The Video Game History Foundation launches a crowdfunding campaign to help keep the industry’s history alive

The Video Game History Foundation has officially launched their Patreon crowdfunding campaign in an effort to preserve the history of the industry we've come to love so very much.

If there's one thing we're not very good at, it's thinking about the future in regards to the past. What I mean is that many gamers (myself included) come from a time when the only way to acquire and play games was to go to a store and bring home a disc or cartridge. While holding something tangible in your hands is as great a feeling there is, these things do have a lifespan, and if they scratch or break, there's no uninstall/reinstall to fix the problem. They are as good as garbage.

Those times aren't quite ancient history yet, but we're getting there, and it might happen sooner than you think. The big question then becomes, what happens to all of the games you bought on said discs or cartridges?

That's precisely the question that The Video Game History Foundation intends to answer. One day every disc and cartridge that has ever released will ultimately become unplayable via degradation and use. In fact, it's already starting to happen, and people like Frank Cifaldi, the founder of The Video Game History Foundation are picking up the torch and trying to preserve as many of these games as possible before they are lost to time.

It's a good cause, and the Foundation is starting small right now by digitizing as much material as they can, but they need help. And for an industry that is still fighting for relevancy on the whole "is it art" debate, the preservation of gaming's history would be a significant step towards that legitimacy.

Sources: [Patreon via Gamespot]