Some hacks are impractical, done for the pure act of creation. This macOS Gameboy may be one of those projects. Built from a rugged looking 3D-printed shell, this hackintosh Gameboy runs an emulated version of Nintendo’s old software and can, if you want, be hooked up to a regular monitor and keyboard to run as a semi-normal Mac.

The project is the work of Ike T. Sanglay Jr, an engineer living in the Philippines. He built the thing with a Lattepanda Alpha motherboard loaded with Dortania's OpenCore, a piece of software that let him install MacOS on an X86 based PC system. 

The buttons all function and can be used to play Gameboy games or work the mouse. It’s beautiful, surreal, and impractical. “You might ask: ‘Why not just use a Raspberry Pi instead?’” Sanglay Jr. said in his video over footage of an unassembled Pi. “Well wow, you must be a genius. I had not thought of that.”

Sanglay Jr told Motherboard he had a Gameboy Advance as a kid and considers himself a console enthusiast. I started tinkering with electronics and programming when I was in highschool,” he said. “I previously worked as a firmware engineer dealing with Internet of Things. But I've been unemployed since the pandemic so I've been having more time creating projects.”

Sangjay Jr’s YouTube channel is full of strange projects. He’s built a 5 inch iMac using a similar method employed in the Gameboy hackintosh, a small screen that monitors YouTube subscribers, and a hack that converts a PS5 controller into a handheld that plays PlayStation 1 games.

The Playdate Proves What Video Games Have Been Missing Are More Cranks

At some nebulous point in the last however many years, video games quietly agreed on a universal way to control them. The PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch controllers have stylistic differences and ergonomic approaches, but fundamentally, they’re the same. Consequently, the kinds of games being made have narrowed, too, because a controller’s input possibilities naturally influence design possibilities. The Wii’s motion controls were a fascinating, if brief, deviation. Same with the Kinect. PlayStation 5’s Dual Sense is cool but not revolutionary. The mouse and keyboard remain important, but undeniably, the controller’s dominance has influenced many designers exclusively taking advantage of what a mouse and keyboard can offer.

“So, naturally, what about a crank?” is the pitch from the Playdate, a charmingly yellow handheld from Panic, a 25-year-old company largely known for Mac software until it started flirting with games a few years back, publishing both Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game. 

The Playdate looks like a hypothetical Game Boy Mini, an abandoned prototype from Nintendo’s 90s Play it Loud! marketing campaign, when it made colored Game Boys—including one with a yellow that looks a lot like what Panic used on the Playdate! On its face, the Playdate looks normal. There’s a d-pad and two main buttons, B and A, in the same order as the Game Boy. The extras—home button to pick games and change settings, charging port, lock button—don’t stand out. What does catch one’s eye is the metal slab on the side, which can gently be pulled out to reveal a tiny crank that is extremely satisfying to move around, simultaneously feeling like it’s going to fall off at any moment and never break. 

I am unabashedly charmed by video game interface gimmicks, no doubt fueled by having spent a life, in both hobby and career, surrounded by games. It probably explains why I was so taken by games like Dance Dance Revolution and Samba de Amigo; as a teenager, my room was littered with PlayStation and Dreamcast accessories. I was immediately onboard with things like the Wii and Kinect, and spent hundreds investing in early virtual reality tech that now sits in a box. (I still really like VR and motion controls, for what it’s worth.) If you give me a new way to interact with a game, you can bet I’ll be interested, which is why all the other charming things about the Playdate—its high-res black-and-white screen, games delivered weekly in a “season” format—have taken a backseat to that weird goddamn crank.

There’s no requirement games on the Playdate use the crank, but in my experience with the first wave of 24 games I had access to all at once—normal Playdate owners will receive two games per week over the course of 12 weeks—the ones that stood out very much used it.

Most of my experience with IRL cranks have come from bike maintenance, while the vast majority of my broader crank experience has happened in video games like Resident Evil, where the only way to progress is by inserting a red jewel into a tiger mask, revealing a crank that will open a hidden door to the secret laboratory that’s been hiding in plain sight.

