Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 338: The Video Game History Foundation

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

From the live archive: Jeremy Parish chats with Frank Cifaldi and Kelsey Lewin of the Video Game History Foundation about the evolution of their organization and how it's working to preserve the medium's past. Cover art by John Pading.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. Okay, well, the slider bar is gone, so I think that means we are live and online. So hello, everyone. Thanks for joining this week in Retronauts, et cetera, et cetera. Hi!

I'm Jeremy Parrish, and thank you for joining our TED Talk. I'm here with the folks from the Video Game History Foundation. Don't call it a museum. Can you please introduce yourselves, even though you have names underneath your faces. Kelsey, I'm always first. You go first. Wow.

Okay. All right. My name is Kelsey Lewin. I'm the co-director of the Video Game History Foundation. I also own a couple of game stores in the Seattle area called Pink Gorilla. I'm Franksafaldi. I'm the other co-director of the Video Game History Foundation and the founder of it as well. And I've been preserving video game history in one form or another for about 20 years.

now, former journalist, former game dev, still poke a little bit at the game dev with a studio called Digital Eclipse. Okay, and it turns out that people can't see our names underneath. So it's good that we introduced ourselves. I'm still Jeremy Parrish in case we weren't running and live when I said that. But yes, we've actually been talking about getting together and doing a sort of video game history foundation updates since last year at Long Island Retro Expo. As a matter of fact, Frank and I were talking about that.

And it never quite happened. We were going to get together the three of us and talk at Game Developers Conference this spring. And that didn't happen because the whole world got sick. And so here we are speaking virtually and I'm glad that we can finally make it happen. Yeah. But I had Frank on the show, along with Steve Lynn and Mike Micah,

about three years ago, three summers ago at California Extreme where we all sat around in a hotel room talking into an iPhone that was sitting on like a bed. And they basically said, hey, we're launching this nonprofit organization to help preserve video game history. And now three years later, that thing is a reality. It's been going strong. They picked up Kelsey, added her to the ranks to help co-direct it. So basically, this is just kind of a chance to take stock and say, what is the state of video game history, at least through the eyes of the Game History Foundation, Video Game History Foundation?

Yeah. So, you know, just to kind of get everyone off on the ground floor and sort of at the same, you know, same level in case they somehow don't know who any of us are and just showed up at this retro convention and at a panel hosted by us out of curiosity. Frank, why don't you, and Kelsey, also, you just introduce yourselves a little bit and talk about kind of how you came to be part of the Video Game History Foundation. Like Frank, you know, you kind of came through the rom hacking scene sort of and not sort of. Something along those lines through journalism and it was kind of a a tortuous path.

Yeah, it's, yeah, I worked in the video game industry. I mean, still do for like 15 years, but I often say, and there's a lot of truth to it, that I've worked in the video game industry in order to sort of get better at what I consider my real job, which is preserving its history. So I started doing this sort of thing in the very late 90s, like 99, maybe 2000. And my first entry into preserving the history of games was actually sort of seeking out the cartridge-based console games, usually NES, and stuff like that, that you couldn't download ROMs of, that weren't digitized, that weren't preserved digitally yet.

And I was sort of helping that effort in the early days because I was really fascinated by the idea of being able to revisit older games. And I had also been pretty inspired by the Film Foundation, which you'd never know given the name the Video Game History Foundation, which, you know, formed from Hollywood people like Martin Scorsese getting together and being like, hey, we're not preserving film. We've lost a lot of early film. So I sort of applied that line of thinking to video games. Like, is anyone paying attention to those volatile pieces of video game history that are disappearing? I started a website that a lot of people still weirdly know me from, which is called Lost Levels, which was the first website that I know of that focused on games that never came out, unreleased games. And in doing so, sort of weirdly started my journalism career by talking to old game devs about their games that didn't ship,

which actually launched a career in video game journalism, which is how you and I met, Jeremy, edited a website called Gamba Sutra, worked at OneUp for a while with you, eventually got into game development. Like I said, I worked at a studio called Digital Eclipse. Mostly my work that I'm known for there is some of the classic game compilations. I was the producer and director of Mega Man Legacy Collection and S&K 40th anniversary, and then worked a little bit on Street Fighter 30th and Disney Afternoon also.

And then the foundation really is, just kind of been the culmination of all of this preservation stuff I've been doing on the side for the last 20 years. I think really the reason that I went this route is that I felt that I hit a wall being that guy Frank that you should talk to. I felt that that guy Frank should be more than me, that it should be a name that outlives me that, I mean, the name is apt. We needed this foundation of video game history preservation. And I just didn't see it being done to my satisfaction. So I started the foundation to sort of fix the leaky holes in the ship and start figuring out how to solve the harder problems when it came to game preservation.

As Kelsey likes to say it, because she has the same origin really as me, as a frustrated historian, right? Yeah. So I guess that's a good segue into where I come from, which is, you know, I started like basically just collecting and playing old games like a decade ago and started getting into the idea of, wow, there's a whole lot of stuff out here that people just aren't talking about because it's not Mario, it's not Sonic, it's not the thing they grew up with when they were a kid. And a lot of that really just came out of the fact that I was working at a retro video game store and we also had a lot of import stuff. And there was just kind of all of this strange under the radar, or I felt under the radar stuff that was coming through that I wanted to talk more about. And when I started, you know, I really enjoyed researching and I started kind of doing that as a side thing as researching these old things, talking to, you know, reaching out to old developers and trying to talk to them and finding information on stuff. But I was finding it really, really difficult and surprisingly difficult for this medium that is enormous and bigger than movies. and bigger than music in terms of, like, how much money goes into it every year.

