The Video Game History Foundation’s Directors Discuss Its Library and the Acquisition of Computer Entertainer

By Garrett Martin | August 15, 2025 | 5:50pm

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The Video Game History Foundation’s Directors Discuss Its Library and the Acquisition of Computer Entertainer

Last week the Video Game History Foundation announced that it had acquired the full archives of the 1980s game publication Computer Entertainer and would be making them available through the Digital Archive of the Foundation’s library. The news was widely celebrated by the games media (including us here at Endless Mode) and everybody interested in the study and preservation of gaming history, and further validated the work done by the esteemed non-profit organization, its founder Frank Cifaldi, and its Library Director Phil Salvador. And although Cifaldi briefly explained the significance of Computer Entertainer in the official press release, one big question remained for most of the sites that covered the news and for their readers: what exactly is (or was) Computer Entertainer, and why is it important?

In that press release, Cifaldi hit the major bullet points. Computer Entertainer was a newsletter published between 1982 and 1990 by a Los Angeles-based mail-order retailer called Video Take-Out. The store was owned by sisters Celeste Dolan and Marylou Badeaux (who also headed up special projects at Warner Bros. Records for years), making Entertainer one of the very few gaming publications edited and published by women. And it wrote about console games extensively throughout the decade, before, during, and after the industry crash at the middle of the ‘80s, which no other video game magazine can claim. As Cifaldi and Salvador point out, Computer Entertainer is essentially the only American publication that covered the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, from pre-release rumors through the first English reviews of games like Super Mario Bros. It’s a real-time, primary source for the foundational decade of the American video game industry, and there’s really nothing else like it. And now anybody can browse, search, and download its full run through a Creative Commons license, thanks to the VGHF.

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To get a fuller, more informed understanding of Computer Entertainer and its importance, Endless Mode recently talked to Cifaldi and Salvador about the newsletter, the unique role it served in the mid ‘80s, and how the VGHF digitizing the Entertainer archives will benefit the study of gaming history. We also touched on the VGHF’s broader mission, and how anybody with a passion for gaming history can help preserve it. And although we’ve touched it up a bit, we’re running the transcript of the whole half-hour call, so get ready for a long one.

Endless Mode: So you’ve acquired the archives of Computer Entertainer. For people who aren’t familiar with Computer Entertainer, what should they know about it? Why is this a big deal?

Frank Cifaldi: Computer Entertainer was a monthly black and white newsletter that was run out of Southern California by a company called Video Take-Out. This is a company that did mail order, VHS tapes and games and stuff like that, I think, literally out of a garage. And they started a newsletter, essentially to inform their customers about games that were coming out and what they thought of them, and whether they thought they were good, and stuff like that. And so it didn’t come from a traditional video game magazine background, or even magazine background. It came from two sisters who were selling games and wanted to make sure that what they were selling to people, that their customers were informed. Essentially, it is really remarkable, more in retrospect than when it was alive, in that it was a monthly document of the video game industry throughout essentially the entirety of the ‘80s, which is, to our knowledge, completely unique, at least in the US. They covered console games from 1982 through 1990, and no one else can claim having done that. They were one of the very few outlets, and absolutely the only American video game-focused outlet, that was covering the industry during its most sort of nascent period, and in the mid ‘80s, after the video game crash, which sort of pooped in all the Cheerios, there just wasn’t really much of a video game industry left to talk about. So that has the remarkable effect of this being essentially the only US publication that was covering the launch of the Nintendo, which happened 40 years ago this year. So that means that they’re essentially the only people reviewing very important products like the original Super Mario Brothers, the original Legend of Zelda, stuff like that. The, you know, the reemergence of the video game market as it was happening. So it’s a really remarkable historical document. And that’s not even getting into the fact that, again, two sisters running a video game magazine is not a thing other than here, and also that, I think Marylou Badeaux’s story is very interesting in that her day job, on top of running a mail order business and a video game magazine, was that she managed prints at Warner Brothers. I think that’s crazy.

