Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 76: Preserving Game Ephemera

Episode Date: October 10, 2016

Game preservation advocates Frank Cifaldi, Mike Mika, and Steve Lin of The Video Game History Foundation discuss the challenges and obsessions that drive the search for and archiving of the information and materials surrounding the classics. Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

The Sookin Retronauts, the Dark Souls of Video Game Collecting. I haven't made a Dark Souls metaphor on Retronauts before. That's pretty good. So I think I'm a loud one. Considering how often Bob brings up Dark Souls, I think that's okay. I think Dark Souls is more prototype stuff. It could be. So what would this be?

Wow, we can figure it out. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish. And if it sounds a little wonky or if it sounds amazing, I don't know what's going to happen with the auto quality on this one. but I'm recording in a hotel room in Santa Clara because it's California Extreme

and I'm here with a bunch of guys who are at California Extreme but also have a lot to say about this week's topic which is collecting video game ephemera which is a very kind of vague and nebulous topic title but basically we've talked about game collecting we've talked about

sort of presenting games in the best possible way you know, finding the right technology for that. We've talked about game preservation, and this is kind of the next step in that, which is collecting, preserving things that aren't actually games but are related to the games because in a way that stuff's extremely valuable and provides really great insights into the past and into the marketing and sales and distribution and timing of video games, but it's not something that people really make a collection of very often. You know, you'll see someone who's like, oh yeah, I want to have, you know, all the marquees.

for the versus Nintendo systems or you know I want like point of sale posters for all the Nintendo Famicom Disc System games or something but things like marketing materials internal documents like where do you find that stuff what value does it have what value can you put on it who do you get it from like it's you know it's just this really vague and poorly defined area of video game history but one that I think deserves curation and discovery. And so the guys I'm talking to today are very much about that.

So why don't we just introduce ourselves counterclockwise style? So I'm Frank Sevaldi. I've been on the show a couple times. And I am the head of restoration at Digital Eclipse. And a video game, I guess, archivist and historian is what I call myself, right?

Is that what's on my Twitter bio? I think so. Something like that. Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, does sound great, right? It fits, it's apt. So the thing is, The thing about being a video game historian, how do you do it?

You just put it on your Twitter bio. That's what I did. I got to do that, too. I've totally neglected that. So I'm like, Micah, by day I'm a game developer. I work on games for everything out there. But by night, I'm also game preservationist and game historian by hobby, basically. But I work with Frank a lot on a lot of the stuff, whenever I can.

I'm kind of following his lead, like, oh, that's what we should do. Shouldn't we rank? Well, for both jobs, right? Yeah, exactly, for both jobs. But I've been collecting game ephemera for as long as I can remember because I always thought of that as the most disposable thing out there. There's no checklist for it. So I'm like, I would always worry about that stuff.

So that's where my focus is mostly been. And ephemera by definition. Oh, yeah. It's disposable. So it's just every time I'd see somebody getting rid of something or talking about I don't know what to do with this or just toss it, it's like, no, just treat my house as a garbage case. And you've been doing that since like the night.

Yes. Yeah. I'm Steve Lynn. I'm head of platform for Got It. Former game developer, also archivist and historian. I've been collecting since, well, I never got rid of anything from a kid as a kid. So especially past couple years, maybe decade or so, been really strong. And then I've also been on Retronauts before, like Pac-Man and Atari Links. Yeah, you've been a few times, yeah. Have you been? No, you know what? I'm trying to remember. I don't think I have. There was a moment where I may have been briefly on one, but I vaguely remember. Walk past your podcast sucks I think that's what it was I'm glad we could finally get you on And I'm glad we can get all of you guys on

Because this is an area That I find interesting But have no skin in the game I'm very much a person who Likes stuff But doesn't want a lot of it And by definition This is just unruly

It's chaos And that's kind of like Well no I've seen photographs of your place Frank It's very tidy But still Like, there's a lot of boxes and stuff. Well, paper is very compact. It is.

It's also very heavy. Yes. Yeah. When I moved across the country, like, we almost got in trouble because we had so many books that it was like twice as heavy as one of those storage cubicles that's supposed to be. It was like 5,000 pounds instead of 2,500. Oh, God.

They scolded us about that. So, like, I just know I should not get involved in this. Because I tend to have kind of like a, I wouldn't say obsessive personality, but once I start on something, I'm like, I got to keep doing this. I got to go all the way. way we have. And this is endless. Like this would be... Oh, it's literally...

Yeah, yeah. There's no checklist. I can't even imagine. Like, it would drive me crazy. And I don't have time or energy for that or money. So you guys keep doing the hard work. Yeah. My work is a video game historian will be making a podcast where I talk to people with actual hard work. Well, you also do what we do with Game Boy World. Yeah, but I mean, you know, I get that stuff and then pass it along or I borrow it.

Well, that's kind of a word. Yeah, we're kind of in that. The problem is that with the stuff that we focus on, there's not really in a place that they go after. Right. You know, like that's... Well, and also, I was able, like, through, you know, a lot of research

and, you know, checking Japanese wikis and stuff to be able to put together, like, a very firm, rigid checklist and timeline. So I can just kind of follow those rules and not have to worry about, like, what else is out there? Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of our problem, right? Like, every day I'm always finding out something that, like, needs to be preserved. And it's like, damn it.

Like, it's too big. Where are we supposed to put that or whatever? You just don't know. It comes out of nowhere. Yeah. Yeah. So just to get started, I guess the question is, you know, what do we mean by video game ephemera?

I kind of gave sort of like a high level view. But I'd be curious to hear what you guys specifically say and, you know, more to the point, like what you are specifically interested in. I assume it's not just like everything indiscriminately. I mean, maybe it is. But I feel like, you know, within this, there's still like a tendency to specialize or to seek out specific things. Yeah.

So I guess really that the topic just covers anything that isn't a consumer product. Right. I mean, I think that's a pretty blanket statement, but I think it works for what you'd consider video game. That's at the top and everything branches out. Right, right. So like anything that, you know,

was sent to the media is video game ephemeral, like any promotional or sales material, any internal documentation, any internal anything. Right, right? I mean, I don't know, by our definition, maybe a prototype cartridge is ephemeral, right? But I think that's kind of a different. Like, source code would count. Yeah, source code, absolutely.

Documentation, game developer documentation. Yeah. You know, like flyers that you'd get at trade shows if you were a buyer. Like Ian in our office, Ian, who was a programmer on Mega Mad Legacy Collection, actually, the 3DS version. He was the lead. His dad was a buyer for a store. I don't remember which store. Because of that, like Konami and Jaliko and all these other companies would send him VHS tapes with previews of the games and carts.

But like those tapes, those sales tapes are what I'd consider a video game ephemera, right? And, you know, I don't know. I guess what I specialize in, I'm not, I'm thankful that I'm not someone that has a tendency to grab everything because, like, I would drive myself crazy. but, like, I have a filter of myself. I don't know where that filter starts and ends, but I think I have an instinctual filter that has, that's, like, this has information that might be useful to someone someday or has, like, better art than is on the box, you know?

Like, and that's sort of where I focus. A lot of my, like, personal collection over the years, I don't know if I've ever even talked about the magazines on this, show but but uh i collect video game magazines and my focus is north american because that's you know shipping's crazy basically north american game focused uh like game specific so not like pc general with game coverage but game specific magazines um from uh post crash through the end of uh the 90 because uh and and you know i kind of cut myself off there and my personal collection because IGN and GameSpot are still online and still have their news archives online and like archive team has probably scraped that stuff so to me like the news stuff is probably mostly online whereas anything from 99 and before for the most part is not so that's where a lot of my stuff stops but that's just the paper right like yeah i mean i've got um jeremy when

we moved offices at one up i took uh you probably remember i took all of the the electronic press kits that were around and all the old builds and stuff because no one wanted those right and and like this is the style from work yeah yeah yeah yeah but i mean it wasn't even is it theft if it's just going to be thrown out right like no one really cared about that it was just stacks of old tv roms right and zip discs yeah like no one even has zip discs zip drives anymore well it's technically theft because it's company property yeah Did someone... Did Sam actually sign off, I don't know?

It's actually thrown out, right? Once it hits the sidewalk. Well, it wasn't on the sidewalk. En route. En route to the side. There was the pile. There was the going to the trash pile. Yeah, right.

Yeah, see, that's close enough. You were carrying it to the trash and you just went to your car instead. Even if it wasn't going to be thrown out at that point, I can guarantee that it would have been thrown out. It would have been thrown out, absolutely. But, like, those press kids are... And, you know, sorry, like, there's so many...

subject can go down here and I'll try to wrap this up going around the room but like the press kits you know extremely valuable from an historical perspective because these press kits tend to have really high resolution like art from those games that

doesn't exist or you know maybe exists in the IGN gallery for the game shrunk down to like 10% of its original size JPEG compressed yeah yeah and JPEG compressed with an IGN Watermark, you know what I mean?