So, yeah, I was a frustrated historian having a lot of trouble getting good information on a lot of this stuff and kind of upset that I was the one that was having to do it myself. I mean, I really enjoyed it, but I was like, really no one's done this before. And then I found this thing called the Video Game History Foundation, which was, I mean, I think literally around the day it launched. You know, it was good timing. And I didn't realize at the time that it was pretty much just Frank. So I started bothering what I thought was the entity and turns out to just be this guy until he started taking me seriously.

Your DM to me pitching me on you helping us was March 24th. Do you remember the launch date of the funding? Oh, yes. It was February 17th, I think. All right, pretty close month in. I don't think that was day one. I don't think I was like, that's the thing. And I'm going to today type up a...

Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, and Kelsey had been volunteering for us pretty much since then. I mean, she sort of pitched the idea of being our PR person and I kind of brushed her off. So it's like, I have no idea you are. Go away. Because as you might imagine, a lot of people are interested in video game history. So we get a lot of emails that are like, I want to help, I want to help. And it's like, I don't have time to manage all of you.

Please come down. But Kelsey, instead of going away, just didn't go away. Well, I started sending you things. I started actually just kind of doing work and being like, use this or don't use it. I don't care. Yeah. And you showed up to all the meetings. And you helped us organize the museum displays that we did at Portland Retro.

And you, you know, maybe most importantly, we did. this, I can't even think of the adjective to describe how ridiculous it was, but we did this project with Game Informer magazine last year, where for the entire month of May, we organized volunteers to help digitize their collection of ephemeral things, you know, press kits and slides and press releases, things like that. And Kelsey came and did it for the entire five weeks, which was like I didn't expect anyone but me to be there the entire five weeks. And yeah, while we were there, we kind of had the like, where do you see yourself in five years, dinner, you know, and she was like, well, I want to be, I think you said employee

number three. I was like, well, I can't pay you, but do you want to just call it now that you work here? And also, I don't want to be your boss. So that's why Kelsey's a co-director. because she's the real deal, and she proved her worth by far. And I don't know, I'd never thought of her as being under me. We're just equals, so she's with me now. Yeah, so, Frank, you were talking about kind of your start in taking an interest in all this, and going back to the days before emulation and ROM preservation was really complete. Like, that's kind of weird to think about now, because at this point, you know,

maim basically exists to say, like, hey, we found this really weird, licensed Pacino game from Japan or like another pornographic Quicks clone so we've managed to integrate those into the latest release and you know otherwise everything except like TTL logic games

are pretty well preserved but that wasn't the case 20, 25 years ago and they were still getting started and there was a lot of you know there were a lot of gaps in these ROM sets and I feel like we're all kind of similarly motivated by this desire to have things

complete and to have them documented. And that's, you know, that's really what drives a lot of the work I do, especially not just with the Retronauts podcast, but with the video works projects that I do, which started out, you know, I spent years just kind of trying to figure out, like, I want to do a comprehensive thing on Nintendo systems. And finally, I saw the Cron Tindo series and was like, oh, that's it. That's, you know, something other than just some blog posts about games. Like, that's something that kind of spans, you know, different mediums. And no one's that for handheld games so i'll jump into game boy that's kind of evolved you know into doing console stuff too and now i'm actually looking and saying really this series should be about like

video games beyond the nes kind of revival in america so i need to you know get some Atari and some Sega stuff in there too but you know i guess that's the problem with being a completionist is that you you start to realize oh there's more to do there's more to do um the research is never done right And that's what's really great about the work that you're doing because it has, you know, already for the work that I'm doing, it's come in really handy. You know, like I have been starting to look back into that sort of that lacuna between the Atari crash and the NES launch and there just wasn't a lot of documentation out there. But I remember talking to you a few years ago and you had kind of stumbled across the video game update and the computer entertainer newsletter, not even a real magazine, just like a 16-page newsletter that apparently someone in North. Hollywood was putting together once a month and you know scrounging up as much news as they can and you've gotten almost the entire set scanned and posted to like the internet archive

and like that's an invaluable contribution because going back there I can really finally instead of sort of saying like here's kind of what I vaguely remember from when I was 10 and it doesn't really pay attention to the business to actually look back and say like here's a professional attempting to speak to game enthusiasts and to the business and kind of approaching them on both levels in a very compact space. So it's very efficient. There's not a lot of information. But because of that, I'm able to look back and say like,

oh, so here's how the Atari 7800 rollout happened. Here's, you know, kind of the messaging around the Sega Master System. Oh, here's a game that Nintendo said didn't launch for NES until 1987, but they have a review of it in autumn 1985 or, you know, for 1986. So, you know, you can't believe everything Nintendo says is about its own library. And that's, you know, just having that information out there is super valuable. Yeah, that's such a good example, too, because I mentioned sort of like patching up the leaky ship, right? And that is, to our knowledge, the only outlet that consistently covered console games from 85 until 88 when all the video game magazines came back.

Such as console games there were. Like, there are issues where they're like, nothing here. It's just, you know, C-64 games and Atari ST. Yeah, but they were, like you're saying, they were consistent. They were, I mean, you know, what I often say about that publication is like, this is the only English language review of Super Mario Brothers from when it came out. This is it. And, yeah, that's a really good example of that sort of like completionist, like,

leaky ship patching thing. And we've expanded that quite a. bit. I mean, it's, I don't have a good angle here, but I'm in our library right now. I've just, we, we're trying to complete all of the print publications that, that covered video games, because it's, it's a, I think you're right, Jeremy, I'm thinking about this more and more. Like, I think what drives all of us is that completionist thing. And I don't want to complete like a set of video games. That's not my passion. My passion is completing information. So, I, I am very upset if we're missing an issue of a video game magazine because it's like, we don't have every review of this game.