What stands out the most from the crank is how smooth it feels. There’s no tension or feedback, and it will move as fast—or slow—as you do. The circular movement can tickle your brain in unexpected ways, because it’s both new and slightly unintuitive, depending on the game. One highlight game for the Playdate, Omaze, has players turning the crank to move an orb around the edges of a circle, as players move from one circle to the next, towards an exit. Omaze is frequently playing with player’s directional confusion. “I’m moving the crank forward, which is causing my orb to move in a counterclockwise fashion, which means that when I reach the next orb, which will swap directions, I have to move the crank backwards.”

Now, do that really fast.

Several times this week my wife has shouted across the room “are you okay?” It’s a perfectly acceptable question to ask, once it’s clear you’re asking it to someone who’s swearing under their breath while furiously winding their hand in a circle over and over again. My wife has accepted me doing a lot of goofy things with games over the years, yet this disturbed her.

I’ve spent a lot of time muttering incoherently over Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure, a new game from Katamari Damacy and Wattam designer Keita Takahashi, where players, over and over, fail to show up to a date on time. It’s the best game I’ve played on the Playdate.

Each level is a new attempt to arrive at that date, and filled with new obstacles to make that task hard. It doesn’t sound like avoiding a butterfly should be tough, but in Crankin, players do not have direct control over the main character. Instead, the Playdate’s proverbial crank is rotated in order to advance your character’s animation forward and backwards. How fast you turn the crank determines how fast the character moves, allowing you to, for example, stop cranking while your character bends over to observe a flower, thus avoiding said butterfly. 

Early puzzles are simple enough, alternating between moving forward and backward before, levels later, giving ways towards much more sinister tasks. Some advanced stages in Crankin require players to wind the crank as fast as humanly possible, then stopping on a dime to avoid an upcoming obstacle, before heading back into a sprint. The mental and physical gymnastics required to complete some puzzles is extraordinary—and satisfying. 

Some games use the crank less than others, like scrolling through story panels in the matching puzzler Pick Pack Pup, and others, like the Zelda-inspired Ratcheteer, where players power a lamp, are less inspired than perfunctory. Inventory Hero, an idle game RPG where combat happens automatically while players manage a constantly shuffling inventory of equipment, doesn’t seem to use the crank at all. It’s merely a cute game on a device with a crank.

(One adorable aside: the device detects when the crank has been removed from the device or tucked away, and one game actually makes use of this as a mechanic. It’s so good!)

The initial lineup of games run the gamut in scope and genre, too. There’s a handful of arcade-y action games built around a single hook, with players trying to achieve a high score , that I bounced off pretty quickly. (Score chasing does nothing for me.) Others are full-fledged adventure games that suggest a number of hours before hitting credits. Many more, however, are puzzle games centered around enjoyable uses of the crank. Those are the ones that I keep coming back to, and those are the ones I want more of on the Playdate. 

Crankin alone, I’ve spent more than four hours in—a pleasant surprise that keeps surprising. 

The crank proves ultimately more than a gimmick, but combined with the tiny real estate of the Playdate itself, it’s an awkward thing to hold. I play a dozen or so hours of video games every single week and my hands do not get tired, but in multiple sessions with the Playdate, sessions that usually lasted around two hours, I’d have to put the device down and take a break because the strain was becoming unbearable. There’s just no easy way to hold the Playdate still, move the crank, and interact with the other buttons (or d-pad) regularly without turning your fingers into pretzels, or approximating the old Monster Hunter claw technique.

My hands aren’t all that big, either. I expect different hand sizes will produce different rules.

The screen is a mixed bag, too. The black-and-white is striking, and the screen is so pretty and sharp. But because it’s not backlit, you have to think about how you’re using the device. 

“The screen is black and white, and it’s beautiful,” reads an official FAQ about the screen by Panic. “It has no backlight, but it’s super reflective. It’s an aesthetic like no other.”