Like, that's the only way to see that art right now. Or, like, you know, those, the zip disks, and, like, there were five Magneto Optical discs, if anyone remembers that format from, like, old EGM. What's that? Like a Bernoulli disc? I don't even know what that word means. But, like, Sony branded Magneto Optical, like, one of them I got from one up was Space World 97 screenshots that Nintendo sent out.

So, like, I would have had, like, Pokemon stuff. Yeah. Yeah, 10 screenshots of Mother 3. Like direct capture screenshots of Mother 3. Yeah, headed for the trash, you know? Probably pre-Gameboy color, like... Yeah. Yeah, there's some really good stuff.

Like, there's a, you know, like it was still called Zelda 64. Or maybe that was a different disc. I think I have a disc that's just called Delta 64. Anyway, that's kind of where I focus in most of my collecting stuff. And anything that talks about an unshipped game, I tend to grab. Yeah. It's because, like, you know, that stuff is, the most ephemeral of the ephemeral

like any documentation on that game tends to not exist. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a good segue because that's where a lot of my ephemera collection started was in the mid-90s, early 90s when I first started going to trade shows and I was just fascinated by

even the look of press kits. Because I remember the Donkey Kong country press kit was in this green forest box that had like Velcroy open up and everything inside was really nice and high production value. And so I kept all that stuff when other people just kind of pull out

what they wanted and throw everything away. But my focus primarily is actually on the ephemera surrounding game development and the creation process of games, because I'm really fascinated about the people involved in games and how they came up with the game ideas and all the stuff. So I have stuff that's like, game design

documents, artwork from game development process. Like the one thing that a good friend of ours, Brett Pulliam, gave me, was from a Congo Bongo design kit that was like the original design documentation that had artwork done to kind of illustrate what the game would look like and how

it would play and stuff and type written on the back. because, like, what each level would be like that, and I love stuff like that. Is that the original or those copies? It's an original. Wow. And there was, I think Brett founded at, like, either California Extreme or one of these kind of shows. It was California Extreme. Yeah.

And it was, like, in a bin. I know. It's those bins. So, I mean, we'll get in this in second. But, yeah. A lot of these, you know, arcade operators or, you know, production companies will just dump off into ops, and then it's, it shows up in a plastic tub that you need to dig through at California Extreme.

It's amazing to me. So I focus a lot on that. I have things like clay characters from like the Neverhood games and stuff like that or even like the actual figurines from the set of the thing and I don't even think

a lot of those guys still have those and I would just ask them for that stuff when they're building it. Even down to like stuff like McFarlane Toys did the metal gear figures and I had an opportunity where they're getting rid of stuff and they're getting ready to toss

the Psycho Mantis original sculpt that they use to design the character and then 3D scan and then do whatever. I'm like, why would you toss that out? So I have like that sitting down there so things like that and also I'm interested in the business aspects of like what led to

companies forming and this sort of thing so I have a collection of fax exchanges and all this stuff because it's interesting to me to follow that story and have that history and connect the dots between how Will Wright went from like Radon and Buckling Bay to creating a company Maxis around some city and what was Micropolis before and all stuff

and then having all the source code and all the stuff around it so you can really tell the tale and see how like some of the biggest games in our field and industry here or we're formed and created from simple ideas or just mistakes or accidental business adventures and you kept some really like sort of unrelated to that stuff but you kept some interesting ephemeral like that that that that uh that uh big lots flyer i just saw it oh yeah this is great like he kept a big lots flyer from when they were closing out the

Atari inventory that they bought so you know this is like you know nes era like yeah late 80s early 90s right but it was literally games advertised for a dollar yeah yeah like these games are a dollar these are two dollars and these are three dollars and i run into people all the time like even back then it was so amazing to me because it blew my mind that this was even happening because to me that was like heaven like you know to go and buy a total full system for 24 bucks a 70800 and then buy every game i wanted yeah that system was four years old at that point yeah exactly right it was mind-blowing so like it was such an impact that i kept the flyer for years and i knew i had it somewhere and i was digging through stuff i posted that flyer on tour i took a picture and put it on twitter and

it's one of my like most shared and largest impression tweets i've ever put out which it blows my but shows that that stuff, if I had not kept that, like how many people were interested in that? People around the country knew that. Yeah, maybe there's a big lots flyer collector somewhere. Yeah, exactly. But that may only be the one last flyer out there. And Steve, you have clay figures too.

I do have clay figures. So in terms of my ephemera, I focus a lot on Nintendo. And originally, for me, it was all the merchandising material. So like the kiosks. So I have all of the kiosks that Nintendo. at least the playable kiosk. And then I've recently started adding the ones that are non-playable. It's just for display purposes only.

Like the M3, which was replaced by the M-83, or 93. And then I actually got into collecting paper through Frank. So I had always gotten like CES and E3 flyers and stuff like, you know, I went to the first E3 and so I had like all the Polygon man. I'm like, oh, they got rid of this and all that stuff. But then the more I talked to Frank about magazines and paper, I started realizing how much I was exposed to it in just overall collecting. And then instead of just looking through games and prototypes,

I would look through these bankers boxes and like, okay, what's in here? And a lot of my personal collections focused on early stage Nintendo. This is early to mid-80s. So Nintendo NES release press release, things like the games used in the Magnavox via Nintendo trial and then to what Frank mentioned earlier

I have the original clay figures Tetris figures that were used in that issue of Nintendo power and so it's the models that they use in the photograph which bought from Howard Phillips

yes they got from Howard Phillips who kept his clay tetris representation of himself yes do you remember that issue is Howard and Phillips as Tetris figures Yes. I mean, Howard and Nestor. Howard and Nestor. And, yeah, so a lot of that internal company newsletters where they talk about shipping out all those Dragon Warrior copies and things like that.

So that's really been my focus, but now it's, I'll look through anything and we can get into this, but part of it is just realizing, all right, what's important and what's not. And a lot of that just requires that breadth of knowledge. You have, is this important or not? and you just sort of, well, this is probably close, and then you can filter down after that. And we can never, I mean, I say this all the time. We can't know what's going to be important, like even five years from now, right? But, you know, I think to not drive ourselves crazy,

you have to have some kind of internal filter. Yeah, there's times when you're just walking through a show and you're like, this is, no, I can't do this. Just walk away, yeah. There's 20, like, little motion activator controls and, like, one of these, no, I don't even care. Yeah, because I can't do it. Yeah.

So that's where we spoke is. So maybe this is kind of an obvious question or has an obvious question or has an obvious answer, but why is this stuff valuable? Yeah, I mean, to me, you know, I get interviewed about video game preservation kind of often. You were the first person to ever interview me about that, actually. Yeah, the first returonauts I was on in like 2006 or something. But to me, preserving a video game, like I think most people just think of that as the binary code that makes up the game. Like, is that binary code reproduced one for one? Yes, that game's preserved.

I don't agree with that. I think a game is more than just the code. I think we'd all agree with that. I think a game is the story that surrounds it, the development that went into it. You talk about source code, which is like the rarest of the rare, but like comments in source code can tell you so much about...

You see the DNA of a game. We found Goof Troop source code in Resident Evil. Yeah. Then you realize that's a McCami game, right? And like all these things where it's like, you see the DNA of how this evolved into something else and where the origins of these games come from. And, you know, it tells you a lot just about

the nature of game development in a time and a place. I mean, like, you're still kind of using Game Boy Code once in a while, like, in I-TARP and stuff, right? Yeah, exactly. Really. But, like, the marketing of a game, to me, is a huge part of that game. Yeah, it's not the product that the developer made. It's the marketing team. But to me, like, that whole thing is a package.

Right. And, like, I think part of that, honestly, started from my own nostalgia. Like, I kind of realized that I might be more nostalgic for game marketing than for games sometimes, you know, like, I'm more nostalgic for Nintendo Power than I am for most Nintendo games, you know. Or, like, you know, I was a Sega Genesis kid because their stupid marketing really got to be. So, like, video game marketing was such a huge, important part of the culture, and I think preserving that's really important. And I think it's understanding the environment in which these games existed, right?

So a lot of times, like, oh, I can put in Sonic the Hedgehog. But then you read like through marketing material videos and print ads and everything like that, you can actually realize, all right, this is why, you know, Nintendo made Play It Loud, right? Or like all these weird game-wide colors and like, you know, Rarshart test like ad campaign. So I think that it puts things into context that is lost when you're just playing the game. Yeah. But even through, I mean, you see as a game was being developed, it was also influenced by marketing and the reactions. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There's. We've seen early versions of games and look through Soros on some things, which I can't really mention some of these games, because they should never, if they were what they were at that point in time before marketing put it out there, they would never have shipped that because there's some awful stuff in there that had to change for it to actually become a shippable product.

