The Best is History, 06/03/2025
The realpolitik argument for preserving games history
I went to the National Video Game Museum and all I got was this lousy desire to preserve video game history
Discord lines up for an IPO in a deal heavy news week
Split Fiction offers up co-op play delights in this week’s releases
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Hello VGIM-ers,
What’s better than writing your own newsletter once a week? Using it to tell 4,000 people that it’s your birthday today, of course.
Yes, I’ve managed to successfully survive another lap around the sun and have celebrated by securing a natty new office to work from. I really do get the best presents for myself, don’t I?
But before I leave you with the Big Read and skive off for the rest of the day, I’ve got an important announcement to make.
I am hiring two remote freelance writers to write VGIM while I’m on book leave in the summer.
I am looking for a couple of top notch writers to help me out by:
Crafting five VGIMs across the course of June, July and August.
Ensuring each newsletter follows house style (i.e. features lots of puns).
Uploading them to Substack’s back end for me to run the rule over.
While I will consider all relevant applications, I am particularly keen to bring on writers who can demonstrate i) that they can compose crisp copy to a deadline, ii) know the games landscape and iii) understand the industry sits in a wider political, cultural and commercial context.
And in return for freeing their lance up for me, each successful writer will be paid £1500 for five newsletters (a rate of £300 per edition of VGIM produced).
Interested in applying? Send me a short email outlining why you think you’d be a great fit for VGIM with links to your work to george@videogamesindustrymemo.com by Friday 28th March.
The successful duo will be selected before the end of April, leaving plenty of time to get them inducted and introduced to the VGIM audience in time for June.
And with that done, let’s get on with the rest of the newsletter.
The big read - The Best is History
Penny pincher: If I had a penny for every time someone in the games industry said that the medium wasn’t taken seriously, I’d have at least twenty quid by now.
Chips (on the shoulder) ahoy: The games sector and fans of video games have long had a chip on their shoulder about how the wider world sees the medium. Beyond the usual tropes that games cause violence, are addictive or are only enjoyed by teenage boys with questionable personal hygiene, there’s a feeling that games aren't taken entirely seriously by the cultural elites (I’m looking at you, Oscar nominated film Tar) and that this negatively impacts the sector.
Grounded fears: Those fears, I think, are reasonable. The truth is that the perception of a cultural medium does affect its long term prospects. And in comparison to the rest of arts and culture, games are too often viewed by power brokers who draft laws, write opinion pieces and draw up term sheets as the runt of the creative litter.
No, not that one: As a result, the industry finds itself in a tough place to exercise cultural power in any meaningful way. So how can the industry turn the tide on this conversation? On Monday morning, I jumped on a train to Sheffield and pottered over to the National Videogame Museum (NVM). There I met John O’Shea, its Creative Director and CO-CEO (and not the former Manchester United full back), to learn more about the history of the industry as part of research for my forthcoming book *cough, wishlist it here, cough*.
History toys: And although my initial aim was simply to pan for non-fiction gold, I left Sheffield with a deeper thought too. For many years, I thought that the games industry’s objections to properly recording its history was an oddity. But as I sat on my train trundling back to Euston later that evening, I realised that the failure to properly record the sector’s past implies that the story of games is valueless: - weakening the industry’s efforts to cut-through in the cultural conversation in the process.
Strandlike storytelling
Facts and stats: The NVM is still a relatively new part of the country’s cultural fabric. Founded initially in 2015 in Nottingham before moving to Sheffield in 2018, it proudly pitches itself as the country’s “only museum dedicated solely to videogames, celebrating and interrogating their history and culture over the last 50 years.”
Play for all: “We say games are for everyone,” John, who formerly worked at the Science Museum and curated an excellent Pitch to Pixels exhibit at Manchester’s National Football Museum, explained to me over a coffee. “Our core objective is to curate a rich experience for people and help them understand the topic.”
Method to the madness: The NVM supports the industry’s story through three load-bearing narrative pillars which cover: the industrial history of how games are made behind the screens; the experiences of players who make games happen through the act of play and within their communities; the “out of play” impact of games within wider society.
