It’s easy enough to flip to a livestream, or turn to a Reddit or Discord page today, for help with a hard-to-beat level in a videogame, or for news on when the next sequel will be released.

PREMIUM

Today, that world has largely disappeared.

A new project is trying to preserve what remains. Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), a non-profit organisation based in California, recently launched a digital library of vintage gaming magazines (as well as event guides, promotional materials and other ephemera).

The archive holds over 30,000 virtual objects, including over 1,500 issues of gaming magazines, all indexed, text-searchable and free to access.

Also preserved here are podcasts and blog posts about obscure gaming lore; hours of footage from the making of revolutionary releases such as the adventure caper Myst. A total of 81 magazines are represented too, going back to 1981.

Put together, gamehistory.org offers intriguing insight into how this industry has evolved, and how a then-niche subculture viewed itself, before the internet zoomed into homes and changed it all

The archive is funded through Patreon and private donations. Access is free because “we really want to democratise the study of videogame history,” says Frank Cifaldi, 43, founder and director of VGHF.

Why this niche, in the story of who we’ve been?

Cifaldi’s interest in this field dates to the late-1990s, when, as a videogame-loving teenager, he stumbled upon online communities working to preserve old and rare titles. He was particularly intrigued by emulation software, which allows users to play console games on a computer.

“People were tracking down really obscure titles to make sure they were online and that others could play them,” he says. “We didn’t use the word preservation then, but that’s what it was.”

This fascination led him down a rabbit hole of unreleased titles, prototype cartridges, obscure Japanese titles. By 2003, he was running a website called Lost Levels, about unreleased games, and writing for publications such as Gamasutra and GameTap. A decade later, he pivoted to videogame development, but his heart, he says, was always in preservation.

In 2017, he decided to pursue this fulltime, and set up VGHF.

Finding the material has been hard work, and has involved travelling across the US, scouring archives, public libraries and private collections. But the really difficult part was making the material he gathered text-searchable. This required investments in advanced optical character recognition tools that can parse the anarchic fonts and layouts favoured by such magazines.

There is years of work ahead, for Cifaldi, library director Phil Salvador and their shifting team of volunteers. Only about 10% of the organisation’s collection is currently online. “There are more magazines to scan, more metadata to tag, more collections to process,” Cifaldi says. But they can see it taking shape. “I think the foundation’s strength is that we combine the careful vetting and curation of a very traditional physical library,” Cifaldi says, “and the easy access of something far more informal, like Internet Archive.”

IN MINT CONDITION

What secrets of this world can one currently browse through, on gamehistory.org?

Users can expect to find reviews of obscure early-1990s releases such as Pretzel Pete, in which a pretzel delivery man must fight “pretzel-people” enslaved by a villainous baker, to make it to a stadium on time.

Also tucked away here is the first documented use of the word “immersive” in the gaming context (in an article on the promise of virtual-reality gaming, written by Craig Engler for a 1992 issue of Computer Gaming World).

Visitors can access archival game development files and concept art by game producers and artists from the 1980s and ’90s such as Mark Flitman and Tom Payne.

The community has begun to reach out to contribute as well. Earlier this year, game designer and professional pinball player Roger Sharpe invited Cifaldi to look through his personal collection, and the archivist was thrilled to find a sealed bag from the 1985 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, inside which was a press kit for Nintendo’s Advanced Video System, the prototype that became NES (the Nintendo Entertainment System), and was only exhibited to the public at this one event.

In the next phase, Cifaldi and Salvador are also keen to improve the tools they have developed, to enable easier and more efficient tagging and indexing. But more than anything, they want to speed up the uploads, so they can tell more of this story, uncover more early lore and more hidden connections.

“We can’t just put all this material online and say, okay, figure it out everyone,” as Cifaldi puts it. “We have to continue showing people how it’s done, to inspire the next generation of videogame historians.”