A lot of people don't realize that games up until probably the final stretch are most often very terrible, and they're trying to fix them all over to the last point, and then something magical happens, and it turns into a good game. But a lot of it's influenced by the reaction they get from the marketing of the game and what people are reacting to once they realize what the game is and that sort of thing. Yeah.

So one thing, I mean, along with the paper, is the stories. And so if you want to talk about ephemera, you almost... People are ephemeral. Yeah, people, right? And it's getting, you know, everyone, well, not everyone, but a lot of people who are there in the early days of the formation of this industry are still alive and, you know, still able to tell stories. And that's the clock we're racing against because now we're trying to talk to all these people

and find out how these things went down and stuff. Because they're not used to being talked to about this stuff. Yeah. And they're also, you know, they're getting older. This young industry is not young anymore. Right. Well, you know, the paper, I think what it can do is help guide the questions that you want to ask the individual. Yeah.

Right. So you mean like, okay, I read about this prototype and then you asked the programmer. Like, do you remember that? Or like, you know, if it's an unshipped game or something, right? Right. Like, a lot of people, times, unless they, like, we're working on it every day, like, people don't remember it. Like, someone in sales, like, oh, I kind of remember bashy bazook. You know what I mean?

But, like, if you have all this ephemera and metabolism. material, and you can sort of paint a picture of like, like, for example, I hope, so far anyway, on eBay, I'm the only person who collects CES show guides. And what's really interesting about those is that they'll have a, often for each company, they'll have a list of brands or products they're promoting at that show. And they'll also have the names of people who are like the contacts for that company, which is extremely valuable because it's better than LinkedIn. But like, if you get someone and sit them down for oral history and you can sort of paint a picture of like what was going on in the company that year that's going to start

unlocking memories for them right right oh yeah we were pushing bases loaded too that year so uh oh right bashy bazook was that weird you know what i mean and then um and i'm just like that's i i have not interviewed anyone about bashy bazook more before basher but uh yeah it's just the first unreleased game to come to mind or whatever but like but it fills in gaps like there's a lot of you'll see games that were announced with code names and so you can only guess of what those games could have been, but then when you start following the paper trail, you realize they're probably just porting this other game, they don't want people to know

they were going to release it as that. Yeah. So they put out a fake name or whatever, but they were like queuing up their plan, and the only way they could publicly put it out there was to fake a name and put it up and do that. But also, a lot of game developers who work on these games from a long time ago, their names were obfuscated from the development journals. So it's like

using this paper trail, too, you start to piece together who actually worked on the game. You could tell that this person worked on a game with this person before because you've got all the paperwork, and you kind of do the old, like, movie thing where you're looking through microfiche, all this paperwork's like that, where you're connecting the dots and you finally draw a line to, like, this person had to be the person who worked on this game. You make the

cold call, and if you're lucky, that is, you've nailed it because you had all the evidence. Or, like, you know, something I often do, and this is leading to some kind of project someday, is get as much info as I can about the unshipped games for the NES, and we've talked about how, you know, why I find that so

interesting. And, like, okay, just here's an example of something I just learned recently through a ephemera. So Kung Fu 2 was announced for the NES twice. The first time was in 1987 and the second time was in 1992. That 1992 version was a localization of Spartan X2, the Famicom game. But did they announce that same game five years before? No, it was a different Kung Fu 2, which I always suspected, but it wasn't until I went to Frisco, Texas and spent four days in the National Video Game Museum's paper archive going through

flyers that I found a flyer from 1987 from it's Iram right that had a little thumbnail image of Kung Fu too and it was you know the Kung Fu dude with like this blue vest on

like not vest but like tank top over like white clothes and it's like oh this is like vigilante no it's almost vigilance but it's not quite it is in fact, a port of Kung Fu 2, which is an unreleased arcade game that was only discovered last

year as a board. I don't know if you've even seen it. You have seen it. Yeah. So it's like, oh, it's like, you know, painting that picture. It's like, okay, that game didn't come out because the arcade game didn't come out. So, you know, there's, yeah, so just digging up all this paperwork and just stuff that people tossed. I mean, that was like, you know, you're a buyer for Toys R Us at CES and people are just handing you their garbage You know, it's like advertising the games And most people just tossed them

Yeah But that whole like the name The same name, Kung Fu 2, but two different games Sort of in the process there I mean we ran into that when we were at a talk With the Lucas Arts guys Yeah And we were talking to Eric Wilmunder

Who just asked him if he had any old Really old canceled games or anything They ever worked on Which led to him saying he had an old hard drive For his Atari 800 Right When he was working on stuff for Atari even And so that led to us finding

And him telling us that he did but you never thought to do anything with it, was Star Raiders 2, which at first a lot of people were like, well, that came out, but no, it's the actual real Star Raiders too. The one that came out was just like, was it last Starfighter and renamed.

But he worked on the true sequel, which is amazing, even by today's standards, it was mind-blowing technically. And so that was able to come back out. Through just a small conversation, if we didn't think about Star Raiders 2 and just think to ask even deeper questions,

that would have just sat on a hard drive and maybe died off and rotted away had we not push really hard. So those kind of things are, you've got to really think on your feet. And it's finally online now because someone else did it because we're too busy. Yeah, we're too lazy to get her there. We didn't dump it. It's not lazy.

Yeah, we did dump it for them. But yeah, somebody did a nice story and got it out there. And speaking as someone who doesn't, you know, do all of this, you know, hunting for ephemera, like the work that you do is really valuable. Like the Kung Fu 2 thing, you stumbled across that and posted about it on Twitter like a week before I did a video history on Kung Fu. So I was like, wow Here's a little bit of trivia I can add to the video

So it was fantastic Like the links that we go Like last year at California Extreme I mean a year before Like all three of us and a few other people With Brett Oh yeah the Atari We heard the Atari building

Was being demolished Where they built Where they developed ETE and this So we drove from the show over there And one of our friends climbed down to the fence We went and grabbed a whole bunch of pieces of the building for us

Because we've got to have Piece of this building Because they're getting ready to haul it all the way Yeah so they said like they're demolishing the building and we have to get over there and it had already been demolished but there was the sort of detritus around and as a security fence were like this isn't going to stop us from this thing so yeah we have this like chunks of the Atari building and it's such a weird piece of ephemera it's like why do you have this piece of concrete yeah like sitting on

your shelf it's like that's a part of the entire reason that you have an ET card that literally smells like like poop yeah because I went out there Alamogordo and we dug that up for that documentary. I didn't even think about how that would smell but it's the worst smelling thing so no zip lock can hold that smell so it's like I've got three layers of zip lock over this thing in a box taped and then that in a bag and it still

reeks. It's that bad. That's how awful. The metaphor for the game itself. But it's one of those things where like as a result though there's so many people want a piece of that building who work there and stuff so I've been chipping away. It's like a big thing I have that we've pulled out and I'm like trying to be soft to get out. Howard

needs this and this guy that worked in the building I think he was in the warehouse and wants one? Yeah. Well, we talk about, like, there's no checklist, but what's interesting is actually, I worked in a video game trade-in shop in the early 90s. This is an ES to Super Nintendo era, and that list of the games that we would take in for trade

was my checklist, because things like Mike Edler's list really hadn't gotten out there. It was more people trading things over, like, postal mail. And then, you know, Funco Land and all these other places started listing games that would show up in sales, Richards, and those are maybe things that we can start looking for, right?

Okay, did that really exist, or was that... Yeah, exactly. Is that the code name for something that came out later? Or, like, if you go on Google groups and search old news groups posts, you will find, like, NES lists that have fun-shift games in them because people didn't know

because they're just looking at, like, mail-order lists and being like, that's the list. One show, I forgot what the gentleman's name was, but he ran one of the back catalog, old, early-day Atari-era magazine, back catalog list. I think it was video livery or something like that. And I was always fascinated as a kid.

I'm looking at games like Foxbat and all the stuff. I'm like, I can't find anything on this online or think that. And then you finally disclosed me. He's like, oh, we just made up stuff because we just wanted to get people excited to keep looking and waiting to see if the game's coming out. Because like, they knew stuff was coming. So they just make up names and then swap them out when new games actually were real. So I'm like, damn it. Like, I've been looking for 20 years for Foxbat materials.

And he just like made it up one. Or like I have an example of that, which is, you know, I maintain just privately a database of the unshipped N-E-S-K games in one of the fields that I try to keep tabs on is do we have a primary source that this actually existed or is this like maybe just a rumor? And so there was one game that was just on mail order lists called Baby Gangster for the NES, which is a great title. Yeah, I'd find it to me. Right, it sounds, my immediate assumption is unlicensed, crappy, whatever, or just made up, right? Like another yeah, yeah, be bisai or something, baby gangster. Um, but, But then I went through, and this is also from the collection of the National Video Game Museum, actually.

