A fantastic individual who goes by the username “ForeverMozart” on Reddit, and “GlobalVillageCoffeehouse” on imgur, continues to upload an enormous amount of technical-cultural imagery spanning across 4 decades.
Obviously a big part of retro gaming is enjoying playing the games themselves. But I find it incredibly enjoyable personally, and important culturally, to look at the media, manuals, imagery, advertising and other ephemera that went alongside the games themselves. For me, these bring not only a sense of nostalgia for the games I am personally familiar with, but a better sense of understanding of everything from the commercial push to the community hype (or lack thereof) around certain titles at their commercial peak – something we either forget, or perhaps never saw, if we’re looking at an old game for the first time.
Beyond just video games, these scans look at industries and hobbies such as pinball, music, computer graphics and programming, website homepages, logos and marketing, and all sorts of interesting items. These albums each contain several hundred images within.
I’ll link to the accounts directly first, as these are a great place to start digging through what’s on offer:
https://imgur.com/user/globalvillagecoffeehouse/posts
https://www.reddit.com/user/ForeverMozart/posts/
And here are just a handful of my personal favorites, although I highly recommend digging through the links above to find more hidden treasures.
- 80’s Video Game/Computer Magazine Covers
- 90’s Computer Book Covers
- Ads from 90’s Video Game Magazines
- 70’s Pinball Flyers
- Websites from 1996-1998
- 90’s House Albums
- 00’s Techno Albums
I could list so many more, and quite honestly spend all day looking at these. There’s an absolutely huge amount of time and effort that’s gone into organising, collecting and presenting these.