They’re definitely right about that! The Playdate is useless in the dark, and while you’d think plopping on the couch in the evening with a lamp would be enough, often I was moving my body around or adjusting the amount of light in the room to accommodate the Playdate. It’s certainly functional in lower light situations, but hardly ideal, and I regularly found myself thinking about the goofy light accessories I once purchased for old Game Boys. 

This stylistic approach has resulted in a gorgeous device, but it’s not without real tradeoffs. 

Tradeoffs are not inherently flaws, though. They’re choices. The last device I reviewed was the Steam Deck, Valve’s take on the portable computer that promises to let you bring your Steam library—nearly all of it—on the go. It mostly delivers, but does so with a device that’s everything and the kitchen sink. It’s got trackpads to accommodate mouse and keyboard games! Gyroscopes for more precise aiming! A million face buttons and four hidden in the back! It’s got a fan that runs like it’s powering a train and a battery that zaps in an instant! 

With the Playdate, all you have to do is look at the device to see where Panic said “no” to a lot of different ideas. With the Steam Deck, you get the impression Valve kept saying “yes.” How else do you explain a device that has 24 finished games waiting in the wings, but the people at Panic are going to slowly roll them out over three months because it wants them to feel novel and surprising? (Their website even lets you hide upcoming games as “spoilers.”)

I say this as someone who adores the Steam Deck, as prototype-y as it might be, while recognizing what makes the Playdate feel so personal is precisely because its look and build immediately communicate a bunch of human choices that can trigger delight and frustration. 

Some of that frustration extends beyond the physical device, too, like the realization Panic is manufacturing the device in Malaysia, but claims it can’t sell Playdates to anyone who lives there. Instead, the company has a form that people can fill out “so we can keep you posted.” 

Global manufacturing isn’t easy, especially during COVID-19, but it’s a bad look. 

The biggest questions I have are unanswerable, because it requires time and distance and games that better study what this device is capable of, which this review cannot provide. What’s here is novel and fun, and certainly gestures at a device that could extend beyond its “hey, that’s neat” status. But it’s impossible to know if this is a platform or a really fun toy. 

It is, at the very least, a really fun toy.

Follow Patrick on Twitter. His email is [email protected], and available privately on Signal (224-707-1561).

Peglin, as a pachinko roguelike starring a cute goblin, is one of the 5,576 games released on Steam this year. And crucially, it’s a game that’s broken through the noise and become a surprise hit. It’s also a game that won the “best design” award at the Taipei Game Show, a Taiwanese game show that attracts hundreds of thousands of people every year. Peglin, however, is made just north of Seattle in Victoria, British Columbia by a very small group of people who never would’ve had the budget or inclination to fly to Taipei. 

“It's a pandemic-built game,” said designer Dylan Gedig, in an interview with Waypoint recently, revealing Peglin was about making “something a little lighthearted for us and our friends to play test, to help make everything [about COVID-19] go by a little easier, a little smoother.”

The Taipei Game Show, like many events, is usually in-person, with developers setting up booths with laptops, hoping to attract the attention of busy attendees. But also like many events, the Taipei Game Show adopted a hybrid model during COVID-19, and thus held an online festival where developers who lived very, very far from Taipei could submit games.

The Taipei Game Show is not the reason Peglin has become a success, but it’s part of an evolving story where game developers hoping to become the latest breakout, like Vampire Survivors accomplished earlier this year, are seeking new ways to get eyeballs.

Again, six months into 2022, there have been 5,575 new games added to Steam. That’s more than 30 every day. You probably have not heard of, let alone played, most of them. That's the nature of an open platform like Steam, not to mention the ongoing accessibility of development tools, and the increasingly diverse and scattershot ways to climb sales charts. 

“My goal with the game was that, if it crosses a threshold where we'll have enough wishlists to get us on the front page of Steam,” said Gedig. “I'll leave my job and make an actual go of it.” 

Being on the front page of Steam is not a guarantee, but it really, really helps. On Steam, wishlists are a way for potential players to note their interest in a game, and get notified about its release. It’s a huge part of the secret sauce on Steam, because wishlists can be reliably projected into sales and influence Steam’s important “popular upcoming” tab.