I went through, there was a binder that Nintendo sent to customs, to U.S. Customs, and part of it, and it was to help stop counterfeit material from getting into the country, and part of it was a list of third-party licensees and their titles, and under Vic Tokai was Baby Gangster. primary source confirmation so I now have the primary source so like SD Golgo 13 no that wasn't in there

but there's some weird stuff no that could have been oh it could have been yeah yeah yeah it's like the crib silhouette and two babies one of them like trips on the yeah

yeah but like another one on that list that there's no source of anywhere else is Karnov 2 is listed on this thing that, you know, so at Nintendo, at some point, Data East told them we're making Karnov, too, and it went on a list. I think it even has a product code and stuff. But, like, you know, that's, again, piecing together, you know, that's, like, one

piece of paper and then another one that, like, combined, you know, tells us, okay, there really was, at least on a piece of paper somewhere from Vickokai. There was a tent. Like, even if they never made a game, they had intention or at least published intention somewhere of making a game called baby gangster. So if and when I talk to people at Vic Tokai, I know if you ask them about baby gangster. And it's probably remember it, right?

Actually, the one guy I talked to did not. It's like, what the hell's that? It could have been just like the method, too, because we knew they would have to lock in with Nintendo. They're going to have X amount of products that year. They would have to, sometimes if they didn't have anything in mind. Placeholder titles. Yeah, we're going to have a sequel to one of our hits

so Nintendo doesn't give them our slot. Or Vic Tokai in Japan actually made a weird game called Baby Gangster. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Never know. Or, like, you know, what you were saying is, like, even the mailor people would make up titles that they would assume. Yep. Or, like, I think Vic Tokai, actually, in particular, like, announced a lot of stuff that they didn't even start it.

Because I think a lot of times at CES, you would announce a title and, like, a description for a game that you hadn't even begun developing yet just to see if there was buyer interest. Exactly. If buyers are like, okay, we want that. Oh, that sounds great. Yeah. Get your orders, and then you're like, okay, we can now raise money against that. They ordered it the game. We better make it.

Yeah, we can now, like, say we got that money guaranteed. get a loan from the bank and make the game. So I had that conversation with Howard Phillips when he talked about, like, where to track some of this stuff down. He's like, look at those third-party developers because they were the ones hustling, right? They're like, we want to find a hit game. We want to get some of this funded. So they're just pitching everything.

And maybe, you know, at CES, they're like, hey, baby gangster, baby gangster. And then all of a sudden everybody's like, oh, where's this baby gangster game? Babies are big right now. Gangsters are big right now. Dick Tracy is huge. Yeah, did you see Dick Tracy? Like, imagine Dick Tracy with babies. Right.

So there's a lot of that and how much of it is sort of first-party confirmation or primary source confirmation. And that's why I focus a lot on Nintendo paper because this is from the company. It's printed there. At least something was communicated there. I think we all agree that the NES unshipped library is really fascinating. It is. Because, again, and maybe we've talked about this on the show, I don't remember, but the NES was such a weird case where everyone is making so much money that they could afford to just throw everything at the wall and see what's stuck.

And with the licensee restriction, of course, they can only release five games a year. So there were a lot of games that were completed and were fine or good or maybe even great. Some of them, I don't know, not yet. Haven't found those yet. Right. But, like, you know, like really, like decent games. They weren't, like, canceled midway through development because they weren't working or anything. These were, like, actual NES games that, you know, if the Butterfly flag,

lapped like a second later, you know, could have actually come out. Yeah, because though that restriction of how many titles it could release a year, actually shelved a lot of games. Because, like you said, they were making a lot of money, so they were developing all kinds of games at once. Like, Capcom might make 10 games that year and then ship the five. Yeah, and we have reason to suspect that Capcom has a lot of really great NES completed games that are just sitting dormant somewhere if they still exist.

And just because of that process, they were a company that would develop these games and then decide what they could ship or what they should ship and what year. And yes, we have asked. we definitely have asked in our relationship and that's how we have the clues we have we haven't confirmation yet um but yeah i mean like yeah sorry go ahead that's okay i mean this kind of gets into my next question which is how do you even know what to look for i mean obviously you know things that are personal interest to you like the nes unreleased library that's a good starting point yeah for a lot of these other things like who would think to look for you know like you

mentioned, you know, the Star Rader 2 source code or things like legal documents for court cases. Like, what makes you start to stop and think, oh, you know, what would be really interesting is, you know, Exhibit A from the Magnobics. Well, I think in both of these cases, like, we lucked into that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That was total luck for me. I mean, it was, um, yeah, how did I even do that? So, that was that French auction. Yeah. But it was before that. So what happened was there was an eBay auction, so this is specifically the Magnivox versus Nintendo trial stuff

ephemera that I got. Yeah, we didn't go through we didn't go to a court and dig through that. Yeah, right, through court documents. Yeah, I guess what happened was there was an eBay auction for, I think of like an excite bike or something that had that had the Magnavox v. Nintendo sticker on it

and everybody was like, that's weird, like where did that come from? And then realizing what that was and it went for, I like $10,000 or something crazy. Because it was a couple carts. It's the black box cards I don't own from the trial was that first batch. And then I started doing research and realizing that there was an auction in Paris

where there was a collector who had accumulated a lot of this from Ralph Baer and was selling it off. And so I was doing telephone bidding for these. And I just obliterated anyone who was trying to bid on that. But what came along with it was not just the games, but a lot of pieces of paper. So it's Ralph Baer's testimony on why Nintendo infringes on Sanders Associates patents. And it's like hand-drawn diagrams and everything else. And that was kind of a bonus, right? It just kind of, it came in there.

And then we were able to piece more together. Like, you know, on Christmas Day, and I think it's like 1985, like I know what Ralph Bayer was doing. But it's also, I mean, this also goes. to the fact that, like, you recognize, because of your understanding of game history and the history of this whole industry, what's important, what's not, as you're on the fly finding these things. So you're able to, like, quickly determine, like, this is important, right, to set this aside and sort of stuff, because you've got a vast knowledge of, like, key points in the development

of the game industry. Yeah, I think there's some stuff that maybe is real easy and obvious when you're going through, but then there's when you see this tremendous bin, and this is, you know, like the Comicobango stuff, right? you're going through arcade flyers and just manuals and everything else and then that's where you just have to almost like speed through it and be like I think this is important I don't know what this is and just you create this sort of subpile that then you sort through a little bit later and likely you'll miss something

but at least that's how I've gone through it I'm like hey I don't think this game came out or like I don't remember what this is you regularly keep up on like the great mysteries of the game industry too so yeah like in the back of your mind you're like oh these mysteries have yet to be solved. Yeah, like on the show floor right now, you know, someone's got a cut out advertisement for Bouncer. Like, we all know Bouncer. It's like, oh, that's like the most famous, like, lost arcade game.

So, you know, you know, I didn't grab it because $40 for a clipping out of a magazine I probably own, but. Yeah. I've got it if you need it. But, uh, yeah, and, and I mean, sort of the digital version of that, and I think we've maybe all done this, um, maybe not you, Mike, but like, just have saved eBay searches. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

for weird keywords and just check them all the time and like that has led me down you know rabbit holes and paths that I wouldn't even think about not just eBay even Craigslist so who we work with Kevin Wilson remember that time he found out there's a computer store that was his doors were shut in like 87 I think yeah it never opened and it was a computer store that just like sat dormant nobody's been in there since and so they put up on Craigslist that you know first come first serve take whatever's inside so we go over there and just a small group of people that turned into a larger group of people, but we go in, it was a moment in time. There's, like, the Commodore sign up on the wall that lit up.

There's all these machines. There's work tables with stuff still out. But then boxes and boxes of software, I got all the Infocom games in the shrink wrap. I got the don't copy that floppy teacher's kit. Yeah. VHS tape. I don't think anybody knows this exists, but it's like it has, inside it has a workbook for students and all stuff, and it's all crazy stuff. These things that all came from, like, 88, essentially, 87.

That, you know, that was just because he had a robot search on Craigslist all the time. and it popped up, like, oh, here's some Commodore stuff. And, like, the stuff we got out of that, we've been mining since. Like, there's all kinds of crazy, like, again, the kind of sort of stuff where it's, like, sent out to dealers of, like, here's what we're planning next year. And here's the products that are going to be releasing on stuff that, like, I've been kind of tweeting about in the last year, all of stuff that came out of that. Yeah, well, so to Frank's point on eBay save searches, one of the other things that you can do

is if you see an auction and then you end up winning it, it's actually asking the seller if they have more. Yeah, absolutely. they don't realize like I have oh yeah I've got that whole box I didn't think the rest of that was worth it and in some cases there's things are even more valuable maybe not from a monetary perspective but definitely from a historical perspective well I did that with that Nintendo comic that's right that maybe I shouldn't tell people I have a bunch of but I'm just going to do it I guess um a seller had um the Nintendo preview comic so you remember Valiant did Nintendo comics there was a preview edition it was only like eight pages or something He was really small. And I'm not even sure how it was sent out. I think it was bundled in a comic magazine. And so, like, most of the copies you see have, like, ink stains from the rest of the magazine or something.