Objectification: One of the main ways it does this is by letting people get up close and personal with over 5,000 video game objects within its collection. From worn down (but lovingly maintained) arcade machines, to super secretive console development kits and even gamified exercise bikes from the 1970s, the NVM’s collection grounds visitors in the technology, the processes, the people and the spaces where games came to life - laying the foundations for telling a meaningful story of the sector in the process.
Tough times: So far, so good. But despite its noble aims, the NVM has been sailing into plenty of headwinds: slowing down its growth and potential to become the museum for games culture in the UK.
Problems galore: While its move to Sheffield put it in the heart of Yorkshire’s remarkably punchy games scene - with Sumo Group, Rockstar and Team 17 just a handful of big names based in the region - a wider redevelopment project around the museum was botched; leaving it feeling a little isolated in Sheffield city centre. The Covid pandemic hit the museum hard, depriving it of the valuable paid visitor footfall that makes up a major part of its revenue. It has also been an inadvertent victim of some internal industry politicking, after its parent charity The BGI tried to force through the creation of a British Games Institute the best part of a decade ago in a way that narked a lot of people off.
Fixing up: However, I’d say that most of these issues are either resolving with the passage of time (e.g. the pandemic passing) or resolvable with the right industry will (e.g. the heat dissipating from the BGI battle).
Unconscious bias: Instead, the biggest problem the NVM faces isn’t a short term structural issue; it’s an unconsciously ingrained resistance to the importance of preserving video game history. And while some of that scepticism comes from external audiences, the majority of the problem, unfortunately, comes from within the games industry who should be most interested in telling its own stories.
Not in the Culture Club
Can’t play the game: The root of the problem facing the NVM is a simple but profound one. Games companies in the UK, as a rule, don’t understand the needs, wants or practices of cultural institutions who are interested in telling their stories.
Show and tell: “So I'm originally from an arts and culture world, where I’m familiar with a very collaborative and open culture where people want to show you things,” said John. “They want to share things because they’re familiar with what an exhibition is, what a show is, what presentation means to an audience.”
Blocked off: By contrast, John has found that the games industry “deliberately obfuscates how the game is made from the end user.” This, according to John, is not for hostile reasons. Instead, developers want to keep schtum about their design processes to create the perception that “video games appear into the world as these fully realised things” - making it easier to sell them both now and in the future.
Preservation reservations: While ‘maintaining the magic’ is well-intentioned for short term selling, it leads to two big problems for preservation. First, the video games industry’s efforts to maintain commercial value weaken and distort efforts by wider institutional bodies to authentically preserve them. In the US, publishers lobbied against efforts to make mostly unplayed historic games available for free in public settings like libraries. In Japan, Nintendo’s inclination to maintain mystery over its history in its museum in Kyoto saw Katherine Castle of Eurogamer declare the project as “rich with missed opportunity.” And for the NVM, reticence amongst some companies to allow objects to be displayed has meant that fascinating elements of its collection remain stuffed in the store room at the back of the venue - depriving the public of a valuable glimpse behind the industry’s curtain.
Embrace the chaos: Second, and directly exacerbating the previous problem, the desire to present games as perfectly realised projects stops companies from realising an important truth - the messy detritus produced during development is exactly what is needed to tell the story of the industry effectively.
Master the basics: “In literature, you wouldn’t have to argue to somebody why we might want to keep notebooks that James Joyce wrote in and why we wouldn’t just keep the most recently published version of Ulysses,” John explained. Yet when it comes to speaking to games companies about his work, John says that businesses rarely have dedicated cultural experts or cultural enthusiasts within positions of authority in their team - forcing the NVM to do basic legwork to explain why, say, a video game museum exists and what its purpose is.
Disorganised: As a result of all this, plus the generally chaotic and ruthless nature of the business, the games industry has “no centralised strategy of care” when it comes to collecting its historic work. In comparison to literature where every book is catalogued with its ISBN number in copyright libraries and the papers of beloved writers are cherished, historical games objects are consistently lost, disposed of or ‘written over’ by updates and remasters.