“I surveyed game developers [about] how they get how they get wishlists,” said marketing consultant Chris Zukowski. “And the number one are these online festivals—the virtual, not the in-person ones. That's how streamers find games. Right now, the meta for how to get going is you get into these festivals, which gets you 3,000 wishlists, then you go to a streamer, they get you about 3,000 wishlists, and you just keep doing the cycle.”

Peglin passed that mythical threshold, which for Gedig was 8,000 wishlists, last August, because it meant Gedig could reasonably assume he wouldn’t “go broke making this game.” Gedig, once a full-time mobile developer with a hobby, now spends all his time on Peglin, with the game’s post-launch success allowing the rest of the team to now quit their jobs, too.

Loot River, the recent Tetris-inspired roguelike where players can shift pieces of the world around in real-time, tried to ride a similar wave to Peglin. The game received a decent amount of attention when it was announced, with its first trailer being viewed more than 500,000 times, and the developers later signed a deal to appear on Microsoft’s Game Pass service, which some studios use as a way to cover development costs ahead of release. It was even played by Iron Pineapple, one of the most popular Souls creators on YouTube.

But when Loot River came out in early May, the reaction was mixed at best.

“It’s been a wild time since Loot River was released,” said the developers in a Steam post, acknowledging the game’s issues. “To be honest, the launch didn’t go as well as we hoped.”

Being on Game Pass might be financially smart, streamers playing your game and being excited for it might bring you more attention, but it does not guarantee becoming a hit.

Unlike Peglin, Loot River did not arrive in early access, a period where players are more forgiving about a game’s weaknesses, as the developers work out the kinks. A game that arrives “finished” is likely to result in more players bouncing off and never coming back, if the game doesn’t feel right. In the same Steam post, the developer said they “playtested the game ourselves and with a small group of devoted supporters” but this was “a mistake.”

“We did a demo version [of Loot River] in late December with very positive feedback from both media and players which gave us confidence,” said Loot River designer Miro Straka. “We launched in the evening, so I read a bunch of reviews, like 8.5 from Game Informer, then saw that the game had positive reviews on Steam and just broke into top 10 global top sellers. I went to sleep rather happy. I was quite not ready for the morning.”

Straka theorized the fans who showed up to help test the game in the game’s Discord channel were already inclined to like (and be very good) at the game, which resulted in the developers tweaking in their direction, rather than the broader public. It was a disconnect.

“After three days of patches the reviews were getting positive,” said Straka. “We definitely could have done better here though and should have shipped with fewer bugs and issues. Knowing what I know now, Early Access might have been better, but like, we didn’t know this and made a decision that seemed correct at the time from the information we had.”

The result was waves of criticism—and more importantly, “negative” and “mixed” reviews on Steam—that the developers have been trying to combat with rapidfire patches that make changes big and small to gameplay balance, all in the hopes of turning the tide. In a later post, the developers explained how carefully they were tracking individual player reviews:

Loot River's developers tracking the rise of positive reviews. Image courtesy of straka.studio

“For me, player reviews mark the success of such a title,” said Straka. “In the age of content creators, player reviews matter possibly as much (if not more so!) than media reviews. Player reviews tells us if we did a good job with such an experimental title.They also tell us if we should keep exploring these mechanics further, both in the updates for Loot River and in the hypothetical new games. It’s also important for the studio. Having a game that is well received by the audience makes it naturally easier to find funds for the next project, especially if that project doesn’t fit existing categories.”

And though the various paths for accruing attention to a game have become more varied, what remains tried-and-true is pitching people like myself and hoping they’ll write about it. Every day, dozens of emails arrive in my inbox with gameplay descriptions, trailer links, download codes, interview offers, and animated GIFs. Most of them I end up ignoring, not because I don’t want to write or cover them, but because I’m one person with limited time.

But also, a central tension for any games writer, no different than a streamer, is writing about what people will pay attention to. Writing an article that nobody clicks on might be personally fulfilling, both to the writer and the game creator, but less so when it comes to pleasing the algorithms that increasingly influence what many publications write about, fueling ad revenue. It is not a shock that endless articles were written about Elden Ring, because it was a hugely popular video game millions of people were Google’ing, guaranteeing a much higher floor of traffic for anyone dropping “Elden Ring” into their article, guide, or thinkpiece. 

