Saving Gaming's Paper Trail: The Video Game History Foundation
When a game studio closes, the code is often the last thing to disappear. The first things to go are the boxes, the manuals, the press kits, the internal memos and the concept art, the ordinary paper that nobody thought to keep. The Video Game History Foundation exists because someone decided that paper was worth keeping, and that decision turns out to matter enormously.
Preserving the things around the game
The Foundation is a non-profit, started in 2016 by the preservationist and historian Frank Cifaldi and based in Oakland, California. Its focus is deliberately broad: not just the games themselves but the whole world of material that surrounds them. Artwork, packaging, manuals, magazines, development documents, marketing memos, the ephemera that explains how a game was made and sold and received. This is the context that gives the code its meaning, and it is exactly the material that normally ends up in a skip.
Anyone who has tried to document even one machine knows how true that is. For every cartridge there is a box that was thrown away, an instruction leaflet that was lost, a catalogue nobody scanned. Preserving the game is only half the job. Preserving everything around it is the harder, less glamorous half, and it is the half the Foundation has made its mission.
A library you can actually use
Preservation is only useful if people can reach what has been preserved. The Foundation's major undertaking is a searchable online library: high-resolution scans of packaging and documents, source material, and artefacts opened up for researchers, journalists and the simply curious, rather than locked in a vault. That emphasis on access, on making the archive public rather than private, is what separates a genuine preservation project from a hoard.
It is the same principle behind this museum. A collection that nobody can see is just a cupboard. The point of cataloguing, describing and photographing every object is that the knowledge becomes usable by anyone, which is why a library like the Foundation's feels so familiar, even at a completely different scale.
A kindred mission
This is a single-machine archive writing about an organisation preserving the whole medium, and the gap in scale is enormous. But the conviction is identical: that games are culture, that their history is fragile, and that the quiet, unglamorous work of keeping the evidence is worth doing before it is too late. Whether it is one grey handheld documented object by object here or the paper trail of an entire industry, the race is the same, to gather this history while the objects and the people are still here.
You can explore the Foundation's work, and support it, at gamehistory.org. For anyone who believes that what we played deserves to be remembered properly, it is one of the most important efforts in the field.
The Foundation is one of many places keeping gaming's history alive. For more, see our guide to the video game museums worth visiting.
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