Interview: Kelsey Lewin (Video Game History Foundation and Pink Gorilla Games)

The Life & Times of Video Games

I speak to Kelsey Lewin, a video game historian and collector, retro games store owner, and self-proclaimed Wonderswan enthusiast, about the challenges — and also the merits — of researching and archiving the artefacts connected to games development and culture, both past and present. She also shares her insights on how the growth in retro gaming helps fuel interest in games history, why some of the most interesting stories are far beyond the typical narratives of games history, what quirky things we can find when looking into the Wonderswan and its inventor, the famed Game Boy hardware designer Gunpei Yokoi, and much more.

Kelsey co-directs the Video Game History Foundation with Frank Cifaldi, where the two of them have been doing amazing work in preserving and archiving the artefacts of games development and culture — not so much the games themselves, but rather more the packaging and documentation, the source code, the marketing materials, the magazines, etc. And she also co-owns Pink Gorilla Games, a retro games store located in Seattle.

This is the fifth entry in a new series of interviews I'm running alongside the main show — every month(ish) I'll talk to a different person who's exploring games history, in one way or another, to learn about the many ways people are preserving the games industry's past as well as to further our understanding of how this wonderful medium (and the industry that's built around it) has come to be the way it is now.

Interview conducted May 25th, 2020.

Links

• I couldn't fit them inside the podcast summary character limit, so if you're interested you'll need to head to the episode page on my website: lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/interview-kelsey-lewin.html

To support Kelsey and her work you can:

• Donate to the Video Game History Foundation
• Follow her on Twitter @kelslewin
• Subscribe to her YouTube channel
• Buy stuff from Pink Gorilla Games

You can support me and my work by:

• Subscribing to my Patreon
• Donating via PayPal
• Following me (@MossRC) or the show (@LifeandTimesVG) on Twitter and Instagram (@lifeandtimesvg)
• Buying my books — The Secret History of Mac Gaming is available now, albeit temporarily in digital form only (as it's now out of print) from Bitmap Books, while Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet (the subtitle got changed to "The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet") is still some ways off being finished out August 2022 and can be preordered from Unbound. I'll have a book/ebook version of my audio documentaries out soon.
• And telling other people to check out my stuff.

Thank you to all of my wonderful supporters on Patreon for making this possible, but especially to my $10+ backers Seth Robinson, Rob Eberhardt, Wade Tregaskis, Eric Zocher, Simon Moss, and Vivek Mohan. You can help, too — a contribution as little as $1 a month makes a big difference towards ensuring this show has a bright future ahead of it. (And as a Patron you'll get to skip those pesky cross-promotions from other shows on my network, among various other bonuses like transcripts and extra content.)