Hey, everyone, super super cool opportunity.

Aiden and I got to interview Frank Sofaldi and Phil Salvador from the Video Game History Foundation.

We reviewed the review of Super Mario Brothers as in one as in for the Nintendo Entertainment System in Computer Entertainer magazine, which the Video Game History Foundation recently acquired the whole complete rights to free and clear and made it available to everyone.

You're going to get all the details on that, how they got the rights, how they pursued it, and how they've made it available to everyone who's interested in video game history and interested in video game magazine history the way Aidan and I are.

We've been trying to get Frank and Phil on for since, like before we started this podcast, because they're two amazing guys working for an amazing organization they founded and doing amazing work that makes the work that Aiden and I do possible.

So please enjoy this teaser if you're not a Fun Factor Ultra Review Crew subscriber, if you would like to hear the rest of it, and I know you would, if you would like to hear our review of Computer Entertainer's contemporary review of Super Mario Brothers.

We just go to funfactor pod dot com and subscribe.

I promise you cannot miss the sign up, which, as I always say, please again enjoy this conversation.

Go to funfactor pod dot com for the rest.

Gentlemen, we invited you on the show today because the Video Game History Foundation made an exciting recent announcement.

You acquired the rights to Computer Entertainer magazine.

This was founded by sisters Mary lou Bedeau and Celesti Lan and ran from nineteen eighty two to nineteen ninety.

This newsletter fanzine early magazine was one of the few American publications covering the home gaming scene and game consoles during some of its the industry's most historic years.

In the announcement post for the acquisition, you wrote quote.

As a result, Computer Entertainer is one of the only sources for American reviews of classic games like The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Super Mario Brothers, and because it was run by a game retailer, this magazine is one of the only reliable sources of American game release dates during this period.

So why did the foundation Video Game History Foundation choose to pursue computer entertainments specifically and like, how did the deal come together?

Well, I think I'll jump in here because there's a little bit of backstory that makes us make more sense.

I've been someone who studies history, video and mystery specifically for a very long time now, and what I what I identified really early on was that magazines were the mediest source for me.

I started collecting magazines in like the very early two thousands.

In fact, the found in a lot of ways kind of started as you know, my personal research library as a journalist and historian who was frustrated that such a thing didn't exist, and I had to build it in my house.

And it was back in maybe like twenty eleven or so, I mean, i'll say the website specifically.

So there's a there was a zine that ran in the nineties early two thousands called Digital Press, which is now a store in New Jersey, a retro game store, but digitalpress dot com had a magazine scans section, mostly by a scanner named Scott Stiffen who and he scanned a lot of really kind of obscure eighties stuff.

And as I'm sort of building my own library and looking at what was happening in the eighties, you know, I'm kind of relying on people who are more well versed in that stuff, like Scott.

And in that magaz section, uh, there was a a category for Computer Entertainer or perhaps the Video Game Update its original name, I don't remember, you know, where it was at that time.

And there was exactly one issue scanned, and I thought, oh, this is interesting.

What is this?

Is this like a small newsletter sort of thing.

There was reference elsewhere online about how long it ran, and but there were no other scans other than just one loan issue from from you know, an eight year run.

So I'm looking at the scan and something I've you know, learned to do very early in my career is just look for a name of a person and start stalking and see where you can go.

And and uh, this is not a magazine with a masthead.

There's no staff role.

We you know, you don't know from looking at it who made it.

But this happened to be a fairly rare occurrence where there was a photo included one of the editors with a caption with her name, and it was, you know, Computer Entertainer editor Celeste Bido blah blah blah blah blah.

And I was like, okay, I got a name.

I found her.

She's in Australia now, and I messaged her asking if she had any left, and she's like, no, I threw them all away, but I do have my personal bound volumes.

I'd be happy to send them to you.

And again this was like twenty eleven, twenty twelve, so we got those.

I got those, I should say, there wasn't a foundation yet, and I arranged to get them scanned with a book scanner, which is you know, kind of a two cameras pointed at pages trying to like correct the skew and stuff like that.

And long story short, like we put out a like serviceable scan of her volumes on the Internet archive and and that kind of spread around, you know, the story and community as a good resource and in terms of like you know, flash for fast in terms of fast forwarding to today and like why did we acquire it and and re scan it and all that.

