gamehistoryorg

Preserving Unreleased NES Games is Hard.

And by hard I guess I mean expensive.

Last week, something remarkable happened: an unreleased NES (well, technically Famicom) game from the golden age of Konami, which was thought to be completely lost, showed up on a Japanese auction site!

This is "Battle Choice," a title from which we had never even seen screenshots! In fact, we only knew about the game's existence because Konami sold i...

Come see us - and some kitties - at PRGE!

Hi everyone! As is tradition, the Video Game History Foundation will be presenting the annual main museum exhibit at Portland Retro Gaming Expo this weekend, in partnership with the Interactive Art Collection.

The theme this year is the Atari Jaguar, a console with a very brief commercial life that was, miraculously, kept alive by its fans.

We'll have six kiosks with highlights from the syste...

An exciting new preservation project with the creators of Myst!

Just announced at Mysterium this weekend -- thank you for supporting The Video Game History Foundation and making this possible!

The Video Game History Foundation is working with Cyan, creators of the Myst series, to digitize over 100 hours of never-before-seen footage spanning hundreds of tapes!

We’ve made great headway into the project already, and are excited to make the collection viewable later this year! Here’s what you can expect:

• ...
  2023-07-03 20:50:39 +0000 UTC View Post

Fun Stories with editors of Electronic Gaming Monthly!

Last month we traveled to Milwaukee for Midwest Gaming Classic, their big retro game expo. We took part in a couple of talks, but we're especially excited to share this reunion of early Electronic Gaming Monthly editors, moderated by our own Frank Cifaldi. There's some interesting stories in here, as well as a deep dive into Street Fighter mysteries, even beyond Sheng Long (although don't worry, they get into that, too!)

Enjoy!

It's our 6th birthday!

Wow, it's our birthday already! The Video Game History Foundation has spent the last 6 years preserving and sharing video game history, and we owe it all to your support.

We recently updated our Patreon to give you the option to add your mailing address. We'd like to send some stickers to any Patrons old or new as a way of saying thank you -- so if you'd like some, please add your mailing address by March 12 and I'll make sure you get some! We're also going to send a random Patron an is...

Portland Retro 2022 Trip Report

Hi! Frank here. Kelsey and I are still recovering from a very busy weekend at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, but we wanted to share a little bit about how it went.

For those who don't know, PRGE is an annual retro game enthusiast show. It's actually a pretty major part of our year, as it gives us a chance to reengage with the high end video game collector community. We haven't been to one since 2019 because, well, there hadn't been one since 2019, so we were excited to go back.

<...

Sneak preview: The Woman Who Brought Female Representation to Games

Hi everyone! We wanted to share this video ahead of the video/article launch -- it's the incredible follow-up to this Polygon article about the struggle to find an unsung pioneer from video game history. 

This story was put together by historians Kate Willaert and Kevin Bunch, with help from The Video Game History F...

Check out the Preserved Play charity stream for The Video Game History Foundation this weekend!

Don't worry -- we're not asking you amazing VGHF supporters for more money. We just thought we'd share that we'll be a part of this two day charity event again this year, because it's going to be a ton of fun!

In case you missed it last year, Preserved Play is a charity stream put together by The Completionist and his incredible staff to raise money for The Video Game History Foundation. The success of this event...

Introducing our new Library Director!

Hi everyone, this will be announced publicly very soon, but we wanted to give you the early scoop, along with a little behind-the-scenes. We’re thrilled to announce that we have a brand new hire -- Phil Salvador has joined The Video Game History Foundation as Library Director!

Phil is an incredible historian and we've known him ...

Preview of VGHF's new space!

Hi everyone, Kelsey here! We're really excited to share our new space with you. We've been teasing this move since last year, but we were finally able to move in at the beginning of the month. This new space is a HUGE deal for us -- we're able to fit more of the archive in one spot, have plenty of space for researchers to work, and eventually have most of our digitization equipment set up permanently! Here's some behind-the-scenes photos of the process:

First thing's first! Getting pai...

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 2021-06-09 18:02:00 +0000 UTC View Post

Watch us unbox 600 mystery magazines this Friday!

Hey all! We just bought a lot of 600 vintage video game magazines from an estate sale in Florida. We actually don't know what's in these, so it should be exciting. 

We're going to do a simple live stream this Friday at 2pm Pacific as we unbox these live and check them out together. Hope to see you there!

We're live! Come celebrate with The Video Game History Foundation!

We're celebrating our 4th birthday...with all of you! We can't thank you enough for all you've done to make this possible. We've grown a lot in four years, and we're still just getting started.

Come hear what we've been up to, where we're heading, and ask us some questions! Livestreaming for Patrons only: https://youtu.be/J9j87vjR7Rg

Reminder: Our 4th Birthday Stream is this Saturday for Patrons only! (Link to the livestream below!)

Hey everyone! Here's a link in advance to our patrons-only 4th Birthday livestream, this Saturday 2/27 at noon PST. We'll send out a reminder email a little bit beforehand on Saturday morning. Hope to see you there!

https://youtu.be/J9j87vjR7Rg 

The Video Game History Foundation turns four! Celebrate with us this Saturday!

Hi everyone! Our fourth birthday is coming up this weekend on February 27th, and we want to celebrate with all of you!

Join us on February 27th at noon PST for a patrons-only livestream event. We're going to talk about what's changed for us over the past four years and what the future looks like for VGHF. We'll probably also show off some cool stuff from the archives, plus answer any questions you've got for us live! (Feel free to leave questions belo...

We found the first-ever video game awards!