So we don't have like the widest spread that we can or for what people thought about it. And that's really important to us because what we focus on at the foundation isn't the games because other people are taking care of that. You know, there's game collectors. There's there's museums that collect games. There's, you know, libraries that collect games. We don't worry about the games. if we worry about the context that helps you understand the game?

Well, I feel like Kelsey does a lot of work with the actual games themselves, you know, working in retail. And, you know, I see the things that you dig up through auctions, like the Wonder Swan pregnancy test and things like that. It's like super, super in the weeds, things that no one would ever think like this exists,

but you've got it out there. So, you know, there is value to the actual, the objects themselves, the games, because some of them are just so scarce or so esoteric, you know, some of the, especially in Japan, like the things that, were kind of released ancillary to the gaming industry for these devices,

you wouldn't think, like, oh, that's something that I need in my collection. And you probably don't need it in your collection, but it's good to have a document and to know, like, yeah, this video game system was also used to, like, you know, sew sweaters or tell you if you were going to have a baby. Yeah. And the Mamamite one is a funny example, too, because that one caught, that one ended up catching the attention of the company that manufactured it, Teno, which is a healthcare company in Japan, and they were, like, so confused and floored that there was some weird

American that had dug up their old, I'm sure they sold literally in the hundreds of these things. I mean, I've been searching for one for like five years without seeing a single one for sale. So, yeah, I mean, there are still things out there that are not well documented, you know, for retail releases. It's just we've mostly figured it out. Like, it's like 99% done, but if you go over to Japan, we're probably still, we still have some holes. Yeah, and it's not that we outright won't put games in our archive.

It's that we focus on those things that we think are volatile that might actually disappear. So like Mamma Mete is a good example. I think the best example from the work that I've personally done would be where in North Dakota is Carmen San Diego, which is, you know, this mainline Carmen San Diego game. it just disappeared because it's just stuck in North Dakota. So, you know, we actually went out and interviewed all the teachers who worked on it and stuff like that. And we managed to archive the only, I mean, one of the only, I'm sure, like, discs that had never been played before, so it had no save data.

So we managed to archive the clean copy of the game. The box, which, I mean, that game technically you could have ordered. it as a retail game, but we actually don't know if anyone did because most of the copies of that game were loose discs that schools bought, but you could have theoretically ordered a boxed version.

So, you know, we got a box, which is, what are there like, maybe 10 of those that survived maybe? So yeah, it's not that we don't collect any games, it's that, you know, I see no reason for us to get even the rarest NES games,

for example, right? Because it's like, If I really need to touch a copy of Action 52 or whatever, I know enough people that we can get one. Yeah, yeah, like the licensed releases and the, you know, the kind of known set, that's not super hard to come by. Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, there are some weirder NES things that I think the collectors haven't paid too much attention to.

But what we're more focused on, like I said, is the context. So we, in addition to the media, right, like trying to blanket cover all the English language media, at least print, because web is a lot harder. I really wish people could just read one up. I don't know if you feel that way, Jeremy. It would be nice, yeah. Ten years of my life would be, yeah.

I have considered, by the way, just quick tangent, we're a charity and you can donate intellectual property to a charity and write off its fair market value. So I'm kind of wondering if there's a one-up conversation there to be happy. I mean, I actually tried to put together a deal to buy one-up. back in the day. And they were like, no, we're just going to sit on it. We're just going to have the URL here. We're going to let the servers kind of slowly die one by one and let the actual content mold away. So the links all die. Like, we made an effort. We had, we had, you know, money on the table. We had investors. And they were just like, eh, don't care. So. Oh, my God. Yeah. I wouldn't count on them doing anything charitable, unless they really, really need a tax write off, which, you know, in this time it, they might. Yes. They might. Yeah. This might be the time. Speaking of which, if anyone has any property in the East Bay that they'd like to write off a fair market value, please get in touch. But, yeah, I mean, we focus, like I said, on the context of we're getting the media as blanket covered as we can.

A big thing related to that is that we're also going beyond that and trying to get the assets that the media had, which, Jeremy, I'm sure you like me, just threw most of that stuff away. um as it was sent to you because it's just PR garbage but it's interesting like a lot of film history is mostly okay because there's just been like five companies that are now two that controlled film from the beginning um video games were never really like that you know there are large corporations that that have been around forever but the majority of video games were made by companies that no longer exist and probably didn't even get absorbed into anything um and even if they did that stuff got tossed so a lot of the art that we're collecting that was sent to the media is like there's no like publisher archive that even has this art anymore you know this is like when we're getting a four by five piece of transparency from the 90s of like a painting of a box cover it's like we might have the only one of these left yeah the the Nintendo giga leak that happened recently was especially interesting not just because whoa someone hacked into Nintendo servers and dumped all this information about video games we love but because whoa there's actually a company that obsessively

preserved all the content about a game, all the, all the betas, all the development documents, all the in-house messaging, like that just, that doesn't happen, especially on the Japanese side where information storage and data security is not really been that big an issue or not really big, that big admission until fairly recently. So there's all kinds of, you know, just classic games that, you know, we don't know anything about and the original design documents are just gone. Yeah, and that's the other half that we're getting into much more strongly now

than when we last spoke is collecting that game development source material. We think that that's the best way to study a game. If you want to know how a game was made, the best way is to actually have access to its source to be able to tweak it and rebuild it and see what your changes did, to look at, I mean, like you mentioned the Nintendo archives, right?

