Video games have always been built around the promise of the next thing. New hardware replaces old hardware, studios close or reorganize, hard drives are wiped, offices are emptied, websites disappear, and boxes of development material are thrown away because nobody can imagine why anyone would want them twenty years later.
For historians, that constant movement creates a problem. A finished game may survive in the hands of collectors, through rereleases, or as data copied from its original media, but the game itself is only one part of its history. The sketches that shaped its characters, the source code that made it run, the advertisements that sold it, the magazines that reviewed it, the screenshots given to journalists, the internal correspondence that documented its development, and even the rejected ideas that never appeared on a store shelf can disappear much more easily.
The Video Game History Foundation grew from the belief that those materials deserved to be treated as historical records.
Today the organization describes itself as a nonprofit dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games. Its collections stretch far beyond finished software into magazines, artwork, press materials, development records, source code, recordings, trade publications, photographs, promotional material, and other evidence of how games were created and experienced.
What began as a small preservation effort eventually developed into one of the most visible video game history organizations in the United States, complete with a physical research collection, a public digital archive, original historical research, a podcast, preservation projects, and an expanding online library.
Before the Video Game History Foundation
The history of the Video Game History Foundation begins before its public launch.
Frank Cifaldi had already spent years working with classic games, historical material, and preservation when he appeared at the 2016 Game Developers Conference for a presentation titled “It’s Just Emulation! The Challenge of Selling Old Games.” Speaking while associated with Digital Eclipse, Cifaldi argued that the difficulty of keeping older games available was more than a commercial problem. The industry, he warned, had done a poor job maintaining its own legacy. If older games and their histories disappeared, the medium risked losing part of the foundation on which later games had been built.
That concern helped define the organization that followed.
There is a small but important distinction in the Foundation’s early chronology. The organization’s 2024 federal tax filing lists 2016 as its year of formation, while the Video Game History Foundation made its public debut in February 2017. In other words, 2016 represents the institutional beginning, while February 27, 2017 marks the moment the project was formally introduced to the larger gaming public.
That distinction matters because VGHF did not suddenly appear without a philosophy behind it. The questions it would spend the next decade confronting were already present. What happens when an entertainment industry moves so quickly that yesterday’s materials become disposable? Who saves the records when the company that created them disappears? What should historians collect when the game itself tells only part of the story?
The Public Launch in 2017
On February 21, 2017, IGN announced that it would partner with the Video Game History Foundation for a five-hour program called the IGN Save Point Live Stream. The event was scheduled for February 27 at IGN’s San Francisco headquarters and was explicitly described as the public debut of the new nonprofit.
The February 27 launch introduced an organization built around a broader idea of preservation than simply keeping old games playable. Contemporary coverage recognized that difference almost immediately.
Smithsonian Magazine described the Foundation as an effort to save not only code, but also the culture surrounding games, including magazines, marketing material, sketches, early versions, and other evidence that could disappear even when the final game survived.
One of the projects released on launch day demonstrated exactly what Cifaldi meant. The NES Launch Collection examined Nintendo’s introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States, gathering historical evidence that could help reconstruct how the system entered the American market. Rather than treating the NES merely as a console with a list of games, the project approached its launch as a historical event that could be studied through contemporary documentation.
That approach became one of the defining characteristics of the Foundation.
A cartridge could preserve the software, but a cartridge could not explain how journalists first understood the game, what a publisher wanted consumers to think about it, how developers described it before release, which ideas were abandoned during development, or how the game’s reputation changed over time.
For those questions, historians needed records.
Preserving the Material Nobody Thought Would Matter
Some of the most historically valuable material in the game industry was never intended to survive.
Press releases were written for immediate publication. Promotional discs were mailed to magazines and forgotten. Photographs existed to accompany a review. Trade-show brochures were handed out and discarded. Development documents became obsolete when a project shipped. Offices accumulated boxes of material until somebody decided the space was needed for something else.
