The VGHF & The Battle to Preserve Gaming History

As a gamer today, you are probably connected to various platforms – Twitch, X, YouTube, Discord, and so on – that facilitate your engagement with gaming culture. Even if you’re not so connected to the social side, you’ll visit sites like TBN to keep up-to-date on the news and reviews of the latest games.

As such, there is a gaming ecosystem online, one which the majority of gamers will interact with, even indirectly. Those interactions can range from watching your favorite streamer on Twitch to using an online gaming nickname generator before heading onto Discord for a discussion. You absorb news and trends from the ecosystem, and (broadly speaking) it remains findable again.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, we obviously didn’t have that ecosystem. We had the nascent gaming scene, sure. But, well, there wasn’t anything close to the level of gaming culture we have today. Yet, for those who wanted to explore the broader side of gaming, the mechanics of the industry, the main resource back then was magazines.

A Moment to Preserve Gaming History

Now, most of us our conditioned to think of the internet as somewhat omnipotent. You would assume that the info about 80s and 90s gaming culture – much of which acted as the blueprint for gaming today – would be found on various history-focused gaming websites. Some of it is, to be sure, but only a small slice of the overall content that was printed across 1000s of magazines that were printed in that era.

Recently, the Video Game History Foundation signaled its intention to remedy that. The VGHF is a non-profit organization that basically does what its name suggests – preserves video game history. In January of this year, it announced a new digitized archive, giving us a glimpse into the pulse of gaming in that era.

It’s not always easy, as many of the magazines were simply discarded – it seems gaming magazines were not treasured like comics or trading cards – but the determination of the VGHF to source and catalog this information is admirable, and it’s certainly important to preserve the history of the industry.

Gaming Media Was Punk Back in the Day

Indeed, it’s important to remember that much of the gaming sector – and we aren’t talking about 1980s behemoths like Sega or Nintendo here – was underground, pirate, punk, or however you want to frame it. What we mean is that magazines, articles, and ideas were being cooked up in tiny offices, even in people’s basements. You can probably draw comparisons with the pro wrestling dirt sheets of the same era.

VGHF has been in operation since 2017, but it is only recently that it announced it would be opening its proverbial doors to everyone around the world for free. Right now, it features 1,500 copies of out-of-print gaming magazines, as well as a broad range of other resources, explaining how games were made, the challenges faced by those working in the sector, and everything else you can imagine.

You can check out more about the VGHF’s work here. But it should be enough to say that its library is being framed as a game-changing initiative for those who wish to preserve gaming history and culture.