The Magazines Nobody Kept

In January 2025, the Video Game History Foundation launched free public access to a digital archive of more than 1,500 fully digitised video game magazines spanning several decades of print, from long-running titles such as Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power to short-lived publications such as Girl Gamer and Digital Diner (VGHF 2025a). All of it is full-text searchable. For historians of media, technology, and popular culture, this is not a curiosity. It is a primary source base.

The magazines were never designed to survive. Monthly publication cycles enforced disposability; each issue lost its commercial relevance the moment the next one shipped. When publishers folded or merged, back catalogues were shredded during asset transitions rather than transferred to libraries or archives. Developers and editors treated these objects as operational tools: vehicles for advertisements, previews, and reviews that served business functions rather than cultural ones. The result was the systematic destruction of a print record that documented how an entire medium was experienced, marketed, and understood in real time, its evidentiary value rendered invisible by the very disposability that defined the format.

The VGHF’s digital library encompasses more than 30,000 curated files: not only magazines but also development documents, artwork, press kits, promotional materials, and over 100 hours of production footage from the making of the Myst series by developer Cyan (VGHF 2025a). The Foundation built a custom optical character recognition toolset to handle the bold layouts, irregular typography, and dense colour schemes that characterise video game print media, a technical challenge that had previously made these sources resistant to full-text digitisation (Medley 2025). Phil Salvador, the Foundation’s Library Director, has described the platform as “a powerful tool for video game research with best-in-class discovery features,” powered by ArchivesSpace and Preservica (VGHF 2025a). The infrastructure is not makeshift. It is built to professional archival standards, and that distinction matters: what appears to be a fan project is in fact an institutional intervention, designed to convert scattered ephemera into a searchable evidentiary base.

Playing a game tells you what the software does. It does not tell you how the game was promoted, who was presumed to be the player, or what cultural assumptions shaped the critical response. Magazine covers, advertisements, and editorial framing reveal the gendered and racialised marketing logic that surrounded games at the moment of their release: evidence visible only in the print record, not in the software itself. Frank Cifaldi, the Foundation’s founder and co-director, has framed the problem bluntly. The game is an artefact of design. The magazine is an artefact of reception. Both are necessary; neither alone is sufficient.

That distinction is familiar in media history. Scholars of film, radio, and television have long recognised that the institutional apparatus surrounding a cultural work: its marketing, its audience correspondence, its trade press coverage, constitutes a layer of evidence distinct from, and often more revealing than, the work itself. Yet the preservation infrastructure for video games has, until recently, treated the software as the primary object worth saving, while the print ecology that gave it meaning was left to decay. What was preserved was the product; what was lost was the regime of reception that made it legible.

Cifaldi has drawn explicit parallels with film. In a 2016 talk at the Game Developers Conference, he noted that an estimated 75 per cent of American silent films are now permanently lost, and expressed concern that the early history of video games was on a similar trajectory (Cifaldi 2016). The Film Foundation, Martin Scorsese’s preservation nonprofit, served as a direct model for the VGHF’s creation (Lowood 2022). The analogy is instructive but imperfect. Film scholars have access to studio correspondence, shooting scripts, and production records because the film industry eventually developed preservation norms. The games industry has not. As Cifaldi told Atlas Obscura in 2017, “We’re hitting the point where this industry is old enough that people are starting to pass. It’s time to take this stuff seriously” (Beck 2017). That urgency is not rhetorical. It is actuarial.

The scale of disappearance compounds the problem. A 2023 study conducted by the VGHF and the Software Preservation Network found that 87 per cent of classic video games released in the United States before 2010 are no longer commercially available: a rate of disappearance comparable to pre-World War II audio recordings and American silent films (Salvador 2023). Only 13 per cent of the games surveyed remained in print, with no five-year period exceeding 20 per cent availability. The Commodore 64 library, treated as an “abandoned ecosystem” in the study, registered at 4.5 percent. Even the PlayStation 2, a relatively recent platform with a massive installed base, managed only 12 per cent. As Salvador concluded, “The interests of the marketplace do not align with the needs of video game researchers” (Salvador 2023).

If the games themselves are vanishing at this rate, the print materials that documented their cultural life are disappearing faster still. Studios rarely preserved internal records. Game source code was routinely lost or overwritten. The developer Tim Cain has described being forced by his employer, Interplay Productions, to destroy all personal copies of the original Fallout source code upon leaving the studio, only to later learn that the company had lost the material. In this vacuum, third-party artefacts such as magazines are not supplementary to the historical record. They are the historical record, or what remains of it.

