jenna Stoeber (Friday 2:30pm, Blue Dragon Theater)

The Nintendo Entertainment System launched 40 years ago, but what does that mean? Who was involved? Who bought it? And what are the strange, behind-the-scenes secrets that the public doesn't know about? Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi is excited to share his insight, and some exclusive, brand new findings about one of his favorite subjects: the 1985 test market launch of the NES.

• Video Game History Foundation @ PAX! (Monday, 3:30pm, Blue Dragon Theater)

We're all in agreement that preserving our history is important, but what do we even mean when we say that? How do we prioritize what to save, given limited resources? How do copyright laws limit what we can accomplish? And at the end of the day, whose responsibility is it to make sure things don't get thrown away? Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi reflects on the highs and lows of his 25-year obsession-turned-career to demonstrate that when it comes to preserving our past, we're all that we've got.

We're also be running a table in the Bandland area in Summit Hall level 3. You can get a souvenir photo at our Game Boy Camera photo booth (Patreon members get one for free!) and try a demo of our digital library.

For paid members, we've got some more thoughts about what it took to put PAX together and how we want to do events like this going forward.

Why PAX?

While we were at GDC, we got approached by someone from PAX to see if we could a similar booth at their event. We're always open to working with other events, but a booth at the scale of our GDC exhibit is not inexpensive. Understandably, it was out of scope for their budget, but they still wanted a way for us to participate.

In general, we've wanted to have more of a presence at video game events. But we want to do it in a way that has a lower impact on our operations. An event like GDC takes weeks for all-hands to get ready, and previous museums we ran at PRGE had a similar problem.

Whenever we talk about these problems internally, our recent approach has been to figure out how to do something we can reuse. In terms of events, that means: Can we put together a booth template that we can easily bring to other events? Can we come up with panel content that we can bring to multiple audiences?

PAX is our first experiment with this. We have a couple things we're trying out...

Our mobile booth kit!

Our Game Boy Camera photo booth seemed like a no-brainer for us to bring to other events. We were also really happy with our library demo kiosk at GDC 2025, and that seemed like an obvious candidate to pilot at other events.

Frank assembled a booth-in-a-box kit for us, which comes with all the hardware we need to run a small pop-up event at a place like PAX. We don't have any photos handy to share, but picture a giant impervious hard-shell case that contains multiple computers and two monitors.

If it goes well at PAX, who knows where else we could bring this!

Building our bench of panels

It's easy for us to do a panel about what VGHF is, but we want to do able to do more than that. So we're doing two things for PAX:

1. Frank's panel about the NES launch is super timely for this year, and it's something we can bring to multiple events. We already did a version of this panel at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo those month, and now we get to do it again for a totally different West Coast audience! It's a high-quality panel, so there's no reason we shouldn't be able to bring that multiple places.

2. Panels like these always benefit from a little more energy than one person lecturing for an hour, so when Frank does this panel, he also brings on a guest co-panelist to react and add color commentary. This time around, we brought our friend and certified non-NES-launch-history-expert Jenna Stoeber!

The future of VGHF outreach? Maybe

We're mindful of how much tougher communication has gotten for organizations like ours ever since social media started imploding (in general). We've been pivoting to other methods of outreach like our mailing list and our YouTube channel.

In-person events like PAX are another outreach method. They offer us a direct line with the community, which is something we value, and it makes us feel more real to people than it would if we're just an account that posts magazine scans once in a while.

If this goes well, we might try to do it in more places in the future! We heard a lot of your "please come to [event]" requests, and if event organizers can give us some space and cover some of the expenses of traveling, we may have a solution now!

Anyway, see you at PAX this weekend, or on the Twitch stream!