At this year’s Portland Retro Gaming Expo, VGHF director Frank Cifaldi had the pleasure of hosting a panel celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System launch. Frank moderated 3 guests who were at Nintendo of America during this time: Gail Tilden, Marketing; Bruce Lower...
2025-11-27 01:02:19 +0000 UTC View PostHi folks, Phil here! As we're heading into the end of the year, we realized we have a LOT of stuff building up that'll be dropping in December. Without giving away the surprises, we want to give our Patreon supporters a sense of what we'll be doing in the runup to the holidays.
In the vein of a post we made a few months ago about Imagine Town Magazine, we wanted to share another story of how difficult it can be to nail down information about poorly documented game magazines.
We've finally finished 2025-11-20 22:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Let’s all learn what makes our Library Director, Phil Salvador, Phil Salvador! Producer Robin Kunimune sat down with Phil to learn all about his life as a youth, an early path to his passions, creating chaos inside the lines, the mental health struggles many face in early adulthood, finding his...
2025-11-12 19:15:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi folks! We have a new video up going in-depth on our collection of press CDs from GamePro magazine.
We put this video together because we've added the next 100 CDs to this collection, bringing the grand total to 200!* We figured this would be a good time to dig more into ...
2025-11-09 18:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Portland Retro Gaming Expo has posted a video of our panel from this year: We Launched the NES 40 Years Ago Today, featuring Nintendo of America alumni Bruce Lowry, Gail Tilden, and Lance Barr.
We're proud of how this panel turned out. It's rare to get this group together t...
2025-11-03 18:26:55 +0000 UTC View Post
We've opened up our newest archival collection: The Andrew Nelson papers! This is actually our library's first collection of narrative design materials.
Andre...
2025-10-29 15:01:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Phil Salvador introduces the new Andrew Nelson papers collection with guest, you guessed it, Andrew Nelson, himself. Guest-host Alex Greenberg joins to chat with Nelson, co-founder and creative director of CyberFlix, known for its 1996 title Titanic: Adventure Out of Time. Andrew discuss...
2025-10-28 20:45:39 +0000 UTC View Post
For our paid members, we have another early preview for an upcoming collection: the Andrew Nelson papers, from the writer and producer of Titanic: Adventure Out of Time.
Nelson was one of the co-founders of Cyberflix, a company based in Knoxville, TN that produced ...
2025-10-23 15:30:03 +0000 UTC View Post
The canonical launch date of the NES is October 18th, 1985, meaning the system turns 40 years old this Saturday. To celebrate, the VGHF has pulled together a once-in-a-lifetime discussion panel with three people who were there to make it happen!
The panel is happening at 5pm at the
2025-10-15 16:22:21 +0000 UTC
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It’s another quarterly update! Host Robin Kunimune talks with Frank Cifaldi and Phil Salvador about our recent work. From Chicago travel to launching Computer Entertainer, from our new Booth-in-a-Box to 4,000 magazines archived, from NES’s 40th to building Lego; come find out just how many ne...
2025-10-14 20:41:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Phil Salvador interviews Dr. Stephanie Harkin, lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) School of Design Games Program in Australia, about her research on femininity in gaming, particularly in girls' lifestyle magazines. Dr. Harkin discusses her journey from media studies to...
2025-10-01 17:48:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi folks! Today we're opening up research access to the William Volk papers, a collection of documents from former Activision VP of technology William Volk.
Backer Blog members have been hearing about the William Volk papers for a while now, but if you're one of our free followers, now's th...
2025-09-30 14:30:11 +0000 UTC View Post
For our backer blog patrons: an early look at the William Volk papers, a new collection coming to the VGHF Digital Library. Historians are going to have a field day with this one...
William Volk was the vice president of technology at Activision from 1988–1994. He was in charge of Activis...
2025-09-23 15:00:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Host Frank Cifaldi is joined by documentarian, historian, hacker, and all around cool guy SynaMax to talk about their documentary Resurrecting Sinistar: A Cyber-Archaeology Documentary. The 1983 top-down space sho...