The distinction between an object and the institutional frame that surrounded it is one that historians of nearly every field have learned to treat as analytically productive: how a source was classified, circulated, promoted, or ignored often reveals more about the governing assumptions of a period than the source itself. The pages of Edge, Mean Machines, and Next Generation preserve exactly this kind of evidence. Industry leaders guessed wrong. Fans expressed doubts about the PlayStation’s commercial prospects. Critics reversed opinions about games now treated as canonical. What survives in these magazines is not a polished narrative but the dialectic between prediction and reception: a record of how audiences engaged with a medium whose history has been heavily mythologised after the fact, with the contingency flattened out in retrospect.

John O’Shea, Creative Director of the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield and a historian who has worked extensively with game print materials, describes this as “resistance to linear ideas of history” (Stuart 2025). The characterisation is precise. Post hoc accounts of the games industry tend toward technological determinism: the assumption that consoles and genres succeeded because of intrinsic merit or technical superiority. The magazine archive disrupts that logic. It restores the mess of bad predictions, promotional spectacles, and letter-column debates about whether polygonal graphics were worth the trade-off in frame rate. Even reader correspondence: letters to the editor, fan art, cheat submissions, and documents a participatory culture that existed well outside corporate frameworks. What presents as nostalgia collecting is, read differently, the recovery of a public sphere that commercial retrospectives have largely written out.

As Laine Nooney has argued, rigorous scholarship contributing to what she calls “critical historical studies of video games” is long overdue (Nooney 2013). Nooney’s own work on Sierra On-Line drew extensively on non-software sources: corporate records, regional archives, and oral histories to reconstruct the labour conditions and economic structures behind game production rather than treating games as autonomous design objects (Nooney 2020). The VGHF archive makes a similar move possible on a much larger scale, granting researchers access to the contextual materials that have been absent from game historiography: trade press coverage, marketing language, editorial framing, and reader responses. These are the materials that convert a history of products into a history of culture.

The point extends beyond North America. In Japan, the video game magazine ecosystem was larger, more differentiated, and more deeply integrated into consumer culture than its Western counterpart. Famitsu (originally Famicom Tsūshin, ファミコン通信), first published in 1986, became the most widely read game publication in the country, moving to weekly publication in 1991 and reaching a circulation of 500,000 copies per issue. Alongside Famitsu ran dozens of platform-specific and genre-specific magazines: Dengeki PlayStation, Saturn Fan, Neo Geo Freak, The PlayStation, among others. The VGHF has begun accepting donations of Japanese-language publications, and a collection spanning 1992 to 1998 was recently accessioned (VGHF 2025b). Yet the vast majority of this material remains undigitised and inaccessible outside private collections. For historians of Japanese media industries and the transpacific circulation of cultural goods, the gap is significant. The story of how Japanese game franchises were received, adapted, and marketed in Western markets, and how Western titles were repackaged for Japanese consumers, is largely told through these magazines, and it remains only partially recoverable.

That any of this material survives at all is largely due to collectors and volunteer scan communities rather than to any institutional foresight. Groups such as Retromags and the Out-of-Print Archive spent years salvaging and digitising magazines without institutional backing, absorbing the costs of preservation labour that neither publishers nor libraries were willing to shoulder. The VGHF has since partnered with these groups, integrating what was essentially amateur labour into formal archival infrastructure. Hundreds of magazine scans in the digital library were contributed by community members, and the Foundation has described its platform as “a force multiplier for citizen archivists who have been preserving the history of games” (VGHF 2025a). The phrase is revealing: it converts unpaid labour into a valorised input, folding informal preservation into institutional legitimacy without fully acknowledging the asymmetry between the two.

The Foundation’s broader approach treats game history holistically, encompassing not only software and magazines but also developer notes, promotional flyers, strategy guides, VHS recordings, retailer catalogues, and press kits. One of the library’s flagship collections, the Mark Flitman papers, comprises over two decades of documentation from a retired game producer who worked at Konami, Acclaim, Midway, and Mindscape during the 1990s and 2000s. Flitman allowed the VGHF to digitise the paperwork and digital file backups he had kept in his basement, materials that Salvador has described as “an incredible record of the business of video game production and marketing” (VGHF 2025a). In 2019, the Foundation undertook a five-week archival mission at the offices of Game Informer magazine, digitising over 25 terabytes of historical material: press kits, promotional CD-ROMs, and corporate ephemera dating to the magazine’s founding in 1991 (Reiner 2019). As Cifaldi has observed, “the greatest discoveries we’re going to find are on materials that people don’t know are important” (Lowood 2022). That formulation captures both the promise and the precarity of the enterprise: the most valuable sources are precisely those most likely to have been discarded.