Like, a lot of the things that leaked out of there were, and this is what inspires a lot of people, I think, is like that sort of rough draft content that they didn't end up using. I think if you lay all that out in front of you, you start to understand the creative process that went into, for example, Super Mario World that you might not have otherwise. Yeah, and, you know, for years, we had heard like, oh, that started out as kind of this NES kind of game and evolved from there and now we've actually had the chance to see it. Yeah, we've been able to recover

some of the tiles that they were using in their really early demos and stuff like that. And you can clearly see, yeah, it sort of rewrites the narrative, right, of what Super Mario world was where, like, if you're really looking, especially if you start sorting by file date and looking at chronologically of that stuff,

you start sort of seeing the evolution of this game and how it started off I would suspect just looking at the art as more of a programming exercise where it's like can we get Super Mario 3 more or less running on Super Nintendo and then build from there, which when you think about Super Mario World, it's like that's exactly what that game is, right? It's basically Super Mario 3, but they kept building on it and evolving it and adding features to it.

So we, I mean, the way that came out is pretty unfortunate, I think, at which that there were some other way that could have happened. But the study that we're seeing come out of it is what we want to see in the world. That's what we're trying to establish. We're collecting source code because that's just how you start telling these stories. You know, besides the theft, the other unfortunate part that I think you alluded to earlier is that there's email backups that came off of these things. And like, no one should have access to that. But we're trying to build a world.

Our long-term vision is that source code should be donated to archives, to libraries, literally libraries, we think, should have source code donated to them. People should be able to go in and, like, study a game in the same way that they study, I don't know, like Abraham Lincoln's personal papers or something. You know, like I think source code is the equivalent of that. And so we're trying to start building the foundation. there's that word again, of that being the norm, you know, that source code, source assets behind the scenes stuff is something that lives in a place where an historian can access it and study it and start piecing together a narrative. Right.

Yeah, and you know, for myself, like the thing that I think most drives me as a, as someone who has become a writer and I guess video producer, podcast producer kind of accidentally, is just telling. stories and piecing together the stories, not just like, hey, here is what this game is and here is, you know, how it plays, but also here's how it compares to what else was on the market at the time. Here's how, what came before it has influenced that. And, you know, here's what it owes to other creations. And, you know, you can't always get sort of first person perspectives on that first person information because you can't always, you can actually pretty rarely talk to developers and really take the time to pick their brains because either they're not accessible or they're not available or they just don't remember. So it all becomes kind

of reverse engineering. And so the more information that, you know, your foundation can put out there, the easier that becomes for telling those stories and for saying, you know, being able to say, like, go beyond just a review of a game and say, like, here is, you know, the breakdown of the mechanics. Like, that's good. That's interesting. But, you know, I really want to be able to ultimately piece together like a timeline of video game history and say like here are the ideas that fed into this game and you know here's

what it inspired in other works and here's why this game was so made such an impact at the time because if you compare it to what else was on the market or what other games were doing at the time it just you know totally is something different or something better or something new and fresh and yeah again like it's

for someone as old as me who was kind of there back when the NES was was first launching and remembers that time pretty clearly still. You can fill in some of those gaps from your experience. Yeah, that's a good starting point. Yeah. But, you know, I can still only speak from my perspective. And as a result, you know, like when I do that, people are like, well, you don't talk

about Sega enough or you stupid American. There's all these, you know, European microcomputer games that sold 20 copies. How come you're not talking about those? Because I was one of those 20 people and I played that game. Why aren't you? So, yeah, you just need as much, you know, raw material to work with as you can to be able to pick through that and sort through that. And, you know, a lot of what you're doing is not just gathering that information, but helping to collate it and to process it. And that's really valuable, too.

Yeah. Right. I mean, you get so comparatively little information from just the game itself and even the packaging. And even, like, a magazine or two doesn't really paint a whole story of what's going on. And it's, you know, even if you have the game's timeline and you have what came before it, what came after it, the example I always love to use is imagine just handing someone Pokemon Red and thinking that's the entire story when we had like three or four years of just ridiculous amounts of, I mean, they called it Pokemon Mania or Pokemon, Pokemon was on the cover of Time magazine. Like, you don't get that from just handing someone a copy of the game. And so we really, you know, we have often things like Time Magazine's in our archive because we have to make sure that we can paint that entire picture for someone.

Yeah, and I think my favorite example that I like to bring up when you're talking about, like, if you have all of that context in front of you, here's the quick narrative you can instantly extrapolate is when I was helping these guys doing a documentary on Earthbound, the Super Nintendo game, you know, we had every review of Earthbound. And I was able to pull them all out, literally put them all on a table and go through them and sort of start seeing patterns. Because that game didn't sell well. It was considered a failure for Nintendo in America specifically. And a lot of the time people were like, well, the marketing was bad, right?

The marketing that said this game stinks was like, oh, that must have killed the game. So you put all these reviews in the physical magazines on a table. reading them and there's patterns. Almost every reviewer thinks, thought that the graphics were objectively bad. They thought that the tile art and

earthbound, you know, the word 8 bit came up a lot. Like it's an old looking game. It's childish. So, you know, that feels weird now because I think we've come to recognize the beauty of that game, but, you know, reviewers at the time, not so much.