2025-09-16 19:57:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Library director Phil Salvador here, with an unusual new addition to our digital library.
We've added what we believe is the complete run of Imagine Town Magazine, a ...
2025-09-12 18:42:46 +0000 UTC View Post
We’re joined by pioneer video game historian Leonard Herman, author and publisher of several video game history books including the first comprehensive book chronicling the history of the videogame industry, Phoenix: The...
2025-09-02 15:32:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey folks in the Pacific Northwest: We're going to PAX West 2025 this weekend!
Frank is doing two panels, which will be streaming on twitch.tv/pax.
Launching the NES: A 40-Year Retrospective, with o...
2025-08-28 15:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Phil here again, with some technical processing talk.
One of the biggest collections in our library that we've been working through is our collection of press CDs from GamePro...
2025-08-26 14:00:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Host Phil Salvador is joined by Derek Alexander, of the YouTube channel Stop Skeletons From Fighting, and Zarithya, of the YouTube channel Zarithya, to talk about the fan-restored 16-player mode for the 1991 Game Boy game Faceball 2000 as laid out in 2025-08-20 18:22:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Frank Cifaldi and guest-host Kate Willaert (of A Critical Hit) are joined by Marylou Badeaux to discuss the history of the vitally important Computer Entertainer, also known as The Video Game Update: a monthly newsletter which covered video game availability information and...
2025-08-05 10:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
This week, we're launching a collection we've been teasing for a while. For our community of patrons, we're sharing the details early.
As we've mentioned before, we acquired the rights to Computer Entertainer, a game magazine that ran from 1982–1990, and this Wednesday we're addi...
2025-08-04 14:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s time for a little review of what we’ve been up to, so far, this year. With the official launch of our digital library archive, livestreams of game magazine unboxing and EPROM dumping, the newest collections of Craig Stitt and Kirk Henderson, a Trade Magazine Week special event, and teasi...
2025-07-22 20:40:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Phil here again with an update on what VGHF is working on next!
After a couple loud and busy months, we're taking things a little slower in July so we can work on some larger projects. (And also take some well-earned time some off! Phew!) We've teased some of this in the past, but we figure...
2025-07-14 15:05:01 +0000 UTC View PostVeteran game designer and author Lawrence Schick shares stories from his early 80's work with the ColecoVision, Atari 2600, and Intellivision. With over four decades of experience in the industry, Schick details how he helped pioneer a multi-discipline, team-based approach to game development des...
2025-07-09 17:25:01 +0000 UTC View PostHost Phil Salvador and guest host Colleen Barrett, Rare Books Librarian at UK Libraries, chat with David Carter, Video Game Archivist and Comic Librarian at University of Michigan Library Computer and Video Game Archive, about the work he does in archiving video game material within such a large ...
2025-06-24 10:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
After teasing this for a long time, we're finally ready to roll out Trade Magazine Week!
This week, we're opening digital access to a collection of nearly 400 video game trade magazines. For video game historians, this is some of the juiciest material. And we should probably explai...
2025-06-22 15:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
If you listened to our new episode of the Video Game History Hour, you might've also seen that we just rolled out the Craig Stitt art and design papers! It's the latest collection in our digital library.
Craig Stitt is a former video game artist and designer who worked for Sega Technical In...
2025-06-11 23:01:09 +0000 UTC View PostOn this special video episode of the Video Game History Hour, we sat down with Craig Stitt, retired game artist and designer. Craig worked on games including Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Kid Chameleon, Ratchet & Clank, and Spyro the Dragon. He gave us a tour of hi...
2025-06-10 17:29:17 +0000 UTC View PostHi folks-- Phil Salvador here! I'm currently in Los Angeles for Summer Game Fest and, at the time you're reading this, probably at Super Nintendo World instead of watching the big Keighley event.
On Saturday night, I'm going to be on Giant Bomb's SGF couch! For those who don't follow Giant ...
2025-06-06 19:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post