Episode description

My guest today is Kelsey Lewin, co-director of the Video Game History Foundation, the non-profit dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games.

In 2017, after graduating college, my guest helped curate an Atari-themed pop-up exhibition at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Two years later Game Informer enlisted her as a volunteer to digitize the magazine’s entire archive at its Minnesota headquarters. After five weeks of intense work, she became the Video Game History Foundation’s co-director.

Described by the New Yorker as “compact and laser focussed”, since then she has sifted through thousands of old documents, discs, magazines, and prototypes in an effort to rescue the video game medium’s history from oblivion.

“Once institutions can see that putting effort and funding behind video game preservation in a useful, sustainable way is possible — I think they’ll do it,” she recently wrote.  “We’re working on it, but the work is just beginning.”

Play the console:

• Pokémon Crystal
• Animal Crossing
• Dance Dance Revolution SuperNova
• Xenoblade Chronicles
• Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

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