The Video Game History Foundation began treating that material as evidence.
An early example was its Video Game Media Assets Collection, created around digital materials that publishers and publications had used during the normal process of covering games. These collections could contain screenshots, photography, promotional material, and other files originally created for short-term media use.
The distinction was important. Traditional collecting culture often placed its greatest attention on the finished product, especially rare games, sealed games, prototypes, and hardware. VGHF increasingly concentrated on the surrounding historical record.
A common advertisement might be less valuable to a collector than an unopened game, but to a historian it could reveal how a company positioned that game to consumers. An old magazine might preserve release dates, interviews, rumors, reviews, screenshots, and reactions that are difficult to reconstruct decades later. A development disc might contain an abandoned design, unused art, or a version of a game that no longer exists anywhere else.
Preservation, in that sense, became less about rarity for rarity’s sake and more about context.
Building a Library
By 2019, the Foundation was beginning to look less like a preservation project operating from scattered collections and more like a historical institution.
That year VGHF established its first office and library space. The organization installed professional shelving for a growing reference collection and began receiving researchers, although the space remained small. At the same time, donations were adding development documents, artwork, source code, magazines, internal publications, and other records to the collection.
One of the most important projects of that period took the Foundation into the offices of Game Informer.
VGHF described the project as a five-week archival expedition. Teams worked inside the magazine’s historical collection, digitizing and cataloging press materials dating back to the early 1990s. The surviving records included press releases, brochures, press kits, screenshots, artwork, and other materials that publishers had originally sent to the magazine so its staff could cover upcoming games.
For a game historian, a collection like that can be extraordinary.
A long-running publication does not merely accumulate magazines. It accumulates the raw material used to make those magazines. That can include information supplied directly by developers and publishers, early screenshots, media that was never publicly released, correspondence, promotional documents, and evidence concerning canceled or unreleased games.
The work at Game Informer illustrated what the Video Game History Foundation increasingly did best. It went looking for the historical record before ordinary business decisions, technological decay, or simple neglect could erase it.
Saving the Source
In October 2020, the Foundation announced another major expansion of its preservation work: the Video Game Source Project.
Cifaldi introduced the project around a simple problem. Researchers rarely had the opportunity to study the actual source material behind video games. Finished software could demonstrate what players received, but it could not necessarily reveal how developers built it.
The Source Project sought material such as source code, original artwork, design documentation, correspondence, and other development records.
That moved the Foundation deeper into territory familiar to historians in other fields. A historian studying a novel might want the author’s drafts and letters. A film historian might study scripts, production photographs, deleted footage, and studio records. A historian studying architecture might examine blueprints and correspondence.
Video games also had drafts, working documents, production records, and abandoned ideas. They were simply more likely to be stored on aging disks, obsolete computer systems, magnetic media, or drives whose contents could vanish with a hardware failure.
The distinction between preserving the final game and preserving how the game was made became increasingly central to the Foundation’s work.
From Collection to Institution
The amount of material created another problem. Saving something is only the beginning of archival work.
A room full of unidentified boxes is not a useful research library. Neither is a hard drive containing thousands of files with no catalog, description, provenance, or structure.
By January 2022, VGHF said it possessed tens of thousands of physical and digital items. That month the Foundation hired Phil Salvador as its Library Director. His responsibilities included managing the collection, developing systems for it, cataloging material, and helping turn years of acquisition into something researchers could actually navigate.
The appointment represented a major step in the Foundation’s development.
VGHF had begun as an organization racing to rescue endangered evidence. It was now confronting the next stage of historical preservation: organization, description, access, and research.
That transition required library science as much as game expertise.
The institution could recover a rare developer archive, but somebody still needed to determine what was in it. A magazine could be scanned, but a useful digital archive required searchable text and metadata. Thousands of press assets could be copied, but researchers needed a system capable of discovering them years later.
Saving the past and making the past usable were two different jobs.
