Video Game History Foundation

The Video Game History Foundation is a non-profit foundation founded by Frank Cifaldi. The primary aim of the foundation is the archival, preservation, and dissemination of historical media related to video games.

"VGHF" redirects here. For the Vocal Group Hall of Fame, see Vocal Group Hall of Fame.
Video Game History Foundation
Logo introduced in 2020
AbbreviationVGHF
FormationFebruary 27, 2017 (February 27, 2017)[1]
FoundersFrank Cifaldi
TypeOperating community foundation
(IRS exemption status): 501(c)(3)
PurposeVideo game archival and preservation
HeadquartersOakland, California, United States
Area served
Worldwide
MethodDonations
Key people
Frank Cifaldi
(Co-Director)
Kelsey Lewin
(Co-Director)
Chris Melissinos
(Founding Board Member)
Simon Carless
(Founding Board Member)
Steve Lin
(Founding Board Member)
Mike Mika
(Founding Board Member)
Websitegamehistory.org

History

In a talk given at the 2016 Game Developers Conference, Frank Cifaldi expressed concern over the state of video game preservation. Noting that a significant amount of feature films produced before 1950 are now irrecoverably lost, Cifaldi found himself wondering if the early history of video games would ultimately suffer the same fate.[2] In highlighting the disparity between modern film preservation and game preservation, Cifaldi lamented that the games industry was doing "a pretty terrible job of maintaining [its] legacy".[3] Cifaldi would later claim that The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of film, was a major inspiration for the VGHF.[4]

Prior to the founding of the VGHF, several members of its founding board had collaborated with and donated to the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Videogame Museum, and the Strong National Museum of Play.[5]

The foundation launched in February 2017, an event which was marked by a collaborative livestream between the VGHF and video game news outlet IGN.[6]

Activities

Per the Video Game History Foundation's mission statement, the foundation's primary goal is to catalog, digitize, and preserve the history of video games. The media preserved by the foundation covers a broad spectrum; in addition to video games, the foundation also archives source code, design documents, press kits, posters, video tapes, newspapers, and photographs. Particular attention is given to preserving the promotional ephemera produced during a game's release window, which may not necessarily be preserved as thoroughly as the games themselves. Cifaldi has characterized this ephemera as being immensely valuable to historians, commenting; "I think that the greatest discoveries we're going to find are on materials that people don't know are important."[7]

The foundation seeks to aid and facilitate video game museums and archives by donating collected material after its preservation. Artifacts in the foundation's possession are often transitory, and are donated to a permanent home after their digitization and archival.[5]

A "digital library" of the VGHF's collected assets is currently under development, a task which Cifaldi estimated would take several years given the size and scope of the project. As an intermediary solution, the foundation periodically selects assets from their "backend library" to upload and publish online.[8][5]

The Foundation launched its Video Game Source Project in October 2020, an effort to collect the original source code and other assets for classic video games which it will house in its archives and make available for researchers.[9] The first two games added to this include The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.[10] They also included Power Up Baseball, an arcade game that had been in development by Midway in the 1990s in the style of NBA Jam but cancelled due to poor testing results.[11]

References
  1. "New Foundation is Looking to Level Up Video Game Culture". smithsonianmag.com. March 1, 2017. Retrieved January 25, 2018.
  2. Hall, Charlie (March 16, 2016). "Emulation isn't a dirty word, and one man thinks it can save gaming's history". polygon.com. Retrieved January 23, 2018.
  3. Parkin, Simon (March 17, 2016). "Emulation and the challenge of selling old games". gamasutra.com. Retrieved January 23, 2018.
  4. "IGN Save Point Live Stream". IGN. February 27, 2017. Retrieved January 25, 2018 – via Youtube. The Film Foundation, which is actually a big inspiration for the Video Game History Foundation[...]
  5. "What We're Doing". gamehistory.org. Retrieved January 25, 2018.
  6. "IGN ENTERTAINMENT AND VIDEO GAME HISTORY FOUNDATION TEAM UP TO PRESENT IGN SAVE POINT LIVE STREAM". ign.com. February 21, 2017. Retrieved January 25, 2018.
  7. Bowman, Mitch (February 27, 2017). "Inside The Video Game History Foundation". polygon.com. Retrieved January 25, 2018.
  8. "IGN Save Point Live Stream". IGN. February 27, 2017. Retrieved January 25, 2018 – via Youtube. We have this notion of building a digital library of these assets, which is a big ongoing thing. [...] We have this ongoing, massive, probably years long project to have this digital library, but in the meantime, what we're doing is mirroring some of the special collections from our backend digital library and publishing them online.
  9. "The RetroBeat: The Video Game History Foundation is on the hunt for source code". VentureBeat. 2020-10-30. Retrieved 2021-01-07.
  10. Bailey, Dustin (October 15, 2020). "New project aims to save source code for classic games, starting with Monkey Island". PCGamesN. Retrieved October 16, 2020.
  11. Mackovich, Sam (January 29, 2021). "NBA Jam for baseball almost happened: Here's Midway's lost 1996 arcade game". Ars Technica. Retrieved January 29, 2021.
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