Phil Salvador: One thing I do want to add to that too is that in the United States, there were still magazines around other types of electronic games. But back in the ‘80s, video games, arcade games and computer games were often seen as their own markets. So you had magazines like RePlay Magazine and Play Meter that covered arcade games. Still, you had magazines like Computer Gaming World in the US that continued covering computer games, and occasionally, some of these magazines would pop in and say, Hey, what’s going on with the console game space? So you did see occasional coverage of what was happening there, but that sort of moment-to-moment coverage of how the industry was evolving is something that’s exceptionally rare. There was an issue of Computer Entertainer where they surveyed the readers about what content they wanted to see, and they got a lot of responses saying they wanted to see more console game coverage. They actually disclosed something to the effect of, if you don’t see console game coverage in an issue, it’s because there were no games to cover. And despite that, they were continuing to publish 16 pages every month for their customers, which, again, was mainly about computer games. That’s why they changed their name from the Video Game Update to Computer Entertainer. But as Frank said, that kind of in-the-moment of what was happening… you know, you can find other people who maybe were reporting on the Nintendo Entertainment System a year or two after it came out. This is the only publication we know of that reported, “hey, Nintendo is considering releasing a new game console in the United States.” That’s one of the things that makes this coverage really unique.

Frank Cifaldi: I’m going to nitpick very slightly and say Electronic Games also said it, but it was like half a paragraph, and that was it. They never talked about it again, and then they went under but, but just for your edification, Phil.

Frank Cifaldi and Phil Salvador

EM: What was the general newspaper coverage of the Nintendo Entertainment System like? Was there newspaper coverage? Was it just in the business page? Was there any sort of cultural writing at the time?

Frank Cifaldi: I can answer that very extensively. It can fill the whole call. But so when the Nintendo Entertainment System launched in 1985 it was a limited region launch. It was around the New York City area, and the coverage of the launch is not something that really made a lot of outlets. I should say that, yes, while this newsletter is the only sort of consistent thing, there were still a couple weekly columns, or biweekly columns, that ran in newspapers that looked at video games. Just not very extensively, because it was just one column, right? Like Ed Semrad comes to mind, who went on to edit Electronic Gaming Monthly later on. And then there was “The Vid Kid,” another weekly outlet where it was like, “Look at this 14-year-old that’s reviewing games.” But you know, the coverage outside of that, honestly, is basically non-existent in any kind of consumer facing way. And most of the coverage that you see, which again, is very rare, tends to be more in, like, consumer electronics trade magazines, like things aimed at people running stores, toy industry trade magazines, that sort of thing, so all the coverage tends to be that. There’s no, you know, “cultural” writing around it, to answer that question. That’s kind of what we’re getting at. That wasn’t a thing in that time, right? Like, other than the occasional rare newspaper columnist and this thing, the Computer Entertainer, there’s not a lot of cultural or even critical writing about video games during what I’ve been referring to as, sort of, the Dark Ages for the American video game industry.

Phil Salvador: I think it’s also important that even though there is theoretically a date when a product came to market, there wasn’t a launch for this kind of thing in the same way that there is for, you know, games nowadays, like the midnight release for the Nintendo Switch. This had a test market, it was slowly rolled out. If you look at Computer Entertainer, they acknowledge that “the NES is rolling out into this market test in the fall.” They didn’t review Super Mario Bros. until maybe half a year later. So it was the kind of thing where it wasn’t like Nintendo put out a press kit for everyone announcing their product was now available. It kind of gradually came out, because there wasn’t that type of building anticipation market. You know, marketing for video games, there wasn’t Mortal Monday yet, so having this sort of persistent “here’s this as it’s going coverage” is where you saw something like the NES getting covered, which is what Computer Entertainer was.

EM: So you’ve stressed that Computer Entertainer was a newsletter. It’s like a zine. It’s not like a professional magazine. I never really thought about a zine culture for video games in the ‘80s like there was for music or other scenes. Was there anything like that? Were there other newsletters like this at the time, or was this truly a rarity in terms of what it was doing?

Frank Cifaldi: I would not call Computer Entertainer a zine, for what it’s worth. I think of a zine as being more of a low budget effort that a business isn’t being built around.

EM: They’re not printing these at Kinko’s and hand stapling them.