And again, because you have all these magazines in front of you, you can start flipping the pages and see what else is going on, like you were saying, Jeremy. And when they're reviewing this game, first of all, Chrono Trigger had just come out. So that's kind of what they're comparing it to. But second, it's 1995. These same reviewers are playing Japanese Playstations.

You know, they are... Or American Saturn's. American Saturns, yeah, exactly. Surprise. They're in this new 3D reality, right? like it's an exciting transitional period for video game graphics even nintendo when you know they were selling when they were marketing earthbound at a trade show i can't remember either c es or or that year's e3 uh that they exhibited earthbound but it was like their booth was star fox two comanche and fx fighter which were 3d games on the super nintendo and then like off in the corner is this sort of throwback nostalgia RPG except americans didn't have console gamers didn't have a lot of nostalgia for RPGs. Exactly. Exactly. And I think if you understand that context,

like to me, I'm looking at this going, I think it's impossible to market this game in 1995. I don't think there's any scenario where better marketing would have saved Earthbound. I think it was just doomed from the start. And you don't get that unless you have all that context around it, like you said, Jeremy. And even just going back to my own memories, I might have come to that conclusion, maybe if I really, really spent a lot of time thinking about it. But again, just flipping through the magazines

and seeing the giant PlayStation previews and stuff like that, it's like, oh, of course, of course. Yeah, Toshindon looks so much better than Earthbound. I bet it's way, much better game. That's going to be a timeless classic that people are still talking about in 20 years. And Earthbound, I know one's going to remember that. You can move in different axes than Earthbound.

And this lady wants to kick my butt. Yeah. You know, uh, Uh, uh, You know, I'm going to be.

This week on the Super Nintendo's, Blake J. Harris, and Jonah Toulis, co-directors of console wars. Is Nintendo the villain? It's definitely a David Goliath story. Vega could have had the PlayStation and the N64. Oh, my God. This is the coolest thing ever. Glass processing, Reebok pumps. What is your favorite BS marketing push of all time?

Sonic 3 with lock-on technology and working with Michael Jacks and all that. Were you Sega or Nintendo Kids? I mean, I was a Nintendo Kid. PS5 versus the Xbox. Who's coming out on top here? Right here. Greenlit. Video Death Loop is a podcast where we watch a short video clip on Loop until we just can't take

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season one, or check out our past seasons breaking down nearly 20 action-adventure titles. New episodes drop every Wednesday, here on the Greenlit Podcast Network. In this quarter, on the Greenlit Podcast Network, Chris Sibbs and Matt will And in this corner, VHS Audities, confusing animation, and modern not-so classics. Plus snacks! Movie Fighters! We watch movies and beat them up! Yeah, so we've kind of talked about the general sort of work that you're doing, but I would like to talk a little bit about just kind of how the foundation, the mission, has evolved over time because, you know, you seem to have a pretty clear sense of what you wanted to do

when you guys were kicking it off three years ago. But with any project I find, any big endeavor, you know, as you start to actually live it and actually start to make it happen, you realize, oh, I need to adjust. You know, some realities are not what I expected. And there's some things that I feel like I need to put more time into, more energy into. I need to put my focus over here. So, yeah, I'd be curious to hear how the foundation, you know, just the mission has evolved in three years and how it's turned out differently than you might have. expected. I'll start this off and then kick it to Kelsey since I've been here longer. I might have even said this when we last spoke, Jeremy, which is that even when I started this thing with

my board, we recognize from the start this this has to be fluid. You know, this idea of being a charity that does what it can to preserve what we consider volatile video game history is going you have to evolve because video games are not a stagnant medium. And what I would say in terms of our evolution is, I think really in the early days, what we envisioned as the foundation was this vetted digital repository of information, the sort of digital video game history library that could be accessed easily. And while I wouldn't say that vision has gone away, but it has become clear that that's more like phase three,

and we're still in phase one, because there's a lot of work to be done to even get there. So ways that we have evolved, I mean, we talk about source code, for example, right? If someone hands us source code, I can't, it's never been legally challenged a lot of stuff with things like source code. So for example, if a company has an archive of a game, And they're not entirely sure that they own every bite that's in this repo, right?

Like maybe someone downloaded a picture from the internet to use as a placeholder in the game and it's still in this repo and it's someone else's copyright. Or even they just don't have the rights to the music that they used to have the rights to. Exactly. So it's like, you know, we encounter that a lot. Yeah, with limited run games. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're printing old games and, you know, there's, oh, well, you know,

this guy licensed the music in for us and the rights reverted to him. So, I would imagine, like, physical rights might be separate from digital sometimes. And, yeah, so, you know, we still don't have answers for stuff like that. We still don't have best practices, right? We still don't really have a good intake system for things that, I mean, let's just face it, we're stolen, right? Like, we've recognized that a lot of this material is actually going to disappear if we don't have some sort of, like, like way to intake it even through illegitimate means. And we just don't have like,

we don't have a comfortable explanation for people yet, even, you know, about how that's okay. So we're a long way from getting there. But what we've tended to shy away from, I'd say, is the things that other people can do. I think the biggest change that's come over the last three years is just recognizing the things that only we can do and the things that other people can do.

So, for example, we just, you know, people ask us all the time about scanning magazines. It's like, well, yeah, theoretically, I am capable of scanning magazines and putting them on the internet, but so are these 12 other guys over here. So it was retro mags.com, right? And I'm not going to use our limited resources doing that. What I am going to use our resources on doing is going out and seeking things like video game source code from developers who are going to trust us where they might not trust someone else because we're an established charity.

