A collection of a video game developer’s prototypes, design documents, and more has been sold off to collectors, spurring a conversation about video game preservation, privacy, and ethics online. Earlier this week, the Pixel Game Squad YouTube channel posted a video about a storage unit the channel’s owners had bought at auction. Contained among various video-game bric-a-brac including vintage games, hardware, artwork, anime box sets, strategy guides, movies, and toys were finds of historical and preservational interest.
Throughout the video, Aaron Stapish (also known as Riff) comes across what appear to be design documents, concept art, and numerous computer chips believed to contain various game prototypes, including one for Contra III: The Alien Wars. There are boxes containing artbooks with level designs for Double Dragon, a Virgin Interactive folio filled with documents pertaining to a Terminator game, and level design layouts for the Super Nintendo game B.O.B. And it’s the ultimate fate of these production materials that’s causing concern.
While Stapish walked away with a huge collection of games to resell or keep for himself, in a comment under his YouTube video he wrote, “BUT there was so, so, so much more gaming history that has made its way to so, so, so many collectors.” History, especially the fragile history of video games, shouldn’t belong to collectors. Instead of made available for research and study, i.e. preservation, those documents will now potentially sit in a closed, private collection.
There are several comments on the video arguing that the game production materials should be given to a museum, with folks specifically calling for the Video Game History Foundation to get involved. “This is not stuff that should be sitting on the shelf of some collector that views it as another purchase,” wrote one commenter.
There’s also a human angle that makes the story feel just a little bit sad. While not confirmed, it’s believed that the storage unit belonged to a developer named Tom Tanaka. In the video, there are various materials with the name Tanaka on them, and he’s credited as a level designer on The Terminator for the Sega CD, and as an animator on Double Dragon for the Sega Game Gear. On YouTube, a commenter who claims they were a colleague of Tanaka wrote,
“Watching this made me feel sick and angry. It looks like this locker belonged to my old friend Tom Tanaka. I worked with Tom at Virgin Games in the early 90s and occasionally on other game projects over the years. I lost touch with him around 2020. I’m trying to find out what happened to him. I fear the worst. I know you didn’t do anything illegal, but it angers me to see you picking over Tom’s stuff like grave robbers.”
On Bluesky, Video Game History Foundation director Frank Cifaldi echoed that sentiment. “Scrubbing through this video made me really sad. Imagine missing a storage unit payment and suddenly your entire career is stripped naked and splayed out butt naked for a few YouTube views before being parceled out. I’m not saying they did anything wrong, it’s just deeply unsettling to think about.”