But this was, like, a flawless copy. And I did a buy it now for $30 and asked him if he had more. And he's like, yeah, I've got 15 more. We found them at the printer we just bought. So I have, like, the first Nintendo comic book ever, you know, in uncirculated, condition, which doesn't exist outside of my pile, I think. But, like, yeah. Well, that's the same thing with, like, those badges we found with the Nintendo

Championship. Yeah, you got the NWC badge. I was just at, like, Flea Market in this guy who used to be, used to generate and create patches for people, just had this little pile of Nintendo World Championship patches from 91, right? Right. 90. Yeah.

And so I knew right then, I'm like, well, how much for these things? Like, a buck each or whatever it was. I'm like, I'll take them all, whatever. But, like, this came from the same kind of thing where this guy made. these probably for Nintendo, these were just leftovers in his place, and it was like, there you go. Or like the guy on the factory line who sold copies of NBA

Elite, not knowing that they were... Yeah, well, I mean, that was like this, yeah, yeah, just stuff like that that... None of this is ephemeral, but, you know, right, yeah, I guess... It is, yeah, yeah, because it's... Well, I guess it all, it's all femoral. Right, so I don't know if it goes to our definition of ephemera.

You know, I might be changing topics here, but, like, yeah, we're getting all this stuff. Yeah. Right. But, like, it's just kind of sitting around right now because archiving things is very difficult. Yeah. And that is one of my questions. Okay. which is, is there a central repository or resource for this material?

Frank Spring. How do you pilot, present it, catalog, it, share it? Well, it's funny you should ask, because you were talking to three of the five founders of a nonprofit that has not been announced yet, where we are the Video Game History Foundation. So this is, I've not talked about this at all until now, but I actually stepped down from my day to day with Mike.

to focus on game preservation as a full-time job. And so one of the projects that we're going to start with that we're building now is a repository of probably focused mostly on PR and marketing video game material because that's not a resource that exists right now and it's just kind of spread around and all these disparate little attempts at things. And yeah, that's, you know, I don't want to talk too much about, like, features or anything because we're still scoping it out. But, like, you know, we are in the process of getting all of this ephemera in a place that is, that is, you know, duplicated everywhere, you know, like maybe even mirrored onarchive.org or something. But, you know, just getting that lossless material somewhere that's safe.

And even if it's like, and this is something we got to figure out, like the three of us. And I should say that the other two members are Simon Carles, who runs GDC and... And it's heavily involved inarchive.org. Yeah, and Chris Melasinos, who ran the Smithsonian Art of Games exhibit and, you know, is like-minded like us, right? He's been in the industry for a long time. It has always sort of understood the... Yeah, and he's been, I mean, he's been pushing for this for a long time.

Yeah. He finds every way possible to make this stuff happen. I mean, and, you know, he's like stuff... This has been true of all of us, I think. just kind of inherit stuff because people know us as like that oh like there's this guy you know he's better than throwing it away right yeah and uh i think we all recognize that there was a need to have like an organization and like a business card and a logo yeah instead of being that guy i know i'm really happy to hear that this is happening because when we did the retronauts kickstarter one of my thoughts was it

would be really cool to use this money to create like a non-profit yeah and you know work on video game archiving and preservation, but I also realized, like, that's not something that we specialize in and have the knowledge to do. So it makes me really happy to hear that the guys who do have that knowledge and expertise and connections and everything are doing this because it's something that desperately needs to be done. Yeah. That's great.

Well, one thing, you know, Frank and I have had, and actually Mike as well, we had these conversations of we were collecting things because we thought this is important we need to preserve this. But now video game collecting has become much more mainstream in terms of activity. So it's like, okay, you know, that copy of Donkey Kong Jr. is going to be preserved by someone. And so a lot of this is not really about ownership. Right. It's like, we don't want to have like, oh, are they going to open a museum?

No, that's really not the intent. It's really getting it in, doing the preservation in terms of scanning it, archiving it, getting things documented, sharing that information. Or put in a permanent home? And then finding a permanent home for it, right? Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, there are places that are actual, like, funded museums that have librarians on staff and people who can preserve paper. Put them in, you know, like, the archival boxes so they don't deteriorate. Oh, in a way better way than we ever could.

Yeah. That's the thing. I mean, we're careful. I mean, like, you had a flood in your basement. Right? A flood mass. That happens. Yeah, it's like that act of God sort of thing is, like, a lot less likely to happen if it's in a proper place.

Yeah. And there's so many wake-up calls that I think we've all had. I think the biggest wake-up calls have been Ralph Bear dying. It's right. People are dying now. It's starting. And we're fortunate in that Ralph Bear was recognized for his contributions and had been interviewed so many times. Yeah.

And he was, you know, that book of his is so valuable. And like, I love the way it's written because it's written from the perspective of like, you know, not an egotistical way. But Ralph was just like, I recognize that what I did is really important. So while I'm still here, I'm going to tell you everything I remember and show you everything I kept right and like that's the tone of that book and that's like that's such a wonderful thing to exist which everybody could do that because there's very important people out there who don't have that sort of thought about right selves or what they've worked on in fact a lot of them discard what they've worked on in the past well i think it's it's his inventor mentality yeah exactly

it's like i document everything yep because otherwise i can't have a patent yeah so like we're really fortunate with ral yeah but like you know again he's he died like that's that's that you know our founding father, you know, in a lot of ways. So it's only going to trickle down from there. So a lot of this oral history stuff. And, you know, the foundation isn't obviously just archiving ephemera and making an archive. Like, really, we don't ultimately know where this thing goes. Like, year one, this is probably the biggest project.

But, you know, ultimately we're sort of hoping that having a nonprofit that is a foundation for preserving video game history will lead to things like us raising money to give grants to people who are preserving video game history in some way that fits our standards or whatever

but you know like it's it's just one of those things that's obviously needed and someone needed to step up I don't know that I'm like you know the most qualified CEO of a nonprofit but like we'll see but also it's about getting the word out like always but we've already had a few people reach out

who are working on games today realizing just because of the things you've said on podcast that we've all said on podcast that I need to get this somewhere and they're funneling it to us because they're asking us how to archive they have which is amazing to me because we've worked with so many companies where they're like oh we want to let's reissue this game and they're like great get us the source code

and they're like we don't have the source code and then we have to track down people who worked on the game who probably stole the source code or whatever yeah so we've had to do things like that but now that happens with grim pandango right Yeah, exactly. Like, Grim Fandago remasters is because Tim stole a company computer. You know, like, but that stuff had to happen.

Yeah. And so, like, now that awareness is getting out there, it's awesome that we're getting from people. Like, how do I preserve what we've just done? But we've killed ourselves on for, like, the last four years. How do we now preserve it? Because they weren't thinking about that before. And that's something that, you know, we're also talking about as the foundation, you know, writing up standards and helping companies do that.

And, you know, like, I was just actually talking to Matt from Double Fine about this yesterday. and like how maybe I should come down there and talk about how they're doing it because like they're actually among the best in terms of preserving their things I think partially because they're working on these LucasArts's remakes and they were they understand the value yeah yeah so thing um but yeah and that's that's that's what we're doing and you know that's it's it's the beginning of the answer to how do you actually save these things to me is uh don't just be hey I know this guy Steve I'm going to show up with a couple bankers boxes

and just take through there but like hey go to gamehistory.org which I own my god that was available game history.org is our website doesn't exist right now but maybe but it's there's putting in people's heads like getting ready to archive something or get rid of something that they should think twice about it right right like there's these guys who will just come do it

yeah they can just pick up the phone like you've done so many times you guys have like somebody's called you and you're just like you rent a truck and go Yeah, whatever you need to get. Well, that happened to us with IDOS, right? Yeah, exactly. When Crystal Dynamics was moving offices because they still had the giant office that had IDOS U.S. downstairs, I mean, we got an email that day. It was like, hey, we're about to throw away thousands of games. Do you want to come get them? Yeah, we just stopped working, got in the U-Haul, and like, but that's so disruptive. It's very disruptive, but like...

We're like in the middle of IDARB or something. Yeah, we're trying to ship a game. Well, you know what? Like, we've got to preserve somebody else's history. So, you know, not just having a brand that you can turn to, but, like, me just, like, being like, look, I can not make money for a year and survive, hopefully. But, like, I can do this full time. You're not going to disrupt me. So whatever you need, I'll just come do it.