Hi Patrons! We just posted a new analysis on our blog, digging out the first video game awards ever presented, all the way back in early 1980! This was presented in a magazine that we dug out of our archives (meaning, recently purchased on eBay after several years of patiently waiting for one to pop up).

Will your favorite games of the 1970s be recognized? What bizarre categories existed way back then? All this and more here:

2020-12-08 20:05:00 +0000 UTC View Post

The Secrets of Monkey Island's Source Code

Hi Patrons! Thank you for your patience as we wrapped up one of our most ambitious projects to date, an incredibly deep dive into the making of the first two Monkey Island games from Lucasfilm Games. I guarantee that even if you're the biggest fan of these games, there's a ton here you've never seen before.

http://gamehistory.org/monkeyisland

Hangouts fell behind because of this project, but we'll get some...

Introducing the Video Game Source Project

Video game source code and other source materials are inarguably the best resources for those studying how a game was made. And yet the availability of these materials is scarce at best, with few examples available online and even fewer in institutional archives. Worse, historical source code from the earliest days of the medium is being lost by the day.

We'd like to change that. Today, we're announcing what we're calling our Video Game Source Project, the VGHF's most ambitious initiati...

A brand new look for the VGHF!

Hey everyone, Frank here. Today we're proud to unveil the brand new face of The Video Game History Foundation!

Our new logo and brand refresh comes courtesy of our friend, Cory Schmitz. Cory is an incredible designer who has done some of our favorite video game company and game logos. We've been talking to Cory about helping with our branding since way back in 2016, before we even launched! So to see this finally realized ...

Who wants some MERCH?

A lot of people have been asking if they could buy the cool t-shirts they've seen me and Kelsey wearing around at shows, which makes sense! They're great! But we didn't have the resources to fulfill orders from the office, which meant it had to be print-on-demand from a vendor, and we just never found a vendor whose quality we liked...until now! Check it out here:

 https://the-video-game-hi...

Isolation got you lonely? Hang out with us tomorrow!

Hey all! I thought a good way to combat loneliness during this extreme weirdness we're all going through might be to do a little bit of streaming, even if it's just mundane work.

If that sounds good to you, I (Frank) will be streaming from VGHF HQ tomorrow (Tuesday, March 17) from 12:00pm to approximately 3:00pm Pacific time. I say approximately because I'm happy to go longer if the energy is there, but I haven't streamed in a long damn time so we'll see.

Our never-before-used Twi...

Thank you for helping us save video game history in 2019!

Wow, what a year!

2019 was by far the biggest one yet for The Video Game History Foundation. We spoke at conferences around the world, got interviewed multiple times over, built a library AND a museum display, went on a five-week archiving expedition to the most important collection in the world …heck, we were even in three documentary movies that debuted this year!

2019-12-20 14:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post

Kelsey Lewin Named VGHF’s Co-Director

I'm very pleased to announce to the world that my friend and frequent collaborator Kelsey Lewin has agreed to formally join the Foundation as its brand new co-director!

In addition to being an incredible historian, Kelsey has been our most prominent volunteer pretty much since day one, in mostly invisible ways. Among other things, she's acted as our unofficial (and later, official!) head of ...

We made a library! With our hands!

Hi all! We haven't done a Backer Blog post in quite a while, so I thought I'd share what's been taking up most of our time this year: building an actual, physical library!

We haven't formally announced this yet, but we plan to open what I believe to be the country's very first dedicated video game history research library this year. This is the kind of thing that is only possible because of your help! I'm not going to lie and say we're funded enough to actually STAFF a library, but than...

A virtual tour of our pop-up museum!

In case you missed it: VGHF mega-volunteer Kelsey Lewin put together this extensive virtual tour of our "Staying With Power" exhibit from last October's Portland Retro Gaming Expo.

This was a really major endeavor for us. I could spend a long time going through the design philosophies, the setup, etc., but Kelsey already did that for me in the video!

But I do want to briefly explain the heart of this exhibit. We wanted to rewrite the traditional narrative of the Nintendo Entertain...

Nintendo's lost SimCity for the NES has been preserved!

Before it was a Super Nintendo classic, Nintendo's unique spin on SimCity started life on the original 8-bit NES. That version was shown once in 1991 before quietly disappearing, and was generally considered lost...until now.

http://gamehistory.org/simcity 

The Sega-Gremlin Marketing Archive - 80s arcade marketing cheesiness at its best

Now on GameHistory.org, it's the Sega-Gremlin Marketing Archive! 

https://gamehistory.org/sega-gremlin-archive/

This is a priceless collection of early-80s marketing videos from Sega Gremlin, most of them entirely new to the internet. This collection offers a rare glimpse at how arcade game makers sold their games to actual arcade distributors. Still images like flyers are easy to come by, but actu...

Debuting at PRGE: "Staying With Power"

Hi everyone! I wanted to give you a little sneak peek at what we're up to at Portland Retro Gaming Expo next week. As you may know, starting last year became the official sponsor of PRGE's annual museum. Last year's main gallery was themed around the 40th anniversary of the Atari 2600. We also had some little miscellaneous exhibits, including some Wonderswan oddities, a few vintage store demo kiosks, and some oddball prototype collections. It was our first time doing a museum gallery, and while ...

The Media vs. Death Race

Over 15 years before Mortal Kombat, Exidy's Death Race caused video gaming's first moral panic. Check out Chris Chapman's in-depth history video, available now on the website:

https://gamehistory.org/media-vs-death-race/

A Video Game By Any Other Name

Before they knew to call them "video games," headline writers of the 1970s came up with all kinds of colorful phrases. Our latest is up now on the blog:

https://gamehistory.org/a-video-game-by-any-other-name/