If you’re someone interested in the emulation hobby, then you have the ability to recognize the importance of remembering gaming’s past. Chances are, though, that like me, you’ve regretted letting go of some of your own pieces of gaming history—whether it was selling off your childhood collection at a yard sale for quick cash or tossing old magazines after years of subscriptions, foolishly thinking that they were just kiddie clutter.

Ever since we started in 2017, the Video Game History Foundation has been building a digital library to help the study of video game history. We’ve been collecting development documents, behind-the-scenes content, rare video game publications and catalogs, magazines, memorabilia, ephemera, and more.

After years of cataloging, processing, and digitizing our collections, we’re ready to open our (virtual) doors to the public for the first time. – VGHF’s Phil Salvador

I care a great deal about the preservation of gaming’s history, and thanks to the folks at the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), these gems of our cultural history have been preserved — and better yet, are now available for the first time online for free!

The VGHF Library

Anyone remember hearing about this retro handheld? Image c/o VGHF

The VGHF was launched in 2017 when gaming historian Frank Cifaldi noticed that the gaming industry was doing a poor job of ensuring its own historical legacy. Noting how many films made prior to the 1950s had been lost to time, the VGHF was created to preserve all forms of gaming media, print, advertisements, archival video, design documents, and anything else one could expect to find in a historical library or museum dedicated to gaming’s past.

The VGHF Library takes those massive archives and makes them available to anyone who’s curious in a free digital format. This massive undertaking is the result of years and years of dedicated effort from non-profit employees, volunteers, and community members. Their work in digital preservation gives gamers a look at a snapshot in time of when their favorite games first appeared. The ads that go along with magazine content can be just as much fun to pour over as the articles themselves, and taking a look at previews for a future that never was for games and systems gives a whole new perspective to gaming timelines.

A Fuller Retro Experience

There’s something that can be lost in the modern digital gaming distribution methods. When I was young, I would not only play the games that I loved but pour over everything I could get my hands on about them. Holding a physical box in my hand and reading all the highlights on offer from the developers on the car ride home from the store was exciting.

Looking for clues and assistance in the game manual, or unfolding out a giant game map on the carpet for use while playing, added something to the experience. My copies of Game Informer and EGM showed up in the mail every month and let me know what to buy or avoid, what to look forward to, and often just how to learn the most about the games I played and loved.

My earliest EGM memory. Image c/o VGHF

Now, thanks to the VGHF Library, I can consult the very magazine issues that used to arrive in my mailbox. I may have thrown away my entire collection in a fit of youthful stupidity, but they can all be mine now again, forever. I’ve already stalled out in the middle of writing this article several times. The library keeps pulling me back into the very pages I obsessed over as a kid. Every time I click a new issue, memories seem to unlock and reveal themselves. It’s quite a magical feeling to reconnect with something you had all but forgotten about.

The above screenshot preview for Mega Man II is my earliest memory of reading a video game magazine. I was in a Marshall’s department store with my mom, aged 6, and likely given the magazine as a way to placate me through a day of shopping. For whatever reason, that is the screenshot that I will forever connect with Mega Man II in my head. The VGHF Library reconnected me with the exact page from my memories in under a minute. And how hilarious is it to read Mega Man described as the “sleeper hit of ’88”?

The Future of Preservation

A clever print ad for F-Zero GX c/o VGHF

As the library project continues to move forward, its curators promise even more material from the foundation’s vast archives will continue to be digitally scanned and made available online.

We’re in this for the long-haul, and over the coming years, we’ll be adding even more materials to our archive and adding new features to our library system. If you want to learn more about what we have in our library, our catalog has additional information about items that aren’t available digitally yet, and even materials we haven’t processed.

Hopefully, the VGHF Library can shine a light on the fantastic preservation work being done by the Video Game History Foundation to ensure that generations to come have access to these classic materials and pieces of history. Whether you just have a passing interest in learning a little more about the latest RH GoTX, or you’re looking to reconnect with the periodicals of the past, take a walk through the library’s virtual doors to a near-limitless collection of nerd history.

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