We have a board full of people who work in the video game industry. We have published things on our website that demonstrate that we're able to respect the source material and not turn it into gossip, right? With that Nintendo League, something really annoying was people bugging. Dylan Cuthbert about dumb stuff they found in his emails from the 90s. It's like, you know, they know that we're not going to do dumb stuff like that. So I think that's been the biggest change is that I've recognized that honestly, most of our resources are spent just communicating and, you know, building bridges and

organizing as opposed to, you know, the actual archival work. I think we're more focused on getting the things that no one else is really able to get and putting them somewhere while we fundraise and build in order to then catalog that stuff and make it available and stuff like that. So I think we've kind of slowed down on the digital library premise because I don't think we have the resources to do it right yet. And we're building our way toward that. Kelsey, do you agree with that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is really, in a lot of ways, just a matter of resources. And, you know, when we're dealing with volatile media and with not even necessarily volatile media, just volatile conditions that this media is in, because a lot of times it literally is just in someone's garage. And even if it's stored really well, I mean, who's to say that they're ever going to do anything with that stuff in their garage? So, yeah, a lot of what we focus on right now is just the advocacy, part and the communication part and trying to begin the entire premise of building this world where people can study video games more easily because that is still a really new idea to a lot of people. And occasionally, I mean, I even talked to someone who came into my store a couple days ago who mentioned that they used to work in the game industry.

And he literally told me he had some old builds and what he told me verbatim, he's like, maybe I should just like microwave him or something. I don't think I should have those anymore. My choice is. So, you know, even just convincing these developers sometimes that what they have is useful to someone. And, you know, he's like, well, who's going to care about this game? This is, you know, it's not Mario, whatever. I'm like, we don't, we don't get to decide what becomes historically important later. That's up to, you know, 50 years from now.

Who knows if a tack two or whatever is going to become something interesting. down the line. Maybe there is a really interesting development story in there. I mean, we'll never not want to know about the power of juju. That's something that I have found in my years of, you know, hunting down Japanese developers who worked on classic games 30 years ago is that people are often a very poor judge of the merit of their own work. Some people overvalue their own work, but most often what you find with folks who are just, you know, creating stuff work for hire, and, you know, it's just part of their job. Like, it never occurs to them that, hey, this means something to someone on the other side of the planet.

And they're going to hold on to that. And they're going to want to learn more about it and, you know, really detail the history of it all these years later. And so many times you have to kind of get over this barrier of like, oh, really, they want to talk to me? It's just kind of a surprise. But, you know, once you get past that, then the other element is kind of establishing that sense of trust and making them realize that, no, I'm just not, I'm not just some jackass who's here to, you know, like, you know, make you look bad or to, you know, ask you embarrassing questions or, you know, whatever. It's, you know, a genuine interest is kind of hard to get across, but it's

essential if you can. And that is, that is one of the big challenges. And so, yeah, I can see where, you know, that would be a huge advantage for you in this work is, you know, having the kind of credibility of the people you're involved with, and just the longer you work, the more credibility you have, because there's more and more work you can point to to say, like, hey, we found, you know, the story of where in North Dakota is San Diego or this exotic SimCity variant that, you know, people had heard about, but never actually knew the details of. And to say, like, we handled this properly and with respect. And, you know, we brought up to the world's attention without just giving everyone a free game to play.

Yeah, I mean, the best example of that is, I think in 2017, we published an article, and this was sort of our first proof of concept of our longer vision with source code. We published an article that broke down Disney's Aladdin on the Sega Genesis because we had access to its source. So we wrote this really long article that got slashed on it. That's still a thing about how Aladdin was made. We showed the tools that they used. We showed their animation process. We showed cut content because, again, that's what people get really excited about is the old ideas.

And we packaged up this very respectful, long article that showed the world what an historian who understands code can do to tell you about your favorite games. And as a result of that article happening, Disney and Digital Ecliffe, ended up doing a product that was Disney's Aladdin and the Lion King. And they actually used the source code from our archives to make a new version of Aladdin that's on that combination. So I think that's the best example of like establishing that respectable way of doing things that makes people comfortable with this notion because that's, you know, that's Disney, right? That's Disney, you know, doing a product based on. the excitement we generated and using material from our archives. And that's a big part of what we're doing.

And I think that even ties into advocacy, which Kelsey was mentioning earlier. It's just if we're able to demonstrate our vision in that respectable way, then I think that we start working with companies and archiving the stuff more often. And I think even like Game Informer, like we mentioned before, you know, that was, you know, Andy Mac, Andrew Reiner over there, sort of seeing what we're doing and understanding that we do things in a respectful way.

We're not just blasting everything on the internet without asking permission. That's why we were able to work with them and rescue data from literally thousands of disks while we were over there. So I think that's our biggest strength. And I think that ties back to what we focus on now going forward and while we sort of build up the fundraising

and grow is just doubling down on those things that only we seem capable of doing right now and that establish, that preview the future that we want to see in the world, you know, that we're trying to build. Well, we have about 10 minutes left, and I do want to leave a little time at the end for questions from the audience. But kind of as a final topic here, I'd like to ask, you know, aspirationally, what is the thing you would most like to accomplish, you know, like going forward, you know, pie in the sky, five years from now. with the Video Game History Foundation. Kelsey, I'll throw this to you first, just to give you a chance to talk a little more.