The 87 Percent Problem
In 2023, the Foundation produced evidence showing just how severe the accessibility problem surrounding older games had become.
Phil Salvador’s Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States, published with the Software Preservation Network, examined a sample of 1,500 historical games. The study found that only 13 percent were still commercially available in the United States. For games released before 1985, the reissue rate fell below 3 percent.
Put another way, according to the study’s methodology, roughly 87 percent of the classic games examined were no longer in commercial release.
The finding challenged an argument that frequently surrounds digital preservation: that the commercial marketplace itself can provide sufficient access to older works.
Markets preserve products when somebody can profitably sell them. Archives preserve evidence because the evidence matters.
Those are not always the same thing.
A commercially unsuccessful title, a regional release, an obscure educational game, or a product tied up in complicated ownership may be enormously important to a researcher even if no company sees a financial reason to rerelease it.
VGHF’s study transformed a broad concern about disappearing games into something measurable. It also gave the organization a stronger role in debates over copyright, preservation, historical access, and the responsibility of cultural institutions.
The Long Road to a Digital Library
A searchable digital library had been part of the Foundation’s ambitions since its earliest years, but building one proved to be a much larger undertaking than putting scans on a website.
In December 2023, Salvador publicly previewed the developing VGHF Digital Library. By the end of 2024, the Foundation reported that roughly 30,000 files had been ingested into the system. Those records included press kits, artwork, event material, development records, magazines, and other historical documents. Thousands of pages were being prepared for full-text searching.
On January 30, 2025, the VGHF Library finally opened in early access.
The significance of the launch was not simply the amount of material available. It was the way researchers could reach it.
VGHF made the public portions of the digital library free to access from anywhere in the world without requiring academic credentials. The Foundation’s position was unusually open: anyone studying game history could be a researcher.
For a field whose primary evidence had often been scattered among private collectors, old magazines, personal hard drives, developer closets, auction listings, and inaccessible corporate archives, that represented a meaningful shift.
A student writing about an obscure game no longer necessarily needed to know which collector owned an old press kit. A journalist could search historical magazines. A researcher might locate contemporary advertising, photographs, event material, or development records without physically traveling to a private archive.
The website that had once introduced individual preservation projects had become the gateway to a research institution.
More Than a Website
That evolution is important when considering the Video Game History Foundation as a publication.
Gamehistory.org has never functioned only as an organizational homepage.
Over the years, it has become a place where VGHF publishes original research, explains discoveries, presents archival collections, documents preservation projects, releases historical materials, and interprets the records it saves. The Foundation has also developed the Video Game History Hour podcast, creating an oral-history and interview component alongside its written work and digital collections.
The result sits somewhere between an archive, historical publication, research library, preservation organization, and public-history project.
A discovery may begin with a box of disks. It can then become a preservation project, an archival collection, a catalog record, an article explaining its importance, a podcast discussion, and finally a primary source available to researchers.
The publication and the archive reinforce one another.
That is especially important for video game history because preservation without interpretation can leave artifacts disconnected from the stories that make them meaningful.
The Things a Game Cannot Tell You
The Foundation’s work with Cyan, the developer of Myst, demonstrates what that broader historical record can reveal.
Working with Cyan and others, VGHF digitized more than 100 hours of historical footage connected to the Myst series. The resulting collection includes material associated with the production of Riven, developer interviews, filming footage, behind-the-scenes recordings, and records documenting Cyan’s development as a company.
A copy of Myst can preserve Myst.
It cannot preserve the room where the developers discussed it, the camera footage used to create its worlds, the discarded production material, the interviews with the people who made it, or the process by which a small developer became responsible for one of the most recognizable computer games of the 1990s.
Those records turn a game from an isolated object into part of a larger human story.
That idea has been present in the Video Game History Foundation since its beginning.
The Legal Limits of Preservation
Yet the Foundation’s digital library also demonstrates how complicated game preservation remains.