Yeah, so that's, you know, the beginning of our solution to that. And I think we're going to, as this thing grows and becomes public, and as we start having more conversations with people, I think we're going to start to understand what the real needs are. Exactly. And, you know, we hear all different kinds of things. and obviously we can't do everything. Yeah. You know, like, our friend in Seattle thinks that the biggest need right now

is have a place where people can put things that you lock away and no one's ever going to see. Yeah. You know, it's like, yeah, that's kind of important. It's like the seed archive for, like, video games. Yeah, yeah. It's like, like a place people can put things anonymously that no one can see for 50 years is like what he thinks we need.

And it's like, yeah, maybe, but I don't know. That's maybe like for, you know, military secrets or something. But there is a lot of legal things around it. So there's some stuff where it's like, they can't even legally let the public see it. Right. But they also don't want it to be at risk to be thrown out. So they're looking for a solution. But maybe our job isn't necessarily to be, like, to like own that space and like higher security.

But maybe our job is to figure out a solution for it. A solution for it. Yeah, right? Exactly. Yeah. In fact, I actually was just on, I was talking with other people about, you know, the SNS-Playstation. I made a cash offer for it but at the time they were probably thinking

are we even allowed to sell this right? Is Sony or Nintendo going to come after us and I think that's But imagine they get contacted by a non-profit called the Video Game History Foundation That can assist them and like sorting that out Or even acquire the damn thing Yeah I mean in fact just last night

I was meeting with folks that were like Yeah we were cleaning out our office It was an editorial publication and we had Deb kits and all this other stuff there was the guy in the room who was saying oh we need to ship that back to Sony yeah and then the other person saying like Sony doesn't care about this 10 year old dev kid right yeah and so you know that push pull like okay what do we do and then who do we who do we turn to on advice just think just thinking about alice at one up sending back all those

DS cards like they don't care yeah no we have to mail these back ah yeah the worst thing that happened during that EGM move I don't know if I told you about this was there was a box and I opened it up and it had tapes and they were like I don't know eight inch tapes like camcorder tapes from it must have been from old EGM or something and like I opened the box and the first one on top just said game gear footage like oh cool these are probably there's probably good stuff in here and I put it down it was just gone the next day it must have gotten trash because who would take that home but yeah I'm sure like oh this is garbage yeah um but yeah um but yeah office moves, I've been saying this for a while

I was becoming my cashphrase, our office moves are the biggest threat to video games. Well, that's where I got all that Atari stuff, right? The Tengen Tetris prototypes, this was, so it was, it's two big boxes. Actually, it was at California Extreme where I got those boxes. And we opened it up, and it was basically

the licensing group of Atari, and so someone would license an IP, and then they would send them what they had made. So it's like hard driving across like every single platform or Zibots. But then in there was, like, all these prototypes, and we're digging it out, and then we're like, wait, this is the actual development of Tangin Tetris, and you can see the progression across ROMs, right? And that was the office move. Atari cleared out, and this was in a closet, and a guy opened the closet, saw these boxes and thought, oh, Steve might want these. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. So, you know, and I've always just thought, if you could brand, like, Lost Levels was an attempt to just branding, like, this is where unreleased games go. you know, I didn't really take it as far as I could have, but you know what I mean? Like, I've always believed in, like, branding something and being at dot org or whatever. And that is just way more powerful than I know this guy. So, you know, that's, I think, the biggest advantage of this nonprofit. So this touches a little bit on another question I had, which is the element of money.

I mean, just from doing, you know, Game Boy World and Good Intentions and that sort of thing, I've discovered, whoa, you know, trying to get these games and just take photographs of them. And your packaging is prohibitively expensive. And it would be really cool for me to have just like a library of complete Game Boy games. But at the same time, I have to, you know, buy my wife health insurance and things like that. So I can't really keep these games. I just kind of like bring them in, document them, send them out, you know, sell them on eBay or whatever. But with this kind of stuff, you can't really do that.

There's no, there's no churn for... Well, technically I might be able to, but I feel like even even if it's... if I scan something, you know, I think that physical archive still has to exist, to your point. So that means it's basically a one-way money road. Yeah, yeah. And that seems, it's a lot for, you know, people to bring, you know, to put on their own shoulders. Right, but a nonprofit has a lot of tax benefits, you know, like, like if and when I'm salaried, that's tax free, you know, and, and you know the company itself isn't taxed the same way as an individual either so and also a company a nonprofit organization a 501c3 anyway and that's still pending because the applications

in which is why we're not like public yet actually but a 501c3 can take donations from people that they can write off so we can start like crowdfunding money that like is you know like the people write off and we can sort of, in theory, if that's where the organization goes, I don't know, if the organization goes toward acquisition, which we haven't talked about too much yet, because there's no need to because we have so much stuff. But like, if we go in that direction, like, I think for all of us, you know, that expense can be, not be our personal expense anymore, right? Or like, you know, the $200 a month I'm paying in storage right now just for video games

stuff that like I don't even want to own you know that I'm just keeping safe like you know that can I can transfer that to this company then like I'm going to actually like all my magazines and stuff I'm giving a possession to this company I'm donating my stuff and that's another thing too right like like we can once we once we've sort of figured out all the the number crunching and stuff that I don't know if any of us already could have but like when we get to the point where we can explain to people like yeah you can sell it or you can write it off and here's the paperwork we'll do that right now give them the examples yeah like you know that might sway people more toward if they have something you know really valuable and they need money like

it you know we might depending on the person obviously but like you know there's now a place to donate that stuff and maybe it's for maybe maybe maybe your write-offs less than you might get on open market but you know the point being like that could sway people who you know have rare material and medical needs you know what I mean but the unfortunate thing too that we've learned is Like, you'd think that a lot of these companies have rich histories. Would be willing to donate or give some sort of help to preserving their own history. Yeah. But even that's hard.

It's like pulling teeth. And, you know, a lot of them, especially the larger companies, have what they call their own internal archivist on staff, whatever. But all that person really does is just hold on to the consumer-facing products. Yeah. Not actually the end of the e-a's okay. Yeah, they're pretty good. Among the companies, EA is pretty good.

But even they are, you know, challenging to get them to support your cause or whatever because, like, they have their own efforts and that sort of. thing and they just don't you know that there haven't been that many opportunities yet where like they've really lost a lot of revenue because they lost something yeah you know and and you know maybe that would be a wake of call for something but for a lot of these companies they see value potentially and especially with some of the conversations recently where they see value in archiving the legal aspects of you know who owns what who licensed from who yeah and that sort of thing because some of the biggest challenges for them from business perspective is like they might want

to reissue a game that they know is going to make a lot of money yeah but they have now lost the materials for who did the music. Do they own the rights to the music? The source code. The source code. Yeah, and all that kind of stuff. But I mean, we've had, you know, as digital clips, you and I have had situations where, you know, we're ready to, like, go on a game.

And we're like, we don't know who owns every part of this. Exactly. Or, like, we don't know that, you know, even, like, some of the packaging in ephemeral material. It's like, we don't know if we own that. And finding that out is way more expensive than. Yep. Exactly. whenever people were.

So maybe to a sort of separate point, the actual value or how much this stuff goes for, and it varies wildly, and it just depends on if you find it, right, if you see it. So, you know, for me, first party Nintendo or, you know, training docs or anything like that,

whenever that shows up on eBay, there's enough people with shared searches that it's very likely I'm going to get into a bidding war. But then there's other stuff that just kind of comes out of nowhere. Yeah. And the description's really bad, and it's really just kind of lucking into what, like knowing what it is, knowing that that's important.

And then you get it for like $5 or like $10 or something like that just because of the cost of the shipping. And so maybe through this or making people aware that, hey, pieces of paper can be valuable. But it is valuable to only a very small number of people. And the three of us and some of the other folks we know that they collect paper, we're buying it because we want to preserve, not because I want something on the shelf.

Right. Right. And maybe there are people. It's like, you want to walk it away in a vault or I want to put it, you know, somewhere where no one gets to see it. Yeah. And we're never, like, I'm not going to scan this because I have the only copy. Like, that's what we're trying to avoid. I haven't run into that yet, you know. Like, I haven't, I haven't run into the prototype problem.

Right. Where, where something gets, like, decimated in value because there's a copy of it. It's dumped. Right. Yeah. Like, I don't, like, I don't think anything's going to happen if we dump your news releases. I mean, I already post it. them on Twitter anyway

everybody's seen all of that I think as more people come into it you could run into that problem though sure yeah yeah I mean actually you know I have run into that come to think of it I have run into that with in the Atari days Parker Brothers in particular but I think other

I think Atari also you know at trade shows they'd like print up promotional boxes or games that ultimately wouldn't ship right Incredible Hulk yeah and I've had you know I've had long argument about like we should scan that Hulk box in high-res because that's like a valuable piece of ephemera

and the counter argument is you know no then people can reproduce it and we as collectors will never know the difference and so we need to never scan this in a way that can be reproduced because we don't want to go down that rabbit hole where we might lose money and like I totally get that mentality and it's unfortunate but like that could start happening if you know just as long as we never make a checklist then people will never collect this story.

