VGHF Holiday Fundraiser Day 3: Retrogaming in 1997
The Video Game History Foundation is raising money for our annual fundraiser this month by sharing cool things from our collection. Today, we're sharing an article from an ultra-obscure magazine in our collection, Digital Diner!
Digital Diner was, in the words of one of the editors who donated his copies to us, trying to be Rolling Stone for internet culture. There were only two issues, but they're surprisingly good. The article we want to highlight today was in issue #2, and it's about the retrogaming scene... circa 1997.
I think it's easy to assume retrogaming is a more recent phenomenon, or even as "recent" as the early 2000s, but this article dives into the growing retro community that existed as far back as the PS1 era! There's some familiar names in this article, including Jamie Fenton and legendary FPGA designer Kevtris. Truly, everyone was yearning for the Good Old Days before they were even that old.
But here's the really cool part: we have this scan because we have already scanned 1200 video game magazines.
VGHF is building a library of video game magazines, and we want to make sure as many of them are scanned as possible. When we receive a duplicate copy of a magazine, we check if it’s already available online. If not, we send it off to a local vendor to scan. This is an actual photo of our first order with them! And with the exception of magazines where publishers specifically forbid it, all of them are browsable online, right now, on the Internet Archive, including this issue of Digital Diner.
We want these scans to be widely accessible, so we’ve donated digital copies of these magazines to community scanning groups like Retromags and Gaming Alexandria to help build their own collections. If you’re the kind of person who reads game magazines online, there’s a chance you’ve already read some of our scans!
So far, we’ve scanned enough magazines that you could read one issue every day for the next three years and not get to the bottom of the pile. And there's another 300–400 unscanned magazines in my office that we're waiting to send off.
None of this would be possible without the support of our community! If you appreciate the work we're doing, please donate to our winter fundraiser! And if you sign up for our Patreon, you can see tomorrow's surprise a day early. For Nintendo fans, it's a REAL good one.
