In Spring 2016, I took part in a rather unusual archaeological dig. There was no dirt, no trowelling – in fact the excavation didn’t even take place outside. It was just me, in my childhood bedroom, digging through old copies of Official Nintendo Magazine and realising that I could map my childhood obsession with video games from the stacks hidden in my bookshelf. Opening up an issue from February 2006 I found a feature lauding the mysterious new ‘Nintendo Revolution’ console and a caption jibing “Good looks and great to play with. Revolution sounds like our ideal girl.” It’s a window into a different time. 14 years later and some things have changed- we didn’t get a Revolution, we got a Wii. I’ve grown up. Games journalism (for the most part) has too.
Back in 2016 someone else was also rifling through some old stuff in their house, but their discovery would draw more attention. Dan Tiebold found the last known existing Nintendo PlayStation prototype in his dad Terry’s attic. The console represents a turning point for the games industry; Nintendo and Sony were to collaborate on an add-on to the SNES. Nintendo infamously snubbed Sony in 1991 when it announced it had instead made a deal with Phillips. Sony would go on to release its own console, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Fast forward to 2020 and the Nintendo PlayStation was once again in the limelight as Terry Diebold put his up for auction. On March 6th, Greg McLemore paid $380,000 in total to get his hands on a piece of hardware that had been touted as priceless. As an archaeologist, I’m familiar with the buzz that can surround individual artefacts, and the cognitive dissonance on display in auction houses putting the hammer down on ‘priceless’ objects to the highest bidder. While I’ve been intrigued by the billing of the Nintendo PlayStation as a fable turned to fortune, I wondered what video game historians and preservationists made of the furore surrounding it.
Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Videogame History Foundation, succinctly describes the piece as a “view into an alternate timeline.” Frank has been working in games preservation for almost twenty years and founded the VHF after identifying the gaps in the field that needed to be filled. “Things like working with games developers to preserve their original source code, and a library of complete video game magazines,” Cifaldi explained to me over Skype, reminding me that my trove of magazines is tiny compared to the thousands he’s carefully collected. When I ask him about the historical value of the Nintendo PlayStation, he understands that people want to see it preserved but tells me “I don’t think historians can extract more stories out of this physical object than they already have.” The console has been photographed and analysed to the point that it’s been bled dry of new data. Given Cifaldi describes his work on video game preservation as “stopping the bleeding rather than re-inventing the wheel,” it’s not surprising he doesn’t consider the Nintendo PlayStation as a top priority for preservation.
Like Cifaldi, video game historian Carly A. Kocurek believes that “ephemera like magazines, flyers, promotional merchandise are profoundly important… A lot of my work is going through tens of thousands of pages of magazines. It’s extremely glamorous, I assure you.” Kocurek is an associate professor of digital humanities and media studies at Illinois Tech, and author of the book Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade. A key argument of the book is that the gendering of video games as a masculine pursuit was never inevitable, but was shaped by young boys’ greater access to public gaming in arcades, the association of video games with competitive male-dominated sports, and the idea that technological skill was a male attribute. I wondered if the hype surrounding the auction of the Nintendo PlayStation, itself a public game for the prize of influencing video game history, reflected the techno-masculine competitiveness discussed in Kocurek’s book. “On the one hand, I’m glad people are excited about video game history,” she continues, “on the other hand, I think about what half a million dollars would mean to any of the institutions really doing the hard work of preserving games.”