And the very beginning of this conversation is probably where it's like, the fact there is no checklist is probably a good thing. All of those, God, all the old newsletters for the third-party publishers for the NES, for example, those used to be worth nothing. Right. And then Nintendo Age people

on the forum started documenting them and now you can't get them anymore. You know, because like now there's a list. Right. All the issues of newsletter X, right? Yeah, it's like, oh, like, Warrior World, the NX newsletter, like, forget it. Right. You're never going to know they had that.

Yeah, yeah. I had like the Sunsoft. Sunsoft, uh, Sunsoft King's Time News, I think. Yeah. Yeah, and the Square had one, FCI had, like, every Tax-Anne had one. Yeah, there's a ton of, like, almost every American third-party publisher for the NES had newsletters. Um, I've not found much of historical interest in that, you know what I mean? But they're still really cool.

Yeah, they're really cool. Flip it, right? yeah what else you got um i mean that's that's kind of the bulk of it um i mean that's that's kind of the bulk of it um and i would like to sort of wind down now so well actually really quick, if you don't mind, sorry, the, the, the, uh, just going back, because one of our biggest projects out the gate with this thing is probably a marketing slash PR archive, right? Um, uh, sort of the importance of that being around, you know, is, um, people who are writing historical retrospect doing stuff like you do. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to be in touch with you guys. Yeah, I'm writing about

Ishido. Do you have anything about Ishido? Uh, yes, in fact, at the library of Congress, I happen to know at the Library of Congress The copyright submission for Ishido They have photos of the original prototype board game That was used for the DC is only like four hour Four hour dry from where I live No, that archive isn't coal pepper Virginia

There ain't nothing else in Culpepper It might actually be closer than DC It might be for you, yeah But like for the stuff you're doing you know, this archive, like, you know, I think the value of high resolution, clean, color, corrected scans is kind of a, you know, people don't understand the value of that. But like, for people like you who are creating material with it, or like even me, like, I'm creating material right now out of the stuff I got out of a trip to North Dakota to do a story I'm where in North Dakota is Carmen San Diego. But like, you know, having that, like, there were. pictures of these things online but like having a nice high-risk scan of the box you know i think i think that i think that makes the material the people like you and i produce uh you know it makes it look better which i think gets more eyes on it which i think promotes the idea of video game history you know

the more we can do to polish these things the better and so you know that's that's a big part of of having this arc yeah i went back and actually redid my first game boy like first year game boy book because I just took some photos and didn't bother to do any perspective correction. And I was like, I started doing perspective correction for the next year and was like, oh, that first year stuff looks really shoddy. Yeah, I actually went back and redid it

and republished it with a larger size and it looks better. Yeah, and it's not, you know, and again, I don't think it's just like, oh, it looks better. I think you understand that it's more than that. It's like it lends more credibility to this thing we all believe in.

It helps spread the word, which in turn helps get eyes on our organization. which in turn helps get things to our organization and preserves video game history. Well, if you look at like Evan Amos, right, the sentence is doing the photograph systems, right? In like professional settings, every stock photo of a video game system

comes from him. That's right, every news article and everything else. And then, you know, we hooked him up with the National Video Game Museum where he actually took pictures of their collection, right? Like the weird rare stuff. He probably did like the Barbie Game Boy Color prototype. Yeah, he spent like three days,

constantly photographing systems, right? And that was his opportunity to do that. And I think actually even NBM guys at first were like, well, well, people want to come to the museum if they can see it online, right? But then realizing like, oh, this is actual promotion. Yeah, I mean, I can see photos of the USS Enterprise model, but I want to go to the Smithsonian

and see that they've restored it and actually be in the presence. There's something like, you know, a photo of a Mark Rothko painting is like, oh, there's some colors, but you go and see a Rothko painting and you're like, there's colors. Yeah, yeah, right.

There's a difference. Yeah, right. Yeah, I don't think preservation cheapens the value of what's being preserved. I think it just gives greater access to it allows more people to understand and appreciate it and doesn't diminish the original product itself. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I love when people do

is just scanning print ads, right? Or like, you know, Sears catalogs or, you know, sale flyers and everything, people do those, like, Radio Shack, like, hey, here's this, like, 386 SX for $5,000 or something. It would help put things into perspective. But then, you know, watching the old toy commercials or game commercials, this is what marketing was. Yes.

So one quick thing, you know, in the press release for the NES, the first words are watch out America. Which Steve is holding. Yeah, sorry, I'm holding, yes. It's Watch Out America. Space Invaders Beware. Japan's leading manufacturer of electronic games has just landed here with the NES. yes. So there's a couple things in

there, like Space Invaders reference. Right. And then the fact that they had to introduce who Nintendo was. Yeah, Japanese invasion. Right, yeah. Kind of language. Okay, what's going on? Yeah, I think some of the taxes, like the Japanese believe or whatever, in the press release.

Yeah. It's just a weird way of saying it. Yeah, totally. So, yeah, just to wrap up, and you guys can go as crazy with this as you like, but I'm curious to hear what what each of you thinks is the most interesting and most precious thing in your in your collections respectively and maybe the most interesting tale of acquisition you've had like

what's the most extreme length you've gone to to find something I instantly have an answer for the first half of that it's not so much an extreme length though I think the best thing in my house and this has been on its way to the strong for like three years now just haven't mailed it out is I have the editor's bound archive of a new newsletter called, well, depending on what was in vogue at the time or not, it was either called the video game update or computer entertainer. And this is a newsletter started in, I think, 82 or 83, and it ended in 1990, and it was run by these two sisters in L.A. who had a mail order Atari business, and they were

like, it was called Video Magic. I don't know if you remember Video Magic, but yeah, they were, or video, I think it was, no, it wasn't video magic it was video Swapper maybe I don't something I know video something but I was thinking

video magic because an eBay auction just ended but it was eBay there's these two sisters who had a mail order business and

and so we're always on top of what the new releases were they were coming out and like when they were coming out and they were sending out and they were sending out catalogs but like one of these catalogs

they added a little bit of editorial material and then that became a monthly like zine, like a video game zine that reviewed almost everything. And there was these two sisters in L.A. One of them was in the music business.

I think she worked at Warner Brothers on like their black music label, and she was like working with prints and stuff as her day job, and at night she had this video game newsletter. But what's really fascinating about that newsletter, there's a couple things. One is that because of their mail order business, because that was their primary motivation here,

they were on top of release dates. And every issue in the back had every game that was coming out for every system and the date that the publisher told them when they called them that month. You know, so, like, they had a calendar. And so, like, for games that never happened, like, you'll see an announced date

and you'll see it slip, slip, slip, and then disappear. And they'll usually have a story about it disappearing. Like, we called Nintendo, and Return of Donkey Kong is no longer on the docket. but and and and that's really actually have something in there about return of donkey con or was that yeah yeah yes absolutely yeah um and like there's stuff in there and but the the second even more interesting thing i think is that uh console game industry in america we all know crashed uh like 83 84 ish um and then we didn't really start start seeing video game magazines again here until

89 with uh game pro maybe was 88 i should know that like a game pro and computer entertainment was that first before game pro i think so yeah i think i think i think the i think game pro was like like yeah right run same time yeah yeah but um yeah that's when you started seeing those again like and that's spun off romantic or something which is a computer yeah um but uh but the only people who are reporting on console games between like 85 and 88 were these two sisters uh at least that we found so like that entire dark period you know that we have we actually have like month to month news documentation about the stuff. So, like, when Nintendo had the AVS, like, they were there, and they published the photos of the AVS and a write-up about what it was and, like, the launch games and stuff. And, like, you know, when Nintendo redesigned it to the N-A-S, they're like, look, that A-V-S thing's different now. And, like, release dates for things that we didn't have, like, master system release dates in America don't exist outside of this newsletter.

you know um you really need to get that online it's it's scanned i just uh yeah you're right that's that's something that i personally need yeah it's it's it's an ongoing project emailing you a lot an ongoing project and that's you know again one of the reasons that i needed to just make this full time is i just have a never-ending backlog of like i don't want to just put those out there like i want to talk to them a little bit you know and like i do have them scanned but not in a great way but they're all scanned and in an OCR searchable way

but like I need to they're kind of janky anyway that's like a project along with a bunch of others but that is the best and then as far as most extreme lengths I'll come back to that you guys have been thinking about that one of it is like I don't think I've gone to very many extreme lengths because

usually people just want to give this stuff up because taking up space or whatever financially I have but oh yeah it's like spending a lot of money on things here and there for sure but like this discussion yeah sure we've flown yeah i just went to north dakota yeah exactly exactly okay actually yeah i'll go back to that yeah okay but the uh as far as like things to this conversation there's a couple things just come to mind i can't really say which ones are the most like crazy or whatever but like favorite i think favorites here like uh i do have one section in my basement

that's just a whole bunch of like floppy disks and hard drives and all stuff that i've accumulated from people who've worked on games in the game sheet who are just like i think there's stuff on here Yeah. And so every so often I go in there and I try backing this stuff up and find out what's on it. We always find something cool. Yeah. Like we found like the Micropolis source code and all that kind of stuff. Micropolis being the code name for SimCity.