A recent tweet thread by designer Breogán Hackett, who also started the wonderful collection of nostalgic horror games called Haunted PS1, sharply criticized this approach:

“Articles, especially those that view games as art and give them the consideration they deserve can really help in terms of getting people to actually care about your game,” said Hackett in an interview with Waypoint. “I've worked on and been adjacent to a lot of promotional efforts as part of the Haunted PS1 and again and again I see people discovering these games and being amazed at the creativity and experimentation on show.”

“It's not the traffic you get from [traditional] press really—an article on a big press site isn't going to directly bring in 1000s of wishlists for your Steam page,” said Mike Rose, founder of video game publisher No More Robots (Descenders, Yes Your Grace), “but rather, if your game really takes off in the press, it leads to it just being spread around everywhere more.”

There’s a trickle down effect, too. One of No More Robots’ upcoming games, a cute RPG about helping spirits called Spirittea, was written up in many places. None of those articles resulted in meaningful traffic to Spirittea’s Steam page, and likely resulted in very little traffic for those publications, either. But articles in the press help justify a publisher like No More Robots investing in an experimental game, and sometimes leads to platform holders like Sony and Microsoft reaching out about future announcements, wanting to collaborate.

A screen shot from the video game Spirttea. Image courtesy of No More Robots

Of course, it’s not the responsibility of journalists and critics to facilitate these arrangements, even if it’s impossible to ignore the very real impact they all have on such marketing cycles. 

On some level, argued Rose, what’s happening here is a definition of success. 

“I think for gamers,” said Rose, “‘success’ is ‘it has loads of concurrent players on Steam,’ no matter the game. For the vast majority of devs, the actual answer is ‘the game is making us enough money to keep doing what we enjoy doing for a living.’ Obviously it scales at that point, but really, any dev who releases a game, and that game then keeps paying for that team to keep making more games—any dev will tell you, that's a success to them.”

Follow Patrick on Twitter. His email is [email protected], and available privately on Signal (224-707-1561).

Sometimes Preserving Video Game History Requires Partnering With the Enemy

The Video Game History Foundation, a nonprofit focused on video game preservation co-founded by former games journalist Frank Cifaldi, recently shared it had spent the last year or so working with Wata Games, a company that evaluates the quality and authenticity of games for collection and sale, to document every video game prototype that’s submitted for its services. 

In his tweet revealing the news, Cifaldi, who dedicated much of his life to preserving video game history where companies themselves often fail, seemed excited to finally share some of the rare video game history he was able to document by cooperating with Wata. But the response he got was not entirely enthusiastic. Some people responded with surprise and anger that he would work with Wata, which has been accused of making video game history harder to share with the public and contributing to a speculative investment bubble.

“Dump the ROM to the public and let the collectors have the cart and PCB with the original code,” one person said. The “ROM,” or “read-only memory,” is where a video game’s code is stored on older games, and to “dump” it means copying it from the original physical media so it can be shared with others online. “You hoarding the code doesn’t mean shit to us.” 

“I'm actually pretty shocked to hear that you're working with WATA,” another person said. “They're making big strides to completely destroy the retro gaming market and make retro games inaccessible to the general public, which goes against your entire ethos.”

Working with Wata has allowed Cifaldi to look at a wild gamut of games, including early review copies of Silent Hill 2 (likely to be roughly the same as what later shipped), or incomplete versions of Final Fantasy X marked at 80 percent done (likely to be at least slightly different than the retail version). Prototypes really vary. 

As part of the process, Cifaldi creates a digital backup and produces a public report of his findings. He cannot share the digital backup—legal questions of copyright aside, the data is owned by the person submitting the game to Wata—but it technically exists. That way, while the buyers and sellers of these prototypes might not upload a copy for the public to enjoy, Cifaldi’s work ensures they are not lost forever. Now, there’s a record. And if something happens to the original material, or the owner loses a copy of their back, Cifaldi has a redundant copy.

