Video Game History Foundation: June 2021 update

[The Video Game History Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games. We’ll be posting a regular update to our blog and Patreon page going forward with new/interesting acquisitions and content!]

Hi everyone, Simon Carless here! I sit on the VGHF executive board and run our Twitter account, among other things.  Welcome to the first of some regular updates rounding up the work that the Video Game History Foundation - Frank Cifaldi, Kelsey Lewin and friends - have been up to during the last couple of months.

For this first update, we’ll be concentrating on the VGHF’s biggest asset - its physical library of video game magazines, art books, and other history.

The State Of The VGHF Research Library

We’ve started posting pictures of notable & new acquisitions to the physical Video Game History Foundation Research Library (which is located at our office in Emeryville, CA) over on the VGHF Twitter. This core project is a major focus for us right now.

Here’s some great examples from the last month, starting with a Nintendo ad from the rare 1990 CES Daily show magazine we recently added to our archives:

We’ve had these for a while, but we also showcased our rare selection of 1980s Lucasfilm ‘Monthly Marquee’ internal newsletters, including a number of video game division updates, as donated to VGHF by Lucasfilm veteran and Sinistar co-creator Noah Falstein:

We’ve also recently acquired the first issue of ‘Arcade: The Video Game Magazine’, a practically unknown magazine that debuted in Summer 1982. It has a lot of previously undiscussed first-person reporting on the Pac-Man craze, arcade game cloning/bootlegging, and its legal aftermath:

And finally, before Classic Gaming Expo, there was 1998's World Of Atari event. VGHF has just acquired an original program from the Las Vegas CGE precursor for its Research Library.

Video game nostalgia has become its own sect of video game history, and it's important to preserve it:

You can keep looking at VGHF’s Twitter for daily updates with pictures from the collection, and we often discuss new acquisitions in the Video Game History Foundation Discord, which is available to all $10/month Patreon pledgers.

VGHF is continually processing new physical magazine, flyer and program donations and purchases. We send duplicate magazines that haven’t been digitized yet for scanning by third parties - they’ll often pop up on the Internet Archive at a later date.

Here’s just some of the duplicate magazines that we are in the process of sending out to third parties:

After we’ve picked the best copy of any given magazine, we put the others into our ‘blind box’ vintage game magazine purchase/subscription service. This has been extremely popular since its launch, and we’re sending hundreds of de-accessioned vintage video game magazines out every month via this method.

With the combination of the physical library, third-party scanning efforts and ‘blind box’ purchases - which help to fund additional acquisitions - we think we’ve got a virtuous circle going here.

One important long-term goal is having our physical library cataloged by issue, as opposed to just ‘organized’. (This is complicated by the fact that all issues of the same magazine share the same ISBN number. So there will need to be a lot of manual data entry.) We’re in the early stages of acquiring metadata to give us a head start on this.

Other notable VGHF updates

As always, there’s a lot going on at Video Game History Foundation. So we’ll try to pick one or two things to focus on in each quarterly update. But here’s a few highlights from other active items:

• Of course you probably saw it, but VGHF published the forensic analysis of Earthbound’s localization files last week, in association with Legend Of Localization’s Clyde Mandelin, and it’s had a massive amount of positive commentary, including this neat Ars Technica article on the article/project. Your support makes longform pieces like this possible, so thank you!
• The Video Game Source Project, announced last October, has had a number of notable private donations since its announcement. VGHF is setting up an advisory board with industry luminaries to help us work out the best way to collect, display and interpret this material.
• We’d be remiss to not mention the Video Game History Hour, the weekly podcast from the VGHF crew which has interviewed over 30 journalists, developers, curators and creators about game history. (You can find links to listen at the bottom of the announcement post from last November!) Recent guests have included MAME’s David ‘Haze’ Haywood, game historian Raven Simone, and Rare veterans Kev Bayliss and David Wise, among many others.
• There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes VGHF work that you often don’t see on preserving donations of prototypes or early versions of games. For example, Frank recently Tweeted about a set of incomplete loose EPROMs from ‘90s console games we were donated. And while his Tweets had a sad ending, there’s been some positive updates since then that we hope to share at a later date!
• On the fundraising side, VGHF’s partnership with Limited Run Games to add an optional VGHF donation on checkout has continued to be a major win for us. And March’s collaboration with The Completionist on a two-day ‘Preserved Play’ video stream to raise money was incredibly successful.
• VGHF worked with RetroUSB to recover Ed Logg's abandoned port of Millipede for the Famicom/NES, from its original source code! This was Logg's first work for the system, and though it was canceled, it provided the knowledge needed for Tengen's Tetris. The game was canceled mid-development, so some features are missing, including the DDT bombs and, obviously, any audio. Documentation survives showing that the game was cancelled because the rights weren't completely cleared for Centipede. More info via this Twitter thread.

So that’s the current status of the Video Game History Foundation. We have big plans for the future, including expanded physical offices, further releases of some digital assets, and - of course - continued progress on all the items you see above.

Please continue to support us via our Patreon, the magazine ‘blind box’ purchases, by donating when you buy at Limited Run, and any new ways we may introduce! And in return, you can check out our latest announcements on our Twitter, the VGHF blog, and the podcast.

We’ll be back in a couple of months for the next update, but in the meantime, thanks for the support - it means a lot!