Frank Cifaldi

Frank Cifaldi is an American video game historian, preservationist, and developer, and the founder of the Video Game History Foundation. He began in games as a writer, running the enthusiast site Lost Levels, which documented unreleased and lost games, before contributing to outlets including Nintendo Official Magazine UK and Gamasutra. In the early 2010s he moved from journalism into development, joining the restoration-focused studio Digital Eclipse, where he produced acclaimed classic compilations such as the Mega Man Legacy Collection and The Disney Afternoon Collection, work built on faithfully bringing decades-old games to modern hardware.

He founded the Video Game History Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the history of video games, and by around 2020 had left Digital Eclipse to run it full time. The foundation archives not only games but the material around them: source code, design documents, press kits, magazines, and photographs, and operates a dedicated research library in Emeryville, California, believed to be the first of its kind for the study of game history. Its widely cited research found that the overwhelming majority of classic games are commercially unavailable, a finding that reframed preservation as an urgent problem rather than a hobbyist concern.

Cifaldi is one of the most prominent public voices arguing that the industry does too little to keep its own history playable, and has repeatedly pressed rights holders and trade groups for legal preservation pathways. When Sony announced the end of PlayStation disc production, he argued that in a discless future, unofficial preservation, the kind the industry calls piracy, is the only form actually doing the work.