Users can search magazines and many historical documents through the library, but they generally cannot use it to remotely play preserved commercial games. VGHF explains that United States copyright restrictions currently prevent it from providing digital researcher access to out-of-print games in the way many researchers and preservation advocates would like.
The problem reached the federal copyright system in 2024 as preservation organizations sought broader possibilities for remote research access to preserved games. The effort did not eliminate the existing premises limitation, leaving researchers and institutions with restrictions that do not apply neatly to the realities of digital scholarship. The attached research trail includes both the Copyright Office proceedings and preservation organizations’ filings as key primary documentation of that dispute.
That creates one of the great contradictions of video game preservation.
A historian may be able to search an old magazine from across the country, read a development document, view promotional art, and study production material online, while legal and technological restrictions make the game at the center of that history much harder to examine through an archive.
Preservation therefore remains partly a legal problem, not merely a technical one.
From Preservation to Open Culture
By 2025, VGHF was also experimenting with something beyond preservation and access.
In August, the Foundation announced that it had acquired the rights to Computer Entertainer, an early American video game publication that ran from 1982 to 1990. VGHF digitized the full run and released it under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Researchers, writers, filmmakers, streamers, and others could not merely read the publication. They could reuse it under the terms of that license.
That represented a different level of access.
Archives usually preserve works whose copyrights belong to somebody else. They can provide access within legal limitations, but they cannot simply declare the material free for public reuse.
By obtaining the rights to Computer Entertainer and releasing the publication into the Creative Commons, VGHF moved from preserving cultural history to deliberately returning part of that history to public use.
For researchers, it also preserved something difficult to recreate later: contemporary reactions.
Modern players can look backward at Super Mario Bros., the NES, Sega, Atari, or early computer games knowing which products became classics and which companies survived. Writers in the 1980s did not have that advantage. Their magazines recorded uncertainty as it happened.
That is precisely why contemporary sources matter.
Nine Years of the Foundation
By February 2026, the Video Game History Foundation had existed publicly for nine years.
For the 150th episode of the Video Game History Hour, Frank Cifaldi was joined by founding board members Simon Carless and Steve Lin to look back at the organization’s creation. By then, the Foundation described its journey as one from a small organization with limited resources to a substantial digital library that had reached more than 100,000 unique users.
That growth can obscure how unusual the original idea was.
Video game collecting was already well established when VGHF appeared. Museums already displayed games. Fans preserved software. Enthusiasts documented consoles, releases, secrets, prototypes, and unused content.
The Foundation’s contribution was to insist that video game history required something broader.
The medium needed archives.
It needed librarians.
It needed source material.
It needed contemporary magazines and trade publications.
It needed the records sitting in developer storage rooms and publication offices.
It needed historians who could interpret those records.
It needed systems that could make historical evidence searchable instead of merely saved.
Most of all, it needed people willing to preserve material before anyone could be certain what future researchers would want from it.
Saving the History Behind the Screen
The importance of the Video Game History Foundation is easiest to understand when imagining what would happen without organizations like it.
A game can survive while its history disappears.
Players may still know the title. Collectors may still own the cartridge. A digital copy may still run through emulation. Yet the reasons it looked the way it did, the people who built it, the abandoned ideas, the marketing campaign, the contemporary reaction, and the documents that connected it to the larger industry can still vanish.
VGHF was built around preventing that second kind of loss.
From the public launch in 2017 to the Game Informer archival expedition, the Video Game Source Project, the game-availability study, the hiring of professional library staff, the opening of a digital research archive, and projects involving Cyan and Computer Entertainer, the organization has gradually widened the definition of what it means to preserve a video game.
Preservation is not only keeping the game alive.
It is keeping enough of the world around that game alive that somebody decades from now can still understand what it meant.
