Phil Salvador

Before Mario 64, before Star Fox, there was Eclipse, a Game Boy demo developed by Dylan Cuthbert that convinced Nintendo to start making games in 3D. Eclipse was eventually fleshed out and published under the title X, which led to the Super FX chip for the SNES, which led to the Nintendo 64, and the rest is history.

The original Eclipse demo has long been considered lost. Even Dylan Cuthbert no longer has a copy, and it has remained one of the big missing links in Nintendo history.

We found it.

This extraordinarily detailed write-up/video from our friend John Rairdin goes into the history of Eclipse and how it ended up putting Nintendo on the path to 3D game development. We found our copy through Mark Flitman, a veteran game producer who worked for Mindscape... which was the company that got the rights to Eclipse BEFORE Nintendo did!

I'm gonna copy our founder Frank about what it took to preserve this:

The video goes into this, but this item, lost even by its original author, was sitting in the collection of a former game producer who didn't know what he had. We had to fly out to his home, book a hotel, and take the time to document a literal basement of material to find it.

This kind of work takes years of relationship-building to make happen. It takes employees who don't have to think about their "day jobs" when going to work on it. It takes having money in the bank to hop on a plane and book a room when an opportunity like this comes knocking.

We run very, very lean, meaning your money has real impact. Our big annual fundraiser goal this month, the only time we directly ask, is $50,000. It sounds like a lot, until you factor in that we're two Bay Area employees with an office! We're frugal as heck.

Which is to say, we need your support! We're running our annual fundraiser right now, and we're trying to hit $50k by the end of the year. Any amount helps, so if you think this discovery rules, please donate to our fundraiser! We want to keep doing more projects like this, and that's only possible with your generosity.

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 old 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! (For @sebmal specifically, there's some Mr. Do.) 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.

You heard me!

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.

You might know that before the NES, Nintendo was thinking about bringing the Famicom over to the US as the Advanced Video System. There was even one on display at the Nintendo World Store in NYC for a while.

The Video Game History Foundation has what we believe to be the only surviving flyers for the Nintendo AVS, which were handed out back in 1985. They show a vision for a pretty radically different console where you could add on functionality with new accessories. This is a REALLY cool artifact of how Nintendo was trying to approach game console marketing in the wake of the whole "the entire American console game industry collapsed" thing.

We're sharing artifacts like this as part of our annual fundraiser! If you think this is cool, please send us a couple bucks to keep us going in 2024!

If you played Riven back in the day, you might remember the mini-doc that came with Riven. It was pretty great, but it was also compressed to hell in QuickTime.

As part of our project to digitize Cyan's archives, we went back to the original master tape for The Making of Riven and brought it back at unbelievable quality, including 4x the original framerate. Just look at this difference! Holy moly!

We're sharing this as part of our annual fundraiser! If you like what you see, please consider donating a couple bucks to our pledge drive to fund our next year of operations!