Preservationist, Historian & Developer · Lost Levels, Gamasutra, Video Game History Foundation · 2000s · American
Started a website about games that were never released, and ended up running the organisation trying to stop released games from disappearing too.
Frank Cifaldi began with Lost Levels, a website devoted to unreleased and cancelled video games — a subject that in the early 2000s had essentially no institutional interest behind it and existed only because enthusiasts like him refused to let it vanish. That work led to writing for print and web outlets including Nintendo Official Magazine UK and Gamasutra. In the early 2010s he pivoted from journalism into development, working at Other Ocean and then Digital Eclipse, where he produced compilation titles including the Mega Man Legacy Collection (2015) and The Disney Afternoon Collection (2017) — putting him on the production side of exactly the preservation problem he had spent a decade writing about. In 2016 he founded the Video Game History Foundation, a non-profit whose remit is the archival, preservation and dissemination of historical media relating to video games. Crucially, its scope extends well past the games themselves: the Foundation archives source code, design documents, press kits, posters, video tapes, newspapers and photographs — the surrounding paper record that determines whether future historians can understand what they are looking at. He left Digital Eclipse around 2020 to run the Foundation full time, and has become the most prominent public voice arguing that the legal framework around game preservation is broken.