Sources & Further Reading
Video Game History Foundation. “Mission.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://gamehistory.org/our-mission/
Video Game History Foundation. “Team.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://gamehistory.org/who-we-are/
Video Game History Foundation. “Projects.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://gamehistory.org/what-were-doing/
Video Game History Foundation. Form 990, 2024. 2025. https://gamehistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/vghf_990_2024.pdf
IGN Entertainment. “IGN Entertainment and Video Game History Foundation Team up to Present IGN Save Point Live Stream.” February 21, 2017. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ign-entertainment-and-video-game-history-foundation-team-up-to-present-ign-save-point-live-stream-300410440.html
IGN. “IGN Save Point Live Stream.” February 27, 2017. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es_4dXrQkpA
Video Game History Foundation. “The Video Game History Foundation Pitch Video.” 2017. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH3stShouZQ
Cifaldi, Frank. “The NES Launch Collection.” Video Game History Foundation, February 27, 2017. https://gamehistory.org/nes-launch-collection-1985/
Cifaldi, Frank. “A Look Back at Our GDC 2017 Display.” Video Game History Foundation, March 7, 2017. https://gamehistory.org/a-look-back-at-our-gdc-2017-display/
Cifaldi, Frank. “Introducing the VGHF Writing Fund!” Video Game History Foundation, August 8, 2017. https://gamehistory.org/writing-fund/
Cifaldi, Frank. “‘It’s Just Emulation!’: The Challenge of Selling Old Games.” Presentation at the Game Developers Conference, 2016. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023470/-It-s-Just-Emulation
Bowman, Mitch. “Inside the Video Game History Foundation.” Polygon, February 27, 2017. https://www.polygon.com/2017/2/27/14752708/inside-the-video-game-history-foundation/
Daley, Jason. “New Foundation Is Looking to Level Up Video Game Culture.” Smithsonian Magazine, March 1, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-video-game-level-up-video-game-culture-180962322/
Fingas, Jon. “Non-Profit Aims to Preserve the Hidden History of Video Games.” Engadget, February 27, 2017. https://www.engadget.com/2017-02-27-video-game-history-foundation.html
Pereira, Chris. “The Video Game History Foundation Wants to Save Gaming’s Past.” GameSpot, February 27, 2017. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-video-game-history-foundation-wants-to-save-ga/1100-6448262/
Alexandra, Heather. “New Non-Profit Has Plans to Save Gaming’s Past.” Kotaku, February 27, 2017. https://kotaku.com/new-non-profit-has-plans-to-save-gamings-past-1792795768
McAloon, Alissa. “Historians Aim to Recover, Restore, and Archive Video Game Media Assets.” Game Developer, April 5, 2017. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/historians-aim-to-recover-restore-and-archive-video-game-media-assets
Video Game History Foundation. “2019 Year in Review!” 2019. https://gamehistory.org/2019-year-in-review/
Cork, Jeff. “Keeping History Alive.” Game Informer, December 5, 2019. https://gameinformer.com/2019/12/05/video-game-history-foundation-keeping-history-alive
Cifaldi, Frank. “Introducing the Video Game Source Project.” Video Game History Foundation, October 15, 2020. https://gamehistory.org/source/
Video Game History Foundation. “2020 Year in Review!” 2020. https://gamehistory.org/2020-year-in-review/
Lewin, Kelsey. “Introducing Our New Library Director, Phil Salvador.” Video Game History Foundation, January 20, 2022. https://gamehistory.org/library-director-phil-salvador/
Stephen, Bijan. “The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion.” The New Yorker, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-collectors-who-save-video-game-history-from-oblivion
Harkai, István. “Preservation of Video Games and Their Role as Cultural Heritage.” Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice 17, no. 10 (2022): 844–856. https://academic.oup.com/jiplp/article/17/10/844/6712222
Salvador, Phil. “Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States.” Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network, 2023. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/248