Plucking random people on Twitter is rarely the path towards a cohesive argument, but it does underscore a legitimate tension between preservation and the increasingly lucrative world of private video game collecting, albeit one Cifaldi sees as the only path he can take.

“I'm really not interested in how people with wealth choose to hoard it, and I don't think collecting out-of-print antiques is some kind of noble pursuit,” said Cifaldi in an interview with Waypoint. “My job is preserving video game history, so I go wherever that's needed, and sometimes that means intervening in the private collector's world to make sure these items are being handled correctly.”

Rare video game sales have exploded over the last few years, a combination of aging millennials with disposable cash and nostalgia to mine, and an ongoing pandemic that’s kept many people at home and seeking new hobbies—like buying, selling, and collecting objects. Last August, a pristine and sealed copy of the original Super Mario Bros. sold for $2 million. A few years ago, the same game in roughly the same condition sold for $100,150. And only a few years before that, Super Mario Bros. sold for $30,000. It was remarkable at the time.

“The figures we're seeing now for sealed and graded copies of incredibly common games like Super Mario 64 (millions of copies sold!) really came out of nowhere for me,” said former games journalist Jeremy Parish, co-host of the podcast Retronauts and media curator at Limited Run Games, a publisher focused on physical media. “I mean, even impossibly rare releases of games for NeoGeo were only selling for five figures a few years ago, and that system is the perfect confluence of low print runs and deep-pocketed collectors.”

“Grading” is the process by which professionals evaluate the quality and authenticity of an object, and is not exclusive to video games or other nerdy hobbies. It’s standard practice.

The exploding high value of rare video games will make a few people rich, but it also raises important questions about who owns video game history. Selling a sealed copy of Super Mario 64 at auction for $1.5 million doesn’t make much of a difference to anyone other than the person who got rich selling it, but is more complicated with prototypes of existing or unreleased games—truly undocumented parts of history that switch hands between a few determined or deep pocketed collectors. 

What happens when it starts becoming impossible to document that history?

One important element in the last few years has been the professionalization of grading. Is it sealed? How well is it sealed? Is the box damaged? How much is it damaged? Grading highly influences the amount a game can and is sold for. There are several video game grading companies, but the one that’s attracted the most attention—and was recently purchased for an undisclosed amount by a larger company involved in hobbyist grading—is Wata Games. 

“I fall more on the side of WATA and their ilk being a grift designed to make a small group of people a lot of money in a short, unsustainable bubble,” said Parish.

Wata, which describes itself on the company’s website as “a young company, born from the community of video game collectors,” was founded by Deniz Kahn in 2017.

“I’ve been a collector my entire life,” said Kahn in an interview with Waypoint. 

The bombastic headlines and ever-increasing sale numbers are fixated on older, well-known games, but as Wata gained notoriety and respect, collectors also started coming to it with versions of games that had never been shipped in a box, or were never finished.

“While the market was very nascent at Wata’s outset,” said Kahn, “prototype collecting and preservation were an even more niche subset of collecting. Although we were confident that we could provide a high degree of confidence and robust analyses through our prototype authentication services, we quickly realized the complexity of prototypes and due to the inherent lack of resources for education we made some errors along the way.”

The errors Kahn alludes to are instances where Wata graded a prototype, granting it the weight of authenticity, before realizing it was not what it seemed. In 2020, there was an eBay listing for a Wata-graded prototype of Spectre, a Battlezone-esque tank action game, on sale for $850. But SNES Central, a long running website devoted to documenting Nintendo’s console, quickly called out the listing as “not a real prototype,” before outlining the evidence.

“I'm really not interested in how people with wealth choose to hoard it, and I don't think collecting out-of-print antiques is some kind of noble pursuit. My job is preserving video game history, so I go wherever that's needed.”

Evan G, who runs SNES Central, had saved “every single SNES prototype” on eBay for a decade. The same seller also tried selling another prototype Evan was suspicious about.