This.

You know, it's not a happy story.

But the story is that Mary Lou's sister, the co editor of the magazine, Celeste, who you mentioned earlier.

Celeste passed this year and Mary Lou was cleaning out her home and she found that Celeste also had her bound volumes the identical set.

They both had a set, and and she emailed me because we had just recently interviewed her for for our podcast, The Video Game History Hour, so you know, we're still kind of fresh in her mind.

She emailed me and and said, hey, I found Celeste's books.

Do you want those two?

And I said yes, But I also, you know, I saw an opportunity there where it's like, well, we didn't properly scan the volumes because we only had one.

If we have an identical set, it's not going to completely shatter my heart to cut the pages out and scan them properly.

And then as I continued thinking it through, you know, I just had the thought like, well, Mary Lou might be, you know, the sole copyright holder of this material at this point, so you know, I thought there might be an I didn't know what the opportunity was, but I was like, maybe there's an opportunity there to make a video game magazine free.

And so I asked her, and we worked it out and acquired it, and and I think because we own it, that gave me the excuse to not only you know, do the labor of making digital editions of the magazine, but also gave me an excuse to go out and travel to the one person that I know of that kept his subscription copies, Leonard Herman, who's the video game history his Leedard Herman, who was a video game historian.

He wrote Phoenix, which is like the first video game book.

He had the last I think seven issues that that that just never made it to a bound set because that year never concluded, so we were able to not acquire.

But we went and scanned the last few issues and you know, finally had the first intact set, had them all cleaned up, had him sorted.

I'd manually edit very extensively the first three issues because all they had were like bad photo copies of them.

And and yeah, we just saw it as as an opportunity to do something something different and and and that's what we did.

One of the things that like stands out to me is you have recently launched like a digital library which makes available a lot of old issues of magazines.

What are the benefits of owning and acquiring in a magazine like this versus just having it in your collections.

Well, I think what's really exciting about it is.

You know, the things we have in our digital library we make available through Fairy Use for research purposes.

But when we own the magazine, it's not just that it makes it easier for us to share it.

It's that we can then authorize other people to do things with it.

When we get donations from developers about development material or things like that, we often have them sign a deed of gift that says something to the effect of, like, to the extent that you have rights to this, you allow us to allow other people to reproduce this in their research.

So if there's like a book that's going to be using something we have, and like, you know, we have the collection of materials from CIM it's all the videos from making of the Myst series, which is really cool.

We can allow people to use that in their documentaries, which is great.

Naturally is happening right now too, there's a documentary about the Myst series that's using footage from our library.

This is a case where we can just say, hey, we have the rights to this, you can blanket do whatever you want with this.

We put the whole thing into the Creative Comments for you know, for free, as long as you you know, give attribution to VGHF.

You can use this in anything you want, including commercial pres which is already happening, which is really cool.

And it was a case where you know, we first thought like, okay, maybe there's like a non commercial license for research, and then it was it was like, you know what, this is easier, this is the right thing to do.

It's like if we just put that for anyone to do something with, not only does that kind of selfishly make our lives easier because we don't have to manually approve request, but it's like, no, we have the power to just let anyone use this, so why not?

And you know, I think sometimes about you know, I tell people I work for a nonprofit and they ask me like, oh, how are you monetizing things?

How are you going to license your material?

And it's like, we're literally a charity.

This is the goals you want to we want to help with.

A friend of ours and academia referred to this as knowledge production and I really like that where it's like our product is we give you resources you then use to generate interpretation of information and non legend understanding.

And I think that's having the rights to something it's not just you know, it's not just putting up a scan for a magazine.

It's this belongs to everyone.

Now you can create what you want with it.

I think that's really powerful and really unique and unusual in this space.

I think to happen because and you were joking earlier about buying Nintendo Power, that's not happening anytime soon.

This is kind of a rare opportunity.

This is one of the few magazines that was not bought up by one of the you know, Big four or whatever remaining giant publishing companies.

And I just want to add to that a little This might be you know, I don't know if there's too inside baseball to talk about like running a small business, because even though it's a charity, it is a business, right like I have to I have to pay us right like we have to be able to eat.

And what Phil was saying about, you know, well, how are you going to monetize this?

How are you going to make money off this?