Frank Cifaldi: Right, these were professionally printed and bound. They were glue bound. And, you know this was their business, right? They, like, they ran a business around this. In terms of, like, were there other newsletters? Yeah. I mean, we’re talking about the days where communication is still print, and there’s still a lot of niche topics that are printed as these sort of lower cost, lower circulation newsletters, as opposed to glossy four color press magazines. I’m trying to think of things in our collection… there’s another similar magazine called The Logical Gamer, but I’m thinking even outside of video games, right? So, like, we’ve come across newsletters about, like, educational software on computers in the ‘80s, right? Like, we’ve come across regional newsletters, like Atari user groups that are regional newsletters, things like that. So yeah, newsletters as a concept is not really a thing anymore. Most communication is online these days, but certainly in the in the ‘80s and before there were these sort of small press newsletters giving coverage to things and most of them are equally as impossible to find, I imagine, as Computer Entertainer.

Phil Salvador: Mentioning that, I think a really good point you made is that a lot of these newsletters, and more zine type publications, tend to be oriented around communities. And I think you saw a lot more of it around things like arcade games or user groups. As you mentioned, there were a lot of publications around Atari and Atari hardware and Atari computers, and understandably, those dried up when Atari collapsed. So I think the fact that you don’t see as much in terms of game publishing is because there wasn’t really a community to send things to, if that makes sense, in the same way that there was a still-active arcade scene. There were still people playing those games competitively. You just didn’t see that around consoles; that just wasn’t an actively cultivated audience.

Frank Cifaldi: I’ll also point out, you know, Nintendo Power started as a newsletter, right? It started as a newsletter called Nintendo Fun Club News, and it was, you know, an even dinkier thing than Computer Entertainer. It was black and white, and they added some pink to emphasize it a little bit. But you know that’s something where it’s like, “we’re servicing this very specific audience, which is like customers that we’ve gotten in our database,” and they didn’t go into a full glossy magazine until Nintendo was, like, capital N Nintendo.

EM: Yeah. So okay, you don’t need to convince me, and I would hope most of our readers would understand this, but just for someone who might stumble upon this, why would you say it’s important for these decades old magazines to be available to the public in 2025?

Frank Cifaldi: So I think one thing that comes to mind for me in terms of the importance of these documents is that we take for granted now that we know when things came out, right? Like movies have release dates, and you go on Wikipedia and you know exactly when a movie came out. Computer Entertainer throughout the ‘80s, if you look at most Wikipedia entries, this is the primary resource for when software—when video game software, I should say—came out in the ‘80s. And you just don’t see that anywhere else. But you know, another reason that it’s important, though, is that the video game industry as we know it today, most historians feel, really began with the way that Nintendo started doing things in the mid ‘80s, and taken as a whole, Computer Entertainer is a look from a cultural lens on the rise of the original, prototypical video game industry of the early ‘80s, its entire collapse, and then the rebirth and success of the second wave, because by the time Computer Entertainer stops publishing in mid-1990 we have Super Mario Bros. 3 and stuff like that. Like, Nintendo Mania was huge. The Wizard movie was running in theaters and stuff like that. So it is the only sort of play-by-play publication that looks at the rise, fall and rise again of the video game industry, and it’s a really remarkable cultural document because of that.

Phil Salvador: So one thing I wanted to add that’s really important to us as an organization is that we think that if you want to understand the history of video games, you need more than the games themselves. People ask us what games we have here, and we like to say we don’t collect games. We collect context. We collect things like magazines that help explain what people thought about games, what people were saying about them, what the reviews were, how people were covering them, materials that were given out at trade shows, showing how they were trying to position their products. That stuff is really important for helping us understand where games came from, how they fit into a broader culture. Even if we had a copy of, you know, every game mentioned in Computer Entertainer, it’s not the same thing as being able to know what somebody thought about at the time. So more broadly than this magazine, in general, that’s one of the reasons that we collect publications like this.

EM: Right. Okay. So you launched the library near the start of this year. How has the response been to it?

Phil Salvador: The response has been terrific in that when we first launched the library, one of our goals was to make a tool that would turn people into game historians. And what we mean by that is we wanted something people could use, where they would have easy access to primary sources they could then use to understand the history of games better. When we launched, understandably, there was a lot of excitement around just the concept of game history or nostalgia for a particular issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly that somebody remembered. But what we saw is that as users kept spending more time with it, they started to say, oh, there’s a really interesting story here. Maybe I can tell something with that. Maybe there’s something here I can learn more about. We’ve already seen that happening with Computer Entertainer, where people have searched for the name of their favorite game. They found it, they found what people said at the time, and then they thought, well, this is interesting. Why did they say that? And then started digging into it a little bit more. I think that’s been the greatest measure of success, more than user counts, or any of that, is seeing people engage with these materials and realize what it means to actually use historical resources to then produce history. A friend of ours in academia refers to this as knowledge production, and I like the idea that we’re in the knowledge production business, and we’re starting to see that with how people have responded to the launch.

