Frank Cifaldi was born on May 22, 1982. He is a video game preservationist, historian, and developer. Cifaldi started by creating a website called Lost Levels, which focused on unreleased video games. This work led to him writing articles for print and online publications, including Nintendo Official Magazine UK and Gamasutra.
In the early 2010s, Cifaldi changed his career path from journalism to game development. He worked at Other Ocean and created games for compilation titles such as the Mega Man Legacy Collection (2015) and The Disney Afternoon Collection (2017), which were produced by Digital Eclipse. In 2016, he started the Video Game History Foundation. Around 2020, he left Digital Eclipse to work full-time on the foundation.
Biography
Frank Cifaldi was born in Las Vegas, Nevada, on May 22, 1982. He lived in Las Vegas until he became an adult and briefly attended community college before beginning a career in video games.
In 2003, Cifaldi created a website called Lost Levels, which gathered information about video games that were never released. His first published writing appeared in Nintendo Official Magazine UK, and he later wrote for other gaming publications like Gamasutra and GameTap. Cifaldi said he wanted to change the way people talked about video games, focusing on topics that were not well-known. He also hosted a podcast called Retronauts.
Around 2013, Cifaldi decided that online video game journalism was no longer a good fit for him. He felt confident in his understanding of video game development and connected with people in the industry, including his friend Mike Mika, who was the studio director at Other Ocean. He took on tasks that others avoided, such as writing the company’s internal newsletter. He worked for the company for five years, and his role grew to include both designing and producing games. He led the start of a game label called Digital Eclipse and worked on projects like the Mega Man Legacy Collection (2015) and The Disney Afternoon Collection (2017). Cifaldi called the Mega Man Legacy Collection “his baby.” He began leaving the company in 2016 after starting the Video Game History Foundation. By 2018, he was the director of the foundation and left Digital Eclipse around 2020 to focus on the foundation full-time.
Cifaldi is also known for collecting many video game magazines. He has studied early video game advertisements, early Nintendo prototypes, and the official release date of Super Mario Bros. He spoke about preserving video games at the 2016 Game Developers Conference.