Something that I've learned I've never had to run.

A business before.

This was my first one, and something that I've learned over the years is that if you spend a lot of time and resources, generating revenue on things that are fairly low yield, know, like like if we charge for access for computer entertainer and you know, like like I don't know, we're gonna make like two thousand dollars or something, you know what I mean, Like like you just have to learn to do the math and be like this isn't worth it versus like the the the goodwill that comes out of just just putting it out.

I was gonna say, there's definitely an evil like Embracer Group version of this where you walk into your friend Norman's house and go.

Yeah, these seven issues.

Are technically mine.

Now get a lawyer about it.

When you go to the Farrangi Archives, what their preservation system is like on Farrangin are But but I think it is also in addition to what Frank said, it aligns with our values.

I mean, I think you know, it is a case where it's like what we want to do is we want to make video game history better as a field.

We like to say that the library is a tool that makes people better video game historians, and like what better way to contribute to that than to create something that is now free information free?

Now that's out there.

So yeah, the talk about this very much.

But my day job is actually with the museum, a large museum, and I work in digital and like personally, for me, like a core tenet of what I want to do is using digital tools to make history accessible for people.

Because museums have existed for a long time, but often you've had to go to them.

You've had to come to the museum to access archives and collections, and we do a lot of work making sure that that's no longer the case.

And I think that there's a lot of tension right now about like I'm sure you guys deal with it, but like AI crawlers coming into like collections and archives, websites and databases, using up resources and finding that path forward of saying we have these materials, we want to make them accessible.

We don't want them to be used in bad faith by people who are going to try to make money off of them in whatever way.

And I think that your approach of saying, hey, let's put this in the creative comments because everyone can use it, and that tension sort of goes away in a way that I think draws, you know, just a lot of positive attention to the work that you're doing and the work that the people in this magazine and old magazines like that do.

Yeah, and just to add to that, we can't do that with everything.

Of course, I mentioned the science stuff that's owned by Cian.

They gave us permission to share, but we don't own it.

So this is a case where it's like, hey, we can do this, so let's do it.

And I will say, you know, I guess this is just a frame of mind I'm in as I'm interested in discussing how we survive as a business.

Like I can I can imagine a scenario a donation of copyright or something where we don't open it up to the creative commons.

And it's not that we wouldn't allow access to it and you know, fair use for research, et cetera.

But for example, if if we had like footage that like documentarians would maybe want to license for their documentaries, you know, we might have a different license in that case because it might actually be a revenue opportunity.

But I don't think the computer entertainer is to be frank like, I just don't think that that the nickel and diming stuff like this is worth it versus something where it's like, oh, maybe a well funded movie might might make sense to to actually pay us for our labor.

You thought we were talking about magazines in this podcast jokes on, you were talking about nonprofit fundraising.

Gotcha, Well, I'm very familiar with that as well.

Uh huh, Yeah.

My wife's stage job is in the nonprofit sphere, and we've both done we're both in political organizing on the partnership's chair for Rank My Vote, which is the rank Choice voting ballot initiative here in Michigan.

They we're going to amend the Constitution.

Gathering signatures in the field right now, So like this is this is all the time for me, totally comfortable with it.

Games media, like especially through the nineties when computer entertainer was predominantly.

I guess it ended up ninety Yeah, ended in ninety but still that's crazy.

Yeah, that is what makes it interesting is it was so early.

There's like a reputation for games media to be dominated by young men, especially back sort of in the eighties and nineties.

So it was especially interesting when you made this announcement.

I wasn't familiar with computer entertainer because I was like four when it was being published well.

And also I'm pretty sure I had a very low circulation.

I mean, it wasn't a newsstand magazine.

It was mail order only.

You know, it was an extension of a mail order company.

And the only people that I've ever known that even knew about it have had some affiliation with the industry, and you know they would I mean, I actually we actually have just by coincidence, we recently acquired something that that demonstrated to us that they were exhibiting a consumer electronics show in eighty five and like handing out a free issue, you know, to get people to sign up.

So it was it's something where it was just very low print run and it's sort of a like, you know, for people in the know kind of thing and not a typical newsstand magazine.

Right right, sort of that's it's almost like World conis on right now.