“All of these facts really goes to show that Wata has not done their homework on these ‘prototypes,’” said Evan, “and should not have authenticated them. Generally speaking, when people are authenticating something, they should have in depth knowledge of what they are authenticating. This, and several other Wata graded prototypes that I have seen are clearly not prototypes.”

Soon after, Wata contacted Evan and acknowledged the mistake, and told Evan “they will be reaching out to experts such as myself to try to create a better system,” even as Evan acknowledged the entire notion of authenticating prototypes was itself a fraught endeavor.

The eBay page was also taken down, noting there was “an error with the listing.”

It’s at this point that Cifaldi and the Video Game History Foundation stepped into the picture.

“My career in video game prototype preservation started as an anonymous rando on the internet screaming at collectors about how they're hoarding history,” said Cifaldi. “I was a complete turd, but I was also in high school. After a while I came to realize that these hobbyists are by and large the source for these prototype games, they're the bloodhounds actually doing the work and finding these things. So if I wanted them online, maybe peeing in the pool wasn't a good strategy.”

In other words, whatever you think of people who buy, sell, and potentially hoard pieces of video game history, absent video game companies suddenly opening their archives (if they have archives at all), we’re utterly reliant on the people who want shelves full of these things.

“Has the existence of WATA made my job harder? Yeah, probably,” said Cifaldi. “The kinds of things I buy to preserve are more expensive than ever now that they've managed to get the super rich collectors from the comic and sports cards world interested in sealed Super Marios or whatever, and that has trickled down to the prototype material I try and save. Anyone following the collector forums over the last ten years saw this coming, the sharks have been circling for a long time now. No matter what caused it, old video games are expensive as hell now and I don't think that's going to stop, even though I'd very much like it to. But my feelings don't affect change, my actions do, and right now collectors are funneling their prototypes through WATA, so that's where I'm butting in and running triage.”

On Twitter recently, Cifaldi jokingly noted this decision was “all part of an elaborate ruse that finally paid off 17 years later when Wata paid me a few bucks.”

But Cifaldi also saw what happened with Wata misidentifying prototypes. He’d already been friendly with the folks over there; Kahn remembers meeting Cifaldi at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in 2017, and Kahn was a frequent visitor of Lost Levels, Cifaldi’s “website about unreleased games,” as far back as 2008.

In 2003, Cifaldi dressed in a pirate outfit—an allusion to the fact that piracy hugely contributes to maintaining a timeline of gaming history—and paid for a booth at the Classic Gaming Expo to promote Lost Levels project.

“While Frank doesn’t identify as a video game collector per se, he is someone who many collectors and enthusiasts like myself have looked up to for years,” said Kahn. “He’s been very clear about his mission and his approach—I always have and continue to admire Frank and his broader vision greatly.”

A basic idea that emerged from the conversations the two had with one another was having Cifaldi examine what was coming through Wata, attempt to verify (or debunk) authenticity, and as noted, make a private digital backup and produce a written record of the findings. 

“When I said that I wouldn't do this unless all of the information I provided was public record, he didn't fight it at all,” said Cifaldi. “You'd have to ask him but I think he recognized that it's ultimately good for everyone.”

“He’s the authority in this field,” said Kahn. “It would have been foolish to impose constraints or tell him how to craft his process, especially if it wasn’t compatible with how we were doing things (it wasn’t).”

This process has been ongoing since late 2020, but again, was only recently disclosed by Cifaldi, because it was only recently that people who’d paid for the service of authentication through Wata had started receiving their items back in the mail, allowing them to be sold with Wata’s grading approval. The difference now, however, is that those items are being sold alongside an ongoing series of public reports about the objects, too.

The first batch of reports contains information on 125 different submissions, like this one:

Madden 96 for the Sony PlayStation is an unreleased game. Object is an Electronic Arts-branded CD-R, identical in appearance to several discs of this era from the Video Game History Foundation archives which we can substantiate are authentic. The game’s title (Madden 96 PSX) and a date (11/23/95) are present. This game shows its compilation date as an in-game screen, meaning we can easily see where it fits in its development timeline. The latest version currently available online was compiled on November 2nd, 1995. The data on this disc was compiled November 23rd, 1995, meaning it is the latest version we know to exist. This also means the data here is, currently, unique.