EM: So when you talk about the collapse and everything in the ‘80s, one thing I’ve had to struggle with as a writer is sort of an American-centric focus, where I’m like, “oh, Nintendo single-handedly saved the games industry.” And I’m realizing that’s not necessarily true for every part of the world, and people from South America or other continents can be very vocal about how annoyed they are when people write about Nintendo that way. Have you guys seen that running the VGHF, and if so, how do you sort of try to work past any American-centric biases that you might have?

Frank Cifaldi: I mean, the first thing that I’ll say to that is that we are an American archive, and right now, the two of us, you are talking to the entire staff of the Video Game History Foundation. We are incapable of capturing the entire history of video games throughout the world. This is why, often when people ask us, “how do I help preserve video game history?” The first thing that we say is, start locally, you know. Start preserving within the blast radius of where you are, because we need thousands of people doing that, if the idea is to preserve everything. That said, I understand the reaction that your readers have, right, like “this was different where I am.” But what we’re talking about is the video game industry and the industry worldwide is and was affected by sales numbers in the United States. You know, we were sort of like ground zero for the success of a video game industry and its changing focus and things like that. And that is why, you know, when taking a broader view of history that tends to be the default examination. I don’t think that it’s coming from a place of ethnocentrism or anything like that, necessarily. I think that it’s coming from a place of looking at the broader impact of what affected everything and you know, when we’re talking about, I believe you said South America as an example, when we’re talking about the evolution of even how games were in South America, you know, like a lot of that really was informed by what was going on in the United States and what kind of splash damage that had throughout the rest of the world.

Phil Salvador: A couple things I’d add is that this is a fairly small field. Video game history and cultural heritage is a small field, and we know a lot of the folks in it. We know folks at other institutions around the world, and when folks reach out to us, it often does make sense to say, “hey, you can contribute to this local museum or this other organization doing it, because they’re also, frankly, better equipped to tell those stories.” I won’t pretend to know the history of the Brazilian game industry, but if there’s someone there who is working on that collection and is able to do justice to it and preserve these things, I’m more than happy to support their work, rather than us trying to take the wheel there. But I think it’s also, as Frank said, a matter of really understanding what our strengths are. We are in the Bay Area in California. There are enough developers here with boxes of stuff in their garages that I could probably spend my entire life working on that. So it’s also a matter of just kind of understanding what our resources are and where we can allocate them, but that is a comment we’ve gotten a lot. We’ve made some attempts to address that. Recently, we were reached out to by a former journalist who had a lot of issues of British video game trade magazines and wanted to contribute them. And that seemed like a great area where we could expand some of our European holdings. I think we do want to include some of that. It is really just a matter of time and resources and the limited money and space and personnel we have, and realizing what can make the most impact with the resources we have, which is tending to work in the United States and especially locally.

Frank Cifaldi: And I would add also just what we are personally good at, you know, what we can have the largest impact on, is the things that we have some inherent knowledge of and interest in, and f we focus our efforts there. And something I’ve had to learn, you know, running the foundation for nine years, is that if our goal is to is to service the world, to do the most we can with the resources that we have, a big part of that has to be focusing on what we’re good at and what we could to have the most impact in and for us, that tends to, yeah, be US-centric material. And to Phil’s point, California-based retired game developers tend to be a big part of our social circles.

EM: People used to say the internet’s forever. Of course we know sites can and will get wiped, pretty regularly at this point. How do you preserve the history of games writing post-print?