Well, I mean, I think for both of us, one of the biggest things is just getting this source code, I guess, initiative is the best way to put it off the ground. And so in five years, I mean, I hope that we have kind of gotten the handshakes down with a company and that we're trusted with someone's actual source repository. and that we can start actually offering that to historians to come study. And as Frank alluded to, there's a lot of legal hurdles in, you know, assuming we have a digital thing that people can access in the future, which of course is obviously one of our big

goals, it's just an expensive goal and time-consuming goal. We don't have legal precedent for putting source code up online in any capacity, unless it's just straight up open source. course. I mean, there's not like a check here if you're a historian studying this type thing that's been tested in the court system that we can say for sure is the okay and on the book's way to access this stuff that we don't own and that the people accessing it don't own. But, you know, a really good first step is to be able to just have this accessible even just in the library. We have a library space in the, in the Bay Area. And, you know, it's not really, obviously right now. it's not set up for visitors because no one's accepting visitors right now. But, you know, to have people able to come in and study the source code and have companies who are totally on board and trust us with what they have, I think, is a shorter-term goal five years from now.

Yeah. Just to expand on that, before we formalized the foundation, I visited the Library of Congress's film archives. which is also where their video game archives were. And so I spent a lot of time with the librarians who run that and came to understood a function that they serve that I thought was really interesting, which is that, Jeremy, you might know this, maybe you don't, but the Library of Congress has a lot of the master film reels for American cinema, right? So, like, not like a good copy, right?

The master film lives there. And very often when a company is remastering a movie, they will get a print made from the master at the Library of Congress. And I'm looking at this going, this should exist for video games. There should be a safe source code repository that companies even could access if they're remastering a game if they've lost their stuff. And spoiler alert, most of them have lost their source code, especially the older source code. So what I want to see in the world is what Kelsey is saying, right, where it becomes

commonplace that source code is not only donated, but it's accessible to people, especially abandoned source code games that, you know, just are past their expiration date. But I would also expand on that and say that I'm not even sure that. that we need to be the house that houses it, right? Like, I want it to be normal that it is in archives of any kind and accessible to people. And I want, and since we're talking pie in the sky, like, I want to solve the problem that Kelsey's talking about, which is, like, what is the safe way that makes people comfortable where people can access it? Because I don't suspect that, I don't know, I'm just going to name a publisher, like Activision. I don't suspect that Activision is going to be like, sure, throw it on GitHub.

You know, I suspect that they'll, that, I suspect there's a line where there's comfort. And I think we have to find that line and solve that, not only from a, you know, what are your lawyers comfortable with perspective, but also like, there's probably a technical challenge there. Like, are we, you know, for every source code repository, do we have to have a virtual machine that you pipe into that has all the files? that you could build from there, right? Or, you know, we don't know. So pie in the sky is that all of that is solved and that source code is extremely studyable. We're talking about source code a lot,

but also the other part of that is that there is also a good resource digitally for searching things like media and oral histories and things like that. But that's all very long-term. And source code is just one part of, you know, a company's archive as well. I mean, it would be great to also

have their original art and their development documents in a library and that sort of thing and archived in a way that is accessible to people as well. Yeah, and just one other just quick anecdote just to prove we're on the right track is that I won't name the company or anything, but there's a major company that an historian wanted to study source code for one of their older games and they had it, but when they went to legal to ask permission, can we send this guy the source code? so we can look at it. The response from legal,

and I alluded to this earlier, was that we don't know that we own everything in here. And so we're putting ourselves at risk if we send this to someone and say this is ours. So that's what put a stop to it. And I think that we have to figure out how to solve that. It might be a meeting them halfway point, right? Where it's, I don't know.

There's a lot of, there's no legal precedent for a lot of what we're talking about. And we have to get to the point where we're establishing something that at least feels comfortable and could theoretically be challenged later because that's how laws work. All right. So with that said, we have just a few minutes. If there's any questions that people in the audience would like to throw out here to have answered, we might be able to take one or two. I'm looking forward to a day where I can, one, travel out to the Bay Area. And two, just like spend, you know, a couple of weeks there visiting your office and just researching for stuff that is there and that is not accessible any other way that will enrich the work.

that I do and help me tell history more effectively. So I'm looking forward to, you know, you guys getting established to that degree. Yeah, I'm looking forward to having all of the stuff we have actually catalogs so you can find the thing. So Matt Hawkins asks, how would you feel about a publisher that retains the actual source code, but the foundation offers guidelines for access from outside parties, presumably educators, academics, journalists, etc. That means the burden of the management of data is not on the shoulders of the foundation.

I feel okay about that. However, I don't suspect that any video game publisher can justify any labor for allowing that access. Like, time is money, right? And I don't think this kind of work makes sense for a for-profit company ever. How do you feel like that? There's not a lot of, yeah, there's not a lot of motivation for a for-profit company. need to, you know, there's the whole like what's in it for us thing. And if it's not going, if it's only going to cost them money and there's not a known return on investment there,

then I think it would be difficult to convince them of that. Yeah, profit motivation is, I think, the biggest challenge to preserving video game history because so much video game code and the rights to games and just the development information are in the hands of corporations that exist to make money for their owners and for their investors, and you like you know history and studying it is it's valuable but it's like a kind of spiritual ethical value as opposed to one that you can write down the bottom line so yeah like you see games that are safe bets you know republished infinitely like how many times is nintendo published super mario world like you know it's available on every service they produced it over the past

15 years but you know when you get into more esoteric stuff that or you know stuff that is kind of in rights limbo and they'd have to figure out, you know, we have to pay some lawyers to figure out who owns this, who has the right to share it. Like, where do we draw the line? That's, yeah, there's just no, no motivation for them there. Yeah, and it's not only, you know, from an educational perspective, why you can't look at this stuff, but it's also why most games are out of print probably forever. I think I saw some other questions earlier. There were a few, there was something about a green lantern game. Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't know anything about that. John Aguilera was asking will we ever see the mythical NBA jam Michael Jordan edition? Maybe. Working on it. In terms of like a release or just seeing more information, because I know that's been shown off. I was at, I can't remember who was Mark. Mark Tremel. Yeah, his GDC chat a couple of years ago and he showed like some footage, some video of it. So, you know, now he showed pictures of Kenneth Jr.