“Given the authentic disc used and the unique data,” reads the report, “we have no reason to doubt the authenticity of this item.”

The rise of companies like Wata— they’re not alone—the argument goes, contributed to the ever-rising price of old games, prototypes or not. Working in collaboration with Wata, especially with someone of Cifaldi’s respect in the preservation community, grants Wata itself another layer of legitimacy—or illegitimacy. 

“I don't begrudge Frank for making use of the WATA process to back up and catalogue archaeological rarities,” said Parish. “The people who collect prototypes and unreleased games have a reputation for being extremely churlish with access to these one-of-a-kind items, and I think it's great that he's managed to insinuate himself into the system in order to document material that very likely would never otherwise see the light of day. I don't really know that there's a better way to make that happen, so taking advantage of a questionable system in order to do good deeds still counts as a good deed, in my book. It's not like WATA scandals are doing real harm, after all... it's still just video games.”

Cifaldi’s argument is that, as someone who’s been tracking down video game history for literal decades, your only options are flawed ones, and this is simply the latest obstacle.

“I've been wrestling unreleased and unfinished games from the private collecting world and popping them online for over twenty years now,” he said, “and WATA is just the current face of the same high-end collector mentality that I've been dealing with that entire time.”

Wata doesn’t see itself as the bad guy, but merely the chosen messenger. If it wasn’t Wata, it would be someone else. The rise of video game prices would have happened anyway.

“The rapid rise in price of video games is similar to what we’ve seen in other collectible categories including sports memorabilia, trading cards, comic books and most recently, NFTs,” said Kahn. “[...] One of the results of higher prices is that it incentivizes folks to unearth more of these treasures from their attics and potentially save them from dumpsters where they could have ended up.”

Hypotheticals are exactly that: a theory. The reality we live in is the one where some of the biggest collectors are coming to Wata in search of their stamp of approval, and it’s now written into Wata contracts that their goods are documented and backed up by Cifaldi, too.

This process is a personal one on both sides, too. 

“A few of them [collectors] were turds too, but most of them are decent people,” said Cifaldi. “They're all driven by the same love of video game history that drives me, even if they express that love differently than I do. Private collectors are part of the preservation ecosystem for literally any artform, if you don't believe that go ask any museum curator and they'll set you straight. My fostering those relationships, my going to retro video game shows since literally the first one and having facetime and real human interactions with collectors, is what has gotten many unreleased games online, either directly from my actions or because my work inspired them.”

All told, in Cifaldi’s career, he said he’s helped get roughly 300 prototypes online in various forms.

“One of the results of higher prices is that it incentivizes folks to unearth more of these treasures from their attics and potentially save them from dumpsters where they could have ended up.”

It’s likely many of the prototypes that pass through Cifaldi’s hands and hard drives will never be seen by the public, and there are open questions about whether all of that information should be centralized in a single place. But it’s a complex situation without easy answers, because the video game industry itself has ignored the problem. They made this mess. 

Just look at how people flipped for the massive trove of leaks—which may or may not have been hacked—that came out of Nintendo in 2020, which provided a glimpse at so much of Nintendo history the company has shown no interest in sharing, like alternate designs for Yoshi, emails between Nintendo and Star Fox developer Argonaut Software, and more. 

But it’s also the case that when you hear the word “prototype,” your mind starts buzzing about an unreleased gem that’s never seen the light of day when, as Cifaldi points out, most of his time with video game prototypes is much more banal and boring. Most prototypes are nearly the same or exactly the same as the games that eventually shipped. Maybe the biggest difference is a few bugs that were fixed before the game was done.

And yet, even those differences, though, are history. Every detail matters.

“I'm at a point now where when something important comes up for sale, the collectors call me instead of buying it, because they know sometimes a game is bigger than them,” said Cifaldi. “That's something that only happens with positivity, empathy, trust, and some damn patience. Sometimes to preserve history you have to play the long game.”