Salvador, Phil. “The Game Availability Study, Explained.” Video Game History Foundation, July 10, 2023. https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/
Lewin, Kelsey. “Digitizing Behind-the-Scenes Content From the Creators of Myst!” Video Game History Foundation, July 1, 2023. https://gamehistory.org/cyan/
Pierce, David. “The Fight to Save Old Video Games.” The Verge, November 13, 2023. https://www.theverge.com/23958715/video-game-emulation-preservation-vergecast
Salvador, Phil. “Introducing the VGHF Digital Library.” Video Game History Foundation, December 13, 2023. https://gamehistory.org/introducing-the-vghf-digital-library/
Parrish, Ash. “The VGHF Built an Archive of Gaming History and Is Making It Available Online.” The Verge, February 27, 2024. https://www.theverge.com/24064103/video-game-history-foundation-digital-library
U.S. Copyright Office. Section 1201 Rulemaking: Ninth Triennial Proceeding, Recommendation of the Register of Copyrights. October 2024. https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2024/2024_Section_1201_Registers_Recommendation.pdf
Software Preservation Network and Library Copyright Alliance. “Petition to Renew a Current Exemption Under 17 U.S.C. § 1201.” 2024. https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2024/petitions/renewal/Renewal%20Pet.%20-%20Preservation%20-%20Software%20Preservation%20Network%20and%20Library%20Copyright%20Alliance.pdf
Institute of Museum and Library Services. “Grant LG-256564-OLS-24.” 2024. https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-256564-ols-24
Video Game History Foundation. “Our 2024 in Review.” 2024. https://gamehistory.org/our-2024-in-review/
Stuart, Keith. “Scans for the Memories: Why Old Games Magazines Are a Vital Source of Cultural History and Nostalgia.” The Guardian, January 28, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/jan/28/video-game-history-foundation-digitised-archive-games-magazines
Salvador, Phil. “The VGHF Library Opens in Early Access.” Video Game History Foundation, January 30, 2025. https://gamehistory.org/vghf-library-launch/
Orland, Kyle. “VGHF Opens Free Online Access to 1,500 Classic Game Mags, 30K Historic Files.” Ars Technica, January 30, 2025. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/01/vghf-opens-free-online-access-to-1500-classic-game-mags-30k-historic-files/
Carter, Justin. “Video Game History Foundation Launches Digital Library for ‘Anyone Who Wants to Study Games.’” Game Developer, January 30, 2025. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/video-game-history-foundation-digital-dev-library
Video Game History Foundation. “Episode 124: Digital Library Launch.” Video Game History Hour, February 5, 2025. https://gamehistory.org/episode-124-digital-library-launch/
Salvador, Phil. “Library Highlight: The Unseen History of Myst.” Video Game History Foundation, May 27, 2025. https://gamehistory.org/library-highlight-the-unseen-history-of-myst/
Salvador, Phil. “VGHF Acquires Early Game Magazine Computer Entertainer.” Video Game History Foundation, August 6, 2025. https://gamehistory.org/computerentertainer/
Video Game History Foundation. “Our Impact in 2025.” December 2, 2025. https://gamehistory.org/our-impact-in-2025/
Video Game History Foundation. “Episode 150: VGHF Founding Retrospective.” Video Game History Hour, February 25, 2026. https://gamehistory.org/episode-150-vghf-founding-retrospective/
Salvador, Phil. “Rolling Out the Next Version of Our Digital Archive.” Video Game History Foundation, April 27, 2026. https://gamehistory.org/archive-portal-update-2026/
Cifaldi, Frank. “Preserving Game History: It’s Just Us.” Presentation at the Game Developers Conference, 2025. https://gdcvault.com/play/1034967/Preserving-Game-History-It-s
Salvador, Phil. “VGHF Digital Archive Passes 5000 Magazines. Here’s What’s Next.” Video Game History Foundation, September 24, 2026. https://gamehistory.org/5k-magazines/
Video Game History Foundation. “Digital Archive.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://archive.gamehistory.org/
Video Game History Foundation. “Library Catalog.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/