It's a big science fiction fantasy convention that used to be very like sort of like niche, like the like, you know, kind of core group of writers and fans were there, but now it's expanded into something much larger.

One thing that stood out to me about Computer Entertainer was that it was founded by two women You've talked a lot about Marylou and her sister Celeste, But what do you think that their legacy means for games media as like a diverse space nowadays.

I think what's really exciting about it, and this is kind of counterintuitive, is that it's not super exceptional or exciting, you know.

I think if we look back at you again, the space of games media does have that very you know, like male skewing angle, especially once the industry roved back up when the nes came in.

But I think what's really notable is that, even though this was run by two women, wasn't pigeonholed as like a publication buy or for women.

Like if you look at a lot of those magazines or publications or communities, they'll often have like, you know, the women writers, like she's not like other girls or something like that.

It's like, no, they they just were two of the most prolific video game journalists of the era, and they were women.

I think it's notable because when we look back at a lot of uh, you know, some sort of the early diversity in the video game industry, we often look for, you know, the sort of like essentialists like, oh, what are they doing that's unique to their you know, their particular gender or race.

Like you know, I think about this is going a bit further afield, but I think this we're talking about, you know, an example, and like uh Murial Tramese who made games in France about you know her or about the French Caribbean and the history there, and they're very much about race and gender in ways that are palpable and exciting, and I think that's neuro Tramese is a really important milestone in you know, black game development.

But I also think about we just got a collection in that touches on Stan Thomas, which is someone who I think people don't know.

He was the president of Sega Channel and he was a black game executive and that had you know, his work did not have anything to do with his identity he was.

He was just the president of Sega Channel.

But he is also a really important black pioneering video games.

So when we talk about Mary Lewin Celeste, I think it's exciting that they were here this early in the industry.

They were again very prolific journalists, but it wasn't like here's the women journalists, you know.

I put him in conversation with someone like Joyce Warley, who was one of the first women game journalists, where it's they just were good at their jobs and effective and were women.

And I think that's exceptionally notable considering how hard the pendulum swung back the other way once we got the you know, oh hey, we can sell video games to young boys who want to blow things up.

Once the industry started kicking back in in the United States.

Yeah, that's kind of what came to mind for me too, is that there was a pendulum swing.

And if we're talking about the early eighties where computer entertainer, I sh'd say the video game update spawned out of, it does look to me to be slightly more, uh, gender diverse than it became in the nineties.

You know, Phil mentioned uh Joyce Warley, who was you know, one of the three main editors at Electronic Games, the first sort of newsstand glossy console video game magazine.

You know, there's one third of the editorial staff was was was female.

I think about things like the early programmers at like Atari and and Activision and and even like Mattel Electronics for the television.

If you if you go through and and look at the staff.

It's you know, it can't be surprising how many games were just straight up written by women.

And I don't know if something quote unquote happened, but I do know that you know that that wasn't necessarily the case kind of starting in the nineties and and but but yeah, to to Phill's point, I think what's interesting is that it's kind of not interesting.

Yeah, when when you see like, you know, like the Blooper videos and the credits of the Tony Hawk games, and it's like all the you know, like guys in their twenties skateboarding through walls of mountain dew or whatever they do in the offices that never stopped at two am while they're all crunching.

It's like, that's not the natural state of video games.

Like, No, there had been a diverse you know, like especially in media, like there have been a lot more around that.

So it's just it's great to have another example of that.

It's like, no, women have always been part of the video game ministry.

There's always been diversity.

It's not something that we're like, I don't even want to entertain arguments about like force diversity or everybody.

It's like No, it's always been there.

What are you talking about.

That's something we've actually been finding too, even looking at.

And we're starting with nineteen ninety five through nineteen ninety seven, sort of the transition from sixteen to thirty two bit and like the very first issue of Game Players we looked at, which was like peak juvenilia right for guys, and you know, penpal section.

Half the names are you know, what would be considered girls' names, right, Like you see there's like another the next issue we saw this like Blockbuster World Championship, you know, and it's like it was like thirty percent girls and pretty ethnically diverse also, and you know, and it's like it's the forced non diversity.

The non diversity is the forcedness, right, Like that's where people doing this false history of how things always were later down the road or say hey no this is a boys club, stay out.

I think that we're finding that again and.

Again say inventioned gender to sell video games.

It's really