Curatorial practice is shifting in parallel. The National Videogame Museum in Sheffield, which holds one of the UK’s largest collections of nearly 5,000 videogame objects, now accepts magazine collections as records of individual gaming journeys, preserving both the objects and the subjective meaning donors attach to them. O’Shea has described the museum’s mission as one of collecting, preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting video games “for everyone. Forever” (NVM 2025). What was household clutter a decade ago is now treated as cultural evidence. Scholars have already begun drawing on game magazines to reconstruct the gendered and racialised assumptions embedded in early 1990s advertising, to trace how Japanese media franchises diffused across Western markets, and to document the emergence of game journalism as a critical genre in its own right, the contours of a new field rendered visible in materials that no one thought worth saving.

The legal environment, however, remains hostile to the logic of open access. In October 2024, the US Copyright Office declined to grant a new exemption under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that would have allowed libraries and archives to share digital copies of out-of-print games remotely with researchers. The Entertainment Software Association had argued that the industry’s own commercial efforts were sufficient to preserve its history: a claim directly contradicted by the VGHF’s 2023 study showing 87 per cent commercial unavailability (VGHF 2023). As things stand, libraries can digitally preserve but not digitally share video games, and can provide on-premises access only. Books, films, and audio recordings enjoy broader exemptions. The asymmetry is structural rather than incidental: the costs of restricted access are borne by scholars and public institutions, while the rights holders who lobbied for restriction bear none.

None of this is unprecedented. Ephemera: trade cards, pamphlets, broadsides, advertising circulars, have been reclaimed before by historians who recognised that the disposable objects of one era become the documentary evidence of the next. Video game magazines fit this pattern precisely. Their temporality, what they highlighted, what they ignored, how they speculated, is what makes them valuable now. They offer something the games alone cannot: a window into the cultural and commercial world that produced, consumed, and discarded them.

The VGHF’s library has already been used in commercial video game projects, including Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection, GEX Trilogy, Bubsy in: The Purrfect Collection, and Atari 50: The Namco Legendary Pack (VGHF 2025c). It has supported the digital archives of Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Informer, and its materials have appeared in museum exhibitions, including the FMV Zone exhibit at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. The archive is being used not only by historians but by an industry that is beginning to recognise, belatedly, that its own past requires the kind of contextual documentation that magazines provide. The irony is quiet rather than dramatic: the same industry that treated these publications as disposable now turns to them as a resource, having destroyed the internal records that might have served the same purpose.

The archive is open. The question now is what historians will build from it.

Beck, Julie. 2017. “The Holy Grail of Video Game History Is Probably an Office Memo.” Atlas Obscura, 30 August 2017. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/video-game-history-foundation-grail-preservation-ephemera.

Cifaldi, Frank. 2016. “’It’s Just Emulation!’ — The Challenge of Selling Old Games.” Talk presented at Game Developers Conference, San Francisco.

Lowood, Henry. 2022. “Frank Cifaldi: A Conversation on Game Preservation and Documentation.” ROMchip: Journal of Game Histories 4 (2). https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal/article/view/171.

Medley, Sam. 2025. “Video Game History Foundation Launches Digital Library of Old Video Game Magazines, Development Assets, and More.” NotebookCheck, 31 January 2025.

Nooney, Laine. 2013. “A Pedestal, A Table, A Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History.” Game Studies 13 (2). https://gamestudies.org/1302/articles/nooney.

Nooney, Laine. 2020. “The Uncredited: Work, Women, and the Making of the U.S. Computer Game Industry.” Feminist Media Histories 6 (1): 119–146. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2020.6.1.119.

NVM (National Videogame Museum). 2025. National Videogame Museum, Sheffield. https://thenvm.org/.

Reiner, Andrew. 2019. “Keeping History Alive.” Game Informer, 5 December 2019. https://gameinformer.com/2019/12/05/video-game-history-foundation-keeping-history-alive.

Salvador, Phil. 2023. Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States. Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7996492.

Stuart, Keith. 2025. “Video Game Magazines Were Disposable—Now They’re a Vital Archive of Gaming Culture.” The Guardian, 28 January 2025.

Video Game History Foundation (VGHF). 2023. “87% Missing: The Disappearance of Classic Video Games.” https://gamehistory.org/87percent/.

Video Game History Foundation (VGHF). 2025a. “The VGHF Library Opens in Early Access.” 30 January 2025. https://gamehistory.org/vghf-library-launch/.

Video Game History Foundation (VGHF). 2025b. “Japanese Game Magazine Donation.” VGHF Library Catalogue. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/accessions/50.

Video Game History Foundation (VGHF). 2025c. “Our Impact in 2025.” 2 December 2025. https://gamehistory.org/our-impact-in-2025/.