At this year’s Portland Retro Gaming Expo, VGHF director Frank Cifaldi had the pleasure of hosting a panel celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System launch. Frank moderated 3 guests who were at Nintendo of America during this time: Gail Tilden, Marketing; Bruce Lowery, Sales; and Lance Barr, Product Design. This event was particularly special as two of these three ...
2025-11-27 01:02:19 +0000 UTC
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Hi folks, Phil here! As we're heading into the end of the year, we realized we have a LOT of stuff building up that'll be dropping in December. Without giving away the surprises, we want to give our Patreon supporters a sense of what we'll be doing in the runup to the holidays.
It's winter fundraiser season
Next Tuesday, we'll be running our annual winter fundraiser again. Truth b...
2025-11-24 21:57:05 +0000 UTC
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In the vein of a post we made a few months ago about Imagine Town Magazine, we wanted to share another story of how difficult it can be to nail down information about poorly documented game magazines.
We've finally finished a complete digitized run of PCGames
2025-11-20 22:00:01 +0000 UTC
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Let’s all learn what makes our Library Director, Phil Salvador, Phil Salvador! Producer Robin Kunimune sat down with Phil to learn all about his life as a youth, an early path to his passions, creating chaos inside the lines, the mental health struggles many face in early adulthood, finding his community, and making his way to VGHF. And, don’t forget the birds! Phil candidly shares his fail...
2025-11-12 19:15:35 +0000 UTC
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Hi folks! We have a new video up going in-depth on our collection of press CDs from GamePro magazine.
We put this video together because we've added the next 100 CDs to this collection, bringing the grand total to 200!* We figured this would be a good time to dig more into this collection and what it takes to get it into our digital archive.
2025-11-09 18:00:11 +0000 UTC
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Portland Retro Gaming Expo has posted a video of our panel from this year: We Launched the NES 40 Years Ago Today, featuring Nintendo of America alumni Bruce Lowry, Gail Tilden, and Lance Barr.
We're proud of how this panel turned out. It's rare to get this group together to talk about their experiences, and the audience got to hear all sorts of unique stories and insight...
2025-11-03 18:26:55 +0000 UTC
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We've opened up our newest archival collection: The Andrew Nelson papers! This is actually our library's first collection of narrative design materials.
Andrew Nelson was the creative director of CyberFlix, a game company in Knoxville, TN that produced inter...
2025-10-29 15:01:16 +0000 UTC
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Phil Salvador introduces the new Andrew Nelson papers collection with guest, you guessed it, Andrew Nelson, himself. Guest-host Alex Greenberg joins to chat with Nelson, co-founder and creative director of CyberFlix, known for its 1996 title Titanic: Adventure Out of Time. Andrew discusses his transition from magazine journalism to game development, the creation of CyberFlix, and the d...
2025-10-28 20:45:39 +0000 UTC
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For our paid members, we have another early preview for an upcoming collection: the Andrew Nelson papers, from the writer and producer of Titanic: Adventure Out of Time.
Nelson was one of the co-founders of Cyberflix, a company based in Knoxville, TN that produced interactive movies. Nelson was brought in as the creative director and wrote several of their games,...
2025-10-23 15:30:03 +0000 UTC
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The canonical launch date of the NES is October 18th, 1985, meaning the system turns 40 years old this Saturday. To celebrate, the VGHF has pulled together a once-in-a-lifetime discussion panel with three people who were there to make it happen!
The panel is happening at 5pm at the 2025-10-15 16:22:21 +0000 UTC
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It’s another quarterly update! Host Robin Kunimune talks with Frank Cifaldi and Phil Salvador about our recent work. From Chicago travel to launching Computer Entertainer, from our new Booth-in-a-Box to 4,000 magazines archived, from NES’s 40th to building Lego; come find out just how many new collections we've added in the last few months.
You can listen to the Video Game H...
2025-10-14 20:41:52 +0000 UTC
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Phil Salvador interviews Dr. Stephanie Harkin, lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) School of Design Games Program in Australia, about her research on femininity in gaming, particularly in girls' lifestyle magazines. Dr. Harkin discusses her journey from media studies to focusing on feminine games. She highlights her findings on the lack of representation of feminine g...
2025-10-01 17:48:52 +0000 UTC
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Hi folks! Today we're opening up research access to the William Volk papers, a collection of documents from former Activision VP of technology William Volk.
Backer Blog members have been hearing about the William Volk papers for a while now, but if you're one of our free followers, now's the time to learn about him! We did 2025-09-30 14:30:11 +0000 UTC
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For our backer blog patrons: an early look at the William Volk papers, a new collection coming to the VGHF Digital Library. Historians are going to have a field day with this one...
William Volk was the vice president of technology at Activision from 1988–1994. He was in charge of Activision's tech at a pivotal time for the company. For one thing, they were recovering from bankruptcy. B...
2025-09-23 15:00:22 +0000 UTC
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Host Frank Cifaldi is joined by documentarian, historian, hacker, and all around cool guy SynaMax to talk about their documentary Resurrecting Sinistar: A Cyber-Archaeology Documentary. The 1983 top-down space shooter arcade game’s unique 49-way joystick allowed players to pilot their spaceship to prevent a gi...