Downstream effects: This makes it much harder for the industry’s story to be told. The games industry’s failure to properly catalogue and preserve its work prevents academics, researchers and institutions from expanding upon the story of the industry organically. This narrows the field of who can tell the story of games in cultural spaces to a handful of particularly dedicated voices (e.g. Marie Foulston bringing games to the V&A), reducing the likelihood of games naturally influencing the cultural conversation.
Tossed aside: Ultimately, the carelessness towards video games history provides succour to those who think the medium is worthless. ”How you treat something tells you how valuable it is,” said John. “If it’s thrown away or not cared for, it becomes seen as a disposable product.” And with our tendency as a sector to toss aside the old in favour of the shiny new thing, it’s not a surprise that sceptics feel justified in thinking that games have little value beyond our price tag.
The dustbin of history?: In short then, the failure to preserve games, the technologies and paraphernalia behind them effectively isn’t a niche problem for the sector; it’s actively damaging its reputation. By showing opinion formers that we have little care for our history unless it sells stuff, we suggest our work has limited creative and cultural value. And if it looks like we don’t believe ourselves when we say our medium is culturally significant, can you really blame external audiences for thinking similarly?
Problem solving
Think local, go global: So what can we do to change this? The answer, unfortunately, isn’t easy. The global nature of the games industry makes it hard to agree on a unified approach to preservation that is useful to both the sectors and researchers. The preservation challenges presented by wear and tear to physical objects like arcade cabinets will never go away. And sifting through user generated content platforms like Roblox for experiences to preserve will be an immense challenge due to the sheer volume of stuff on there. But having spoken to John further, there are local, national and international interventions that could be worth exploring.
Build the community: At a local level, the NVM itself recognises that it has more of a role to play in selling the value of its work to industry. It is currently appointing new trustees to its board to push its work forward. It is applying for public funding from relevant organisations to try to put the museum on a more even financial footing (interestingly, it has never received meaningful public funding despite its status as the only dedicated video game museum in the country). It is also working with the local community - both developers and institutions like schools - to ensure the value of the video games industry surrounding the museum is fully recognised to increase buy-in for its work.
Set sail on the flagship: Moving up to the national level, the industry needs to recognise the soft-power value of supporting games preservation and establishing an organisation like the NVM as a cultural flagship for games.
ACMI Inc: Supporting the growth of a British equivalent to Australia’s world class video games museum ACMI - which blew my socks off when I visited it last year - would provide the sector with a meaningful cultural asset capable of powering the sector forward.
All aboard: But ACMI’s success is rooted within its winning combination of extensive local government support, tie-ups with local educators, on-site games expertise (including via its in house game accelerator) and the practically unabashed support for its work from the games sector - suggesting a need to convene what John would call a “distributed” cross sector alliance to make the most of the opportunity.
Global domination: And finally, there needs to be steady work at an international level to develop that “centralised strategy of care” that makes accessing historical games and objects simpler for researchers and institutions around the world. This won’t be easy to do given the fickle nature of many in development games (hello, live service updates obliterating old builds of popular titles) and the wider madness engulfing the international order.
International action: But if organizations like The NVM, The Video Games History Foundation and the lengthily named European Federation of Game Archives, Museums, and Preservation Projects (EFGAMP for short) can continue to focus on smaller wins that it can achieve in the years to come - such as educating studios about preservation approaches, easing researcher access to archives that are available and potentially implementing a video games equivalent of the thirty year rule to encourage companies to increase access to historic materials over time - we can steadily shift the international conversation in favour of preservation.
Maturing with age: And if we get that right, we might just be able to tell the story of our industry in a way that changes the minds of those high society types we’re all secretly obsessed with impressing.
News in brief
Deals, Deals, Deals: It’s been such a busy week on the deal front that I’ve had to put a load of them in a single story to cover them all *inhales*: The New York Times reports that Discord is lining up for IPO (linked above); Rockstar snapped up Sydney developer Video Games Deluxe and has rebranded it Rockstar Australia; Tencent has upped its stake in From Software parent company Kadokawa to 7.97%; Secret Mode has been acquired by Emona Capital from Sumo Group for an undisclosed fee; AppLovin is set to flog its games business for $900m - $500m in cash, $400m in shares - to TripleDot according to Business Insider *exhales*.