Phil Salvador: Woof, it’s tough because, yeah, people assume digital lasts forever, but if anything, digital is way more fragile than paper. You can put a magazine on a shelf. You can’t put Endless Mode on a shelf. This is a problem that we have not attempted to crack given our limited resources right now. I think we’re all very dependent on places like the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine for documents and these things. I’m not sure if you saw this news that just happened a few days ago where Reddit announced they would be blocking the Wayback Machine from archiving threads. And I understand resource wise, in a world where AI is scraping things constantly, why they did that, but it is a huge loss, and I worry that a lot of that is being propped up by load-bearing threads like that. I think the solution, not just for digital media, this applies to print media as well, is asking more people to take care of their own stories. I think it’s probably unreasonable to expect some of these larger news sites to keep taking those backups of all their files. I don’t think they’re ever going to do that, or that if they do they would donate them to a nonprofit archive. But I think if there’s someone who is a writer, and they save copies of all the articles they’ve ever written across websites, that’s something they can donate somewhere, that’s something they can back up on a hard drive. I think if we’re looking for those kinds of discrete collections, we can actually save and do something with, assuming that corporations aren’t going to save us. I think the hope is to enable more people to tell their own stories and preserve things in their own space. When Frank said “think locally” that doesn’t just mean regionally. It can also mean what’s happening in your own community and your own career and your own outlets.

Frank Cifaldi: It doesn’t even have to be a curation of your own work. It can be a curation of video game material that interests you. We have some collections here, for example, that were curated before they got here. We have a collection that’s on the digital archive right now of material related to FromSoftware that came from someone who curated themselves a collection of material from FromSoftware, and got it here. And I would say that another answer to your question is, is that that’s the kind of thing that I think the community is much better equipped to do than we are, something that we’ve even kind of tried to prove out. When we launched the foundation in 2017 literally our first blog post is my own curated collection of material that I had gathered in researching the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Like we were just talking about. And I don’t know that I was trying to, like, prove something at the time, I just thought, you know, “I did this work, let’s try to open source my research,” right? But that collection could sort of serve as inspiration for other people with their own research kinks, to put things together and curate them before they come to an organization like ours or another for some sort of permanent placement.

Phil Salvador: I think a relevant point that’s really funny, Frank, is that folder you mentioned, that was a Google Drive folder that, I believe, was called VGHF Digital Library. That was the first iteration of the library, just a Google Drive where you put files. And the thing is that obviously wasn’t a library, but it could become a resource in one. There was a really great talk we attended last year from someone who works in film preservation who pointed out that, you know, the first film archives, in quotes, were simply just people’s private collections, but then those eventually made their way to an archive that was able to take custodianship of it and take care of it. I think there’s something there with digital materials as well. I think if you’re someone who’s doing game writing, if you’re someone who cares about your own history, that’s easier to preserve than starting on some mission to preserve every single article that was ever posted on a website.

EM: Getting it back to Computer Entertainer before we wrap up: obviously its goals, what it was trying to do, are very different than what public-facing websites like ours do today. But looking back generally at the ‘80s, how the industry was written about in its earliest days, what has improved since then? And what have we lost?

Frank Cifaldi: I don’t think that we’ve lost anything. If we’ve lost anything, it’s that the industry has gotten too large for anyone to have, like, a broad view of it, right? Like, I think that, back in the ‘80s, it was possible to play every game, maybe not extensively, but you could at least have some knowledge base for every title coming out across any system, right? If we’ve lost anything, it’s that, but I think what we’ve gained is a diversity of ideas and diversity of audiences and stuff like that, so I don’t consider that a shame or anything. But what we’ve gained is, well, what I just said, we’ve gained many more voices covering video games from their own cultural lenses. I think we’ve gained creators creating games from their own cultural lenses, and in terms of the coverage of that, I think we’ve gained the ability to specialize. I think that we’ve gained the ability to be someone who is an RPG specialist, who mostly talks about RPGs, right, or a sports game specialist. I guess I’m talking about Kat Bailey two different ways here. But like we have the ability to have specialists, to have outlets that cover things in their own way with their own voice that is unique and not trying to be all-encompassing. And I guess if we’ve lost anything, it’s a business model for video game magazines. But that’s maybe a different conversation.

Phil Salvador: I think anything that’s been gained or lost has really been about how the business model of the video game industry has changed. Video games are a large, expensive business now; when we talked about zines earlier, a lot of this early video game coverage was more at that scale than at the scale of having large press events and having things with these huge campaigns and influencers behind them. And I don’t know if that’s a good or bad change. The game industry is more of an industry than it was 40 years ago, and I think the way Computer Entertainer covered video games is reflective of that. It was a product guide for readers. It was to help them understand what games were coming out and what they could buy. I think as the industry has evolved, I think we’ve also started moving away from that model of games journalism again, for better or worse.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.