2025-09-16 19:57:46 +0000 UTC
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Library director Phil Salvador here, with an unusual new addition to our digital library.
We've added what we believe is the complete run of Imagine Town Magazine, a promotional magazine for Ubisoft's line of casual games for girls. I wanted to highlight this magazi...
2025-09-12 18:42:46 +0000 UTC
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We’re joined by pioneer video game historian Leonard Herman, author and publisher of several video game history books including the first comprehensive book chronicling the history of the videogame industry, Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Home Videogames, and its subsequent series. We touch on Leonard’s ear...
2025-09-02 15:32:06 +0000 UTC
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Hey folks in the Pacific Northwest: We're going to PAX West 2025 this weekend!
Frank is doing two panels, which will be streaming on twitch.tv/pax.
Phil here again, with some technical processing talk.
One of the biggest collections in our library that we've been working through is our collection of press CDs from GamePro magazine.
From about 1995–2005, whenever GamePro received digital art or ...
2025-08-26 14:00:17 +0000 UTC
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Host Phil Salvador is joined by Derek Alexander, of the YouTube channel Stop Skeletons From Fighting, and Zarithya, of the YouTube channel Zarithya, to talk about the fan-restored 16-player mode for the 1991 Game Boy game Faceball 2000 as laid out in My 2 Year Journey to Solve the 30-Year Myth of ...
2025-08-20 18:22:08 +0000 UTC
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Frank Cifaldi and guest-host Kate Willaert (of A Critical Hit) are joined by Marylou Badeaux to discuss the history of the vitally important Computer Entertainer, also known as The Video Game Update: a monthly newsletter which covered video game availability information and reviews in the 1980’s. Co-created with Marylou’s sister Celeste Dolan, this publication has hel...
2025-08-05 10:00:05 +0000 UTC
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This week, we're launching a collection we've been teasing for a while. For our community of patrons, we're sharing the details early.
As we've mentioned before, we acquired the rights to Computer Entertainer, a game magazine that ran from 1982–1990, and this Wednesday we're adding the complete run to our digital library. What we haven't mentioned yet is that we are rel...
2025-08-04 14:30:02 +0000 UTC
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It’s time for a little review of what we’ve been up to, so far, this year. With the official launch of our digital library archive, livestreams of game magazine unboxing and EPROM dumping, the newest collections of Craig Stitt and Kirk Henderson, a Trade Magazine Week special event, and teasing some special new acquisitions we have SO much to catch you up on!
You can listen to the
2025-07-22 20:40:04 +0000 UTC
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Phil here again with an update on what VGHF is working on next!
After a couple loud and busy months, we're taking things a little slower in July so we can work on some larger projects. (And also take some well-earned time some off! Phew!) We've teased some of this in the past, but we figured you'd appreciate an update:
Computer Entertainer is coming soon!
As I'm writing this...
2025-07-14 15:05:01 +0000 UTC
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Veteran game designer and author Lawrence Schick shares stories from his early 80's work with the ColecoVision, Atari 2600, and Intellivision. With over four decades of experience in the industry, Schick details how he helped pioneer a multi-discipline, team-based approach to game development designing games like Smurf: Rescue and Tarzan while pulling from a wealth of experien...
2025-07-09 17:25:01 +0000 UTC
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Host Phil Salvador and guest host Colleen Barrett, Rare Books Librarian at UK Libraries, chat with David Carter, Video Game Archivist and Comic Librarian at University of Michigan Library Computer and Video Game Archive, about the work he does in archiving video game material within such a large and academic institutions. We discuss what tools are available, what problems typically arise, the p...
2025-06-24 10:00:07 +0000 UTC
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After teasing this for a long time, we're finally ready to roll out Trade Magazine Week!
This week, we're opening digital access to a collection of nearly 400 video game trade magazines. For video game historians, this is some of the juiciest material. And we should probably explain why!
What is a trade magazine?
Most video game magazines were sold to the public. If...
2025-06-22 15:15:01 +0000 UTC
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If you listened to our new episode of the Video Game History Hour, you might've also seen that we just rolled out the Craig Stitt art and design papers! It's the latest collection in our digital library.
Craig Stitt is a former video game artist and designer who worked for Sega Technical Institute and Insomniac Games during his career from 1990–2005. Among his many projects, Stitt worke...
2025-06-11 23:01:09 +0000 UTC
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On this special video episode of the Video Game History Hour, we sat down with Craig Stitt, retired game artist and designer. Craig worked on games including Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Kid Chameleon, Ratchet & Clank, and Spyro the Dragon. He gave us a tour of his portfolio and talked about working at Sega in America, creating Spyro, dealing with burno...
2025-06-10 17:29:17 +0000 UTC
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Hi folks-- Phil Salvador here! I'm currently in Los Angeles for Summer Game Fest and, at the time you're reading this, probably at Super Nintendo World instead of watching the big Keighley event.
On Saturday night, I'm going to be on Giant Bomb's SGF couch! For those who don't follow Giant Bomb, they do an annual talk show from E3/SGF where they bring in game industry people to chat about...
2025-06-06 19:00:09 +0000 UTC
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