Fundtastic: Speaking of money, there’s also been a lot of movement in the public funding space for video games. The European Investment Fund has just stuck 225 million Swedish Kronor (€20m) into a Swedish venture capital fund to support game development in the Nordics via Behold Ventures (linked above).The Canadian state of British Colombia has renewed and bumped its tax credit up to 25%. And the Screen New South Wales’s Digital Tax Rebate has lowered its qualifying expenditure threshold from $500,000 AUD to $350,000 AUD. Bonza!
Unintended consequences: Urban Dead, a 20 year old browser game supported by solo developer Kevan Davies, is shutting down next Friday due to the burdens of the incoming Online Safety Act. In a statement on the game’s website, Kevan said that “the possibility of heavy corporate-sized fines” for potentially breaking new safety rules from the 15th March was too risky for a solo dev to shoulder - forcing him to take the game down instead.
Less than tariff-ic…again: Donald Trump’s trade war is set to impact players across the US, according to a report from IGN’s Rebekah Valentine. Trump’s 20% tariff on China will likely whack up the cost of smartphones, games PCs and consoles created in the country, while his 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico is likely to drive up the cost of - if not finally completely eliminate the selling of - physical game boxes. Eep.
Artificial Unintelligent: Activision Blizzard has landed itself firmly on the naughty step after being caught using generative AI art to promote ‘fake’ mobile games online. Video Games Chronicle reports that the company has been serving ads for ‘games’ based on Guitar Hero, Crash Bandicoot and Call of Duty to players looking at its content on social media - directing anyone who clicks on them to a mocked up app store page where the download button redirects them to a survey. If this doesn’t breach the letter of Advertising Standard Authority rules regarding digital advertising, it almost certainly breaks the spirit of them…
Moving on
Phil Mansell has stepped down as Jagex CEO, with Jon Bellamy stepping up to replace him…Lasse Seppänen has been named General Manager of Supercell London…India Atkin has popped up as a Legal Counsel at Build a Rocket Boy…John Hegarty has been given responsibility for Senior Business Development over at Code Wizards…Alex Boucher and Vanessa Joyce have co-founded the Games Growth Agency…And Olivier Le Bas is leaving French hybrid casual firm Homa to set something new up…
Jobs ahoy
Creative Assembly is hiring a Brand Development Manager to support its work on its latest Alien game…Games Workshop has a role open as a Licensing Coordinator…EA is looking for a new Environment Director…Roblox wants you to be its new Video Solutions Lead in NYC…And if you fancy taking a punt at getting something new, Zenimax Media has a General Application call out at the moment if you’re feeling lucky…
Events and conferences
Tokyo Indie Games Summit, Tokyo - 8th-9th March
Hit Games Conference, Istanbul - 14th March
Game Developers Conference, San Francisco - 17th-21st March
Games Industry Law Summit On Tour, Rome - 1st-3rd April
London Games Festival, London - 2nd-13th April
Games of the week
Split Fiction - Couch co-op game from the makers of It Takes Two and A Way Out serves up another slice of couch based fun.
Knights in Tight Spaces - Am I featuring this because it’s looking like an excellent follow up to spiritual prequel Fights in Tight Spaces? Or do I just like the pun? Decide for yourself on Steam.
Sorry We’re Closed - Survival horror game that releases on my birthday won’t be bought by me because I am a wuss.
Before you go…
The video game BAFTAs announced its shortlist for this year’s awards. And it looks like the Hellblade II team might need strong arms to carry all their trophies home.
The Cambridge developed sequel racked up eleven nominations in this year’s gongs, three more than its nearest rivals Astro Bot and Still Wakes the Deep (who recorded eight nods apiece) and four more than comedy Yorkshire-’em-up Thank Goodness You’re Here! (who notched up seven).
Tune in to the awards on Thursday 8th April to find out who emerges victorious.