Interviewer
If you were given unlimited funding to design a system for storing and preserving digital information for at least a century, what would you do?
Frank Cifaldi
I focus on video game software specifically, in both my personal work and my work at the Video Game History Foundation. Given an unlimited budget, I would focus on what is needed to research history through source material, meaning the original source code, source art assets, et cetera. So I would first of all have a lot of lawyer hours to figure out how to do that.
Interviewer
Lawyers is what I thought your answer might be.
Frank Cifaldi
I would have the best copyright lawyers in the country figuring out how we can actually make this work.
Second, from a tech perspective, I would invest in the ability for researchers to tinker with, build, and play historical video games, to gain a better understanding of what makes them click, what makes them unique.
This is something I personally did for an article on our website, about The Secret of Monkey Island. That’s a game that is very informed in its design by its tools. I learned the SCUMM scripting language it was made with to be able to get in there, tinker, build, and restore cut content. I have a better understanding of that game and where it came from than I would have from just playing it. I would love to be able to share unique experiences like that.We heard from Katie Mackinnon about how thinking of data in an ecological sense could be a key to longevity.
Interviewer
There are a lot of different types of media in your collection, both digital and physical. There are handwritten notes on paper, there’s code, there’s software, there’s graphical assets, the breadth is large. How do you think about processing, storing, and preserving it all, especially over long periods?
Frank Cifaldi
We are still learning as we go. We have to figure out how to prioritize what in the collection is having the most impact on the world. Part of that is responding to direct community asks, or recognizing when someone’s doing something we could help with.
There are no black and white rules for what’s at the top of the list, but we weigh things based on different factors and one of them would be the fragility of the media. So we might prioritize an item that is a game that we already have evidence is being studied by historians, and we have source material that is on CDR, which we know is fragile. That’s probably going to be more prioritized than an object where the content is completely unknown, an unlabeled tape or something that was pressed in a factory, or a format that isn’t as fragile, like paper. Data backup on tape, for example, is something that we’ve come to despise. It’s awful. We have a lot of it that honestly may never be recovered, just because of lack of time.
I would say that for any given media type, we have at least a theoretical way of preserving it in-house. For most of what we have we at least have a path to digitizing it, or if it’s something that it doesn’t make sense to digitize, we have the means to physically conserve it. Or send it off to someone else who can do a better job than us.
Interviewer
I’d love to hear a little bit more about the specific challenge of making a video game accessible that is now a piece of history. The original hardware may be long gone but you might have an approximation of an input controller or a display.
Frank Cifaldi
I think we are currently at the end of the golden age of accessibility to video game history. We still live in a time where you can go to a search engine and type “Nintendo ROMs” and find your way to them. I don’t think that’s going to last much longer. Something I’ve been saying since we started the foundation is we don’t focus on gameplay because the pirates solved it. I don’t know if that’s going to be true much longer.
There’s an institutional knowledge to games. To your point, how a game is supposed to feel, what the controller is supposed to be like, what the output is supposed to look like, a lot of that gets lost and is already lost. In my commercial life prior to the foundation, I produced a collection of arcade games that were originally made by SNK in Japan. We were tasked with making them play on modern platforms. The ability to display the graphics correctly, to play the audio correctly, to accept input correctly, that wasn’t so bad.
But the institutional knowledge that was lost was physical. We had games where the original input mechanism was a joystick that you twisted to rotate your character. We had games where the original feel was that you had three of your fingers resting on three buttons, and you could rapidly press any combination of them. That’s not how we hold a modern controller, we have a thumb over two buttons. So we had to reference grainy YouTube videos to see what the actual play field was supposed to look like, to determine how the industrial designers expected your hands to rest in order to adapt that as best we could to the controllers of an Xbox One or a Switch or whatever.
The ongoing availability of that data and context around them is under question and is sometimes one Internet Archive away from disappearing from the world.
A lot of that knowledge gets lost, and it’s already lost even for things that were within my lifetime. That scares me. I think taking games out of their context like that is a huge disservice to a lot of these titles. Thankfully the concept of a museum and physical archive exists, and that’s how we preserve the intent of these things, but that doesn’t really solve the access problem.
For the most part, for offline discrete games, the ability to play them is not that hard of a problem to solve. The ongoing availability of that data and context around them is under question and is sometimes one Internet Archive away from disappearing from the world.
Interviewer
At least in archival time, the Video Game History Foundation is pretty new. What’s it like being actively involved in building an institution in a field that quite recently had almost none? Right now VGHS is just two full-time employees, but in 200 years, it might not be that way.
Frank Cifaldi
I hope so. At least half of my job is trying to grow us into an institution. Before this I had no fundraising experience. I started this by borrowing the money I needed to file the paperwork. We’ve never had federal funding (back when that was a thing) or any kind of large institutional backing.
It’s just been us hustling, and that’s been good and bad. It’s been good in that we never owe anybody anything. We prioritize our efforts to where it’s actually making the most impact. The bad is that we have a five-year runway at any given time, and that’s not an institution yet. An institution would have a forever runway, right? So it’s top of mind almost every day. It is a constant struggle for us to be able to do the work with two people, but also raise the capital to continue doing the work.
I started it because I felt the need. I was familiar with all of the existing institutions and none of them satisfied what I saw the need was. So we started working, whether we’ve succeeded in building an institution or not remains to be seen.