Yeah. And then like. Mike just has that. It's just like I didn't even know I had it until it was the other day when I was going through stuff. I'm like, well, there it is. So that's always fun. You might have the tools that Will Wright lost in his house fire. In fact, it's even labeled tools.

So it could very well be in stuff there. we've been backing that stuff up and setting up those things for backup and that's always fun to go to but then i also have uh this one that i find this because i'm a big fan of Atari in the early arcade days and Atari 2600 but a distributor in the Bay Area just so happen to have the bound Atari marketing department um collection of every mention in the United States in a newspaper or any other article about anything Atari it's like his scrapbook basically yeah essentially for the marketing department so they had these volumes of it and he somehow got his hands on that and he somehow got his hands on that and then he gave it to me and so I was going through this and there's like small town whatever Florida yeah I gotta show this to you

there's just Xeroxes of every possible mention of Atari I want to see that because what you start to find in those things are like small local game specific newsletters that there are no mentions of online

yeah so in this case it's a lot of stories so it's like who knows where they come from right so they'll talk about like some kid who broke a high score in asteroids to whatever and then you know even articles about like Atari does

you know the first whatever ever And if a news article was saying Atari did that first, probably a good chance they did. And now we know. And I want the Nintendo. Yeah. So wouldn't that be amazing? And but that was eye opening. I've been through those and just like I'm always opening up and going like, wow, I didn't know that or whatever.

But like I didn't even know that. There's so much information that just doesn't exist online. Yeah. Right. It's only in this old stuff. And then we could go back and look at the greater context. Because they have, they wrote in handwriting on these Xeroxes like every work came from, what year, month or whatever. And it's all there.

So it's really good to. But I think we all believe that the more that's online, the more other people can start piecing these things together. Because we can do it all ourselves. And so, you know it out there. Someone's going to have a beautiful mind it, right? And you're like, wait a minute. Yes, exactly.

Totally realize what the connection is. It's the only way to make progress. Yeah. Yeah. For me, actually, it's, I mean, there's physical things, but the most valuable thing for me has actually been talking to these people that I was reading about in Nintendo Power or who were behind the scenes, right? Like Howard.

Howard's really cool. Yeah, sitting down with Howard Phillips. and you know we're talking about we're going over the game master oh my god you tell my 10 year old self like by the way you know 30 years from now you're gonna be gonna go to howard's house yeah we're gonna be like sitting there talking about old Nintendo stuff we're like you know just sitting down with don James and talking about the early days of Nintendo and then the random story coming out where he's like oh yeah I'm the voice of the punchout like I'm the announcer we're like wait has that ever been said do we know that I don't know yeah it's like oh yeah it was me and the other guy and we picked the best

voice sample. And so learning those things are just like we talk about oral history there's just so much there in terms of like physical pieces I love the ABS for sure that I have because yeah I mean like that's you know what Nintendo was going to step forward with

and then obviously the court case stuff is I just feel it's weird that I own it right? You know when I'm holding this it's like how like what confluence of events happened to where this ended up in my collection right? And then these are like people

lore is holding it up it's like this is Nintendo infringing on patent it's like what it's crazy so I think that those are probably my favorites in terms of like greatest lengths probably financial I think is the biggest one

and then yeah like traveling to meet some of these people and then actually doing the exchange yeah and the greatest length thing real quick for me is just a North Dakota thing because it's funny because so there is a game called where North Dakota is Carmen San Diego which is kind of an obscure footnote

in Carmen San Diego history but I've always been very interested in this because Carmen San Diego is a franchise that we all know. Like everyone of a certain age knows Carmen San Diego. And there was this weird one of it was where in the world, we're in USA, we're in Europe, we're in North Dakota. But not everybody knows that North Dakota exists or what it is.

Right. Like a lot of people, yeah, that's true. And so it's always just been this weird footnote on Wikipedia. There's a little more now than there used to be. But like I got in contact with someone who's in education in North Dakota who's spearhead the project because it was obviously you might imagine funded by the state as like a special

game for them and I had been in contact with this guy and you know I had a I had a quick phone interview with him that was like not a very good interview and you know he didn't really I don't know if he just didn't trust me or what but like you know I had this interview and it's like all right well you know if you're still in contact with these other teachers I'm working out of the story I'd like to talk to them and like he just kind of wasn't responding to emails so This documentary crew, not Area 5, a different one, is doing this series on video game culture stuff. They want to talk to me about lost levels.

And they wanted to come to my house and talk about lost levels. And I was like, yeah, lost levels is cool. But let me tell you about this North Dakota thing. So my extreme length is that I convinced a crew to fly me out to North Dakota with them and made them arrange to get all the teachers together in a room so that I could talk to them about this game and get the ephemera that they have for it. and get that all online.

Yeah. Well, actually, were you drunk with power? No, because they, yeah, I felt very depowered immediately when the first day

was a 12-hour shoot of me driving and going to locations because it's a friggin film crew. It's a lot of stupid, like walk over here and quip. You know, this maybe the one in terms of the greatest link

that all of us have flipped for, it's the time. Yeah, right? I mean, going through, Like, how many hours have we spent flipping through pages or bins or just talking about I can feel it on my finger? Yeah, I mean, I'm getting paper cuts and we don't even have anything in front of us, right? And so just scanning, you know, all those hours where you're just trying to get stuff out there. And I would imagine that you all feel like I used to, which is like, man, if I didn't have to do anything else, I get so much done.

I don't feel like I've made a dent. Right. Like, this is all I do now, and it's still just endless. And so, yeah, fine is. Yeah. Such is the nature of passion project. Yes. Yeah.

All right, guys. I think that's more than enough. I appreciate you taking the time out of your California extreme experiences. And just for. you know, Steve bringing in some of this cool stuff for us to look at. Sorry listeners that you can't see cool stuff on the podcast. That's just how it goes. But trust me, it's cool.

It'll all be online. It'll all be online. It's all online. So why don't you guys tell us where to find you online and look at your cool stuff? That's right. Well, I was going to say, like, I don't have a product right now, and I've not even talked about the org before now, but

like, depending on your air date, there should be something on game history at our org, at least explaining is that hyphenated or No, game history. It's one solid word. Yeah, I was very surprised it was available

but otherwise we're all on Twitter at Frank Sevaldi I'm at Mike J. Micah I'm at Stephen P. Lin I think that's it. Yeah, yeah. Twitter's the best.

Yeah, Twitter's handy. You'll see us posting. The Tumblr honestly was like a science experiment for what this non-profits website will be. Interesting. That's what, game preservation?

Game preservation. observation.tumbler.com. Whatever Tumblr is. Tumblr's not enough. Right. And, you know, there will be some sort of crowdfunding thing happening probably around on this air as I imagine. Okay, cool.

And then, of course, for Retronauts, you can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com on usgamer.net, on iTunes, on social media as Retronauts, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, we have a Patreon to help support me coming out to California Extreme with an iPhone to talk to people. on their hotel rooms and so on and so forth. So please consider donating a dollar or two each month. That'd be awesome. No, give it to us instead.

Give us a little and give them a little bit. We're here first with our Patreon. Anyway, yeah, thanks, guys. I really appreciate it. Of course, you can find me personally on Twitter as GameSpite. And, of course, check out usgamer.net and gameboy. Dot world. Anyway, I think that wraps it up for this very cool episode.

Again, thanks, guys. Thanks for having. I'm looking forward to seeing your site launch and I'm looking forward to scraping the things that you put online for purposes. That is the entire point. It's going to be amazing. Yes. And I really appreciate it.

So that wraps it up. We'll be back again next week with a micro episode and two weeks from now with a real episode. Attention Retronauts listeners. If you'd like to meet us in person, and of course you would, we'll be doing a panel at this year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo in beautiful Portland, Oregon. On Sunday, October 23rd, we'll be holding the Retronaut's 10th anniversary panel at 3 o'clock p.m. in Auditorium B, and of course you will need to be an attendee of the Portland Retro

Gaming Expo to attend. But it doesn't stop there. Later that night, from 8 o'clock to 10 o'clock p.m., will be holding a private Retronauts event at Quarterworld, located at 4811 Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland. Attendance will be free, not counting Quarterworld's cover charge, but to get in, you must print out a ticket from the event's event bright page and bring it along with you. To find the event bright page, head on over to Retronauts.com or our Facebook page at Facebook.com slash Retronauts. It will be pinned to the top until the day of the event. We hope to see you there, and remember, you must ask before touching us because we are very sensitive boys. Remember that's Sunday, October 23rd in Portland. Be there or not be there.