Frank Cifaldi (born May 22, 1982) is a video game
preservationist Preservationist is generally understood to mean ''historic preservationist'': one who advocates to preserve architecturally or historically significant buildings, structures, objects, or sites from demolition or degradation. Historic preservation us ...
, historian, and developer.
Cifaldi founded ''Lost Levels'', a website that collected information about unreleased video games, in 2003.
This began his career in the video game industry, and after years of writing about and producing games, he founded the
Video Game History Foundation
The Video Game History Foundation is a non-profit foundation founded by Frank Cifaldi. The primary aim of the foundation is the archival, preservation, and dissemination of historical media related to video games.
History
In a talk given at th ...
in 2016.
He is currently the director of the organization, and has assisted in projects including
Digital Eclipse
Digital Eclipse is an American video game developer based in Emeryville, California. Founded by Andrew Ayre in 1992, the company found success developing commercial emulations of arcade games for Game Boy Color. In 2003, the company merged w ...
's ''
Mega Man Legacy Collection'' and ''
The Disney Afternoon Collection
''The Disney Afternoon Collection'' is a compilation video game developed by Digital Eclipse and published by Capcom. It features six video games originally developed by Capcom and released for the Nintendo Entertainment System, all based on anim ...
'' remasters. He is also known for his extensive personal collection of video game periodicals. Cifaldi has also researched early video game advertising, early
Nintendo
is a Japanese multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It develops video games and video game consoles.
Nintendo was founded in 1889 as by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produced handmade playing cards ...
prototypes, and the official ''
Super Mario Bros.'' release date. He presented on games preservation at the 2016
Game Developers Conference
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tuto ...
. Cifaldi is additionally a former features editor of ''
Gamasutra
''Game Developer'', known as ''Gamasutra'' until 2021, is a website founded in 1997 that focuses on aspects of video game development. It is owned and operated by Informa and acts as the online sister publication to the print magazine '' Gam ...
'', and a former host of the Retronauts
podcast
A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosin ...
.
References
Further reading
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External links
*
Living people
People in the video game industry
Media historians
American archivists
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American male non-fiction writers
1982 births
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