I thought he showed Michael Jordan in there. Am I just making that up? I'm pretty sure you are, because he hasn't located this. Well, it was a good dream while I had it. We are actively looking at that right now, John. It's a very nice timing for that question. So the answer is maybe. All right.

One last question, Oscar Strom says I asked earlier, but how does your work apply to games that depend on central servers, digital storefronts, and or change over time, like MMOs. Those might be arguably more at risk than a lot of retro stuff. If we were actively archiving, like, current games right now, like if we had the resources to do that, I'm sure that this would be the nightmare that keeps us up at night. We just aren't in that place yet where we're,

we just can't worry about this stuff because we can't do anything about it right now. So, you know, unfortunately, I don't have an answer that feels good for what we're doing about that stuff. We at the foundation are doing almost nothing for that because we just can't. I think companies are – the one bright side I'll say to that is that I think companies in general have gotten significantly better about archiving their material because they have figured out how to have a secondary market for their product, right? Like, we're finally in the era of, like, HD remasters and stuff like that and of understanding that a hit game's probably going to make an appearance on the next console with some enhancements. So I think companies have gotten better.

They're not just throwing things away when they're done because, you know, when you made an NES game, it's like there's no such thing is selling that NES game again. That was, that was it. Yeah, you're not going to translate that 6502 assembly to Genesis or whatever. Yeah, exactly. So that's the bright side, I'll say. unfortunately, I don't have a happy answer for you in terms of

things that are being done for that. I think a lot of that stuff is actually screwed. Yeah, and for MMOs, I'll try to make you feel a little bit better in that there's, well, maybe this will make you feel worse, but there's really, like, there's no way to make an MMO feel the same way it did when it was active, again, even if you've saved everything. So what I think is going to be useful to historians in the future

for something like that. It's just a whole heck of a lot of like, you know, video experiences and oral histories and people, and blog posts or whatever, you know, people sharing their experiences within that game because that's a, you know, that's more of a community and event-based thing than it is just the game. You know, the game's kind of like the backdrop for it. But if you, if you loaded up World Warcraft 100 years from now and there's no one playing, that's not really World of Warcraft. Well, and actually my wife is playing World of Warcraft Classic, which they put out. She's playing that right now. She was there from day one, I think from beta even on the original game. And she was explaining to me how like this is not the same game. You know, like it is, there are a ton of active people playing Wow Classic, but it's not what Wow was. It's a different game now because the times are different and people, you know, people know the game so well now that they're playing it in an entirely different way than we did back then. So like, there's no. So it's also like a hundred percent old timers who would be playing. And I don't mean old as an old people, but you know, people who originally played

Wow Classic as opposed to there being a mix of new players and, you know, anyone who's going back to playing that as someone who played that back in the day. So yeah, they already know the game inside now. All right. Well, we need to wrap now. I will say, though, that my misremembered anecdote about Mark Turmel and NBA Jam really gets to the importance of what you're doing. and actually, you know, getting the actual historical documents and publications

because even someone who was there at, you know, an event can misremember things and conflate memories. And so you can only go so far with anecdotal commentary. So having the hard documents, the hard copy there is proof is invaluable. So one last question to end this on. It's very appropriate. Edward Velaise says, I'm a librarian and the foundation seems like a great organization. How can people in general help or work with the foundation?

So this is your chance to give your pitch and tell people where to find you online. Kelsey. Kelsey, that's you. Coward. So I love when people say they want to get involved, and you are more than welcome to reach out to us. You can just contact us. It's on our website, but info at gamehistory.org. We don't have like a really great volunteer pipeline.

for a lot of stuff right now. I think there's absolutely, I mean, very soon probably, even going to be a huge need for people who understand library systems help. Anytime we're talking about cataloging our stuff and sorting things, I mean, we're going to need that kind of help for sure. But I also, I don't have anything I can just like hand you right now to help with. So that's something that we're working on in terms of getting more volunteers in here. But also, I mean, a lot of,

this stuff is physical and there's not a whole lot of going to physical places right the second. So a lot of that stuff is a little on hold right now. But yeah, please feel free to check out our website. We're actually kind of going through a remodel of it right now and rewriting some of this stuff because it hasn't been updated and, you know, since we launched. And as we just discussed today, we've changed some things since then. But gamehistory.org and feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or through email just at game history org. Yeah, and we have, you know, a Patreon if you're familiar with Patreon that includes things like Discord access so that, you know, you could be able to hang out with historians like us and I think a couple other people I've seen in chat are actually already in our Discord. So that's really helpful, not only because it's like you're giving us money to be there, which of course money's helpful, but it's also just like it's nice to have this tight-knit group that we can have conversations with so that we're not feeling.

like we're on our own with this stuff, and you could kind of help us solve problems that way. All right, and I think that more than wraps it up for us. So Frank Sefaldi, Kelsey Lewin, thank you very much for your time. Thanks, everyone, for watching. And I will continue to be Jeremy Parrish and hopefully see you next time around.

Thanks, everyone. Thank you.