'Games That Weren't' preserves lost video game history

Video games are helping to preserve cultural heritage sites, further archaeological study

When Carmen Sandiego swept onto the video game scene in 1985, the deluxe version of the game included historic photographs from National Geographic and music from the Smithsonian. Read this article to learn about the overlap between gaming and ancient architecture.

Atari buried hundreds of thousands of video games in the New Mexico desert

The video game industry crashed in 1983, leaving the company with an enormous inventory. Looking to offload the excess, the company secretly had 800,000 cartridges buried in the desert in Alamogordo, New Mexico. For decades, the story was believed to be an urban legend, but documentary filmmakers pursued the story and, in 2014, unearthed the games.

Thousands of Atari cartridges were once buried in a New Mexico landfill

A waste management specialist unearthed a legendary cache of unsold games decades after they were buried, transforming one of gaming history's most famous disposal stories into an unexpected and lucrative salvage operation.

'Super Mario Bros.' helped save the video game industry

A 1983 crash left the industry in tatters, desperate for a hit. Nintendo’s focus on a more immersive home experience was realized in “Super Mario Bros.,” bringing the industry from the arcade to the living room. The title eventually sold over 40 million units.

Get your hands dirty in this archaeology video game that's actually about archaeology

How many of us have played a video game with an archaeologist protagonist whose main idea of fieldwork involves spying, back flips, and destroying the historic sites they're meant to be preserving? Exactly.

The streamer no longer just offers TV and movies

As a means of keeping existing subscribers engaged, and to add new users on the margins, the streaming service began releasing its own original video games. Many are based on existing Netflix titles and franchises. See their current offerings here.

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for $3M, making it the most valuable video game cartridge ever auctioned.

A virtual art gallery in the mode of 'Doom'

One of the earliest video games to use 3D interfaces, 1993's "Doom" was a first-person shooter set on the moons of Mars which ended in hell. It became one of the most critically and commercially successful games of all time. Now, you can wander virtually in an art gallery in the mode of the game, sipping wine and perusing pixelated versions of classic works of art.

Safely explore historic viruses and other malicious software in the Malware Museum.

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library of the Web

Founded in 1996, the Archive promotes open access and the digital preservation of online information and, as of 2026, contains more than 200 petabytes of content, including over one trillion web pages, 56 million books and texts, 13 million audio recordings, 1.3 million software programs, and other digital content.

The game’s theme was the first video game composition added to the Library of Congress

Koji Kondo’s “Ground Theme,” the opening music for “Super Mario Bros.” was added to the National Recording Registry in 2023. “Having this music preserved alongside so many other classic songs is such a great honor,” Kondo said. “It's actually a little bit difficult to believe.”

'Stadium Events' is one of the rarest Nintendo games

Advance genetic research by playing these scientific video games

Computers produce so much information that researchers can't properly analyze all the data produced, and the overload can also lead computers to make mistakes. Researchers are increasingly turning to citizen scientists—members of the public who are willing to volunteer—to help them make sense of data when computers can't. This article details a few of the ways you can contribute to genetics research by playing video games.

Where did artful screen savers go? A history

Early on in the personal computer days, users and engineers realized screens could be damaged if the same image—of a button, a logo, or a navigation bar—stays static for too long. To preserve the screen, developers deployed screen savers—automatic reductions in the light intensity, or regularly changing patterns on the screen. These artful screen savers had a heyday in the 1990s, but have since lost popularity to the simple black screen. Read the history here.

The design changed video games forever

Miyamoto’s direction and Kondo’s sound showed younger generations the potential of video games, inspiring a more sophisticated form that moved far beyond the one-dimensional entertainment of the arcade era.

See the original websites for companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple

Explore archived images of homepages on websites dating all the way back to 1991.

Reimagine damaged cultural sites from around the world

NeoMam art studios created animated GIFs restoring six endangered World Heritage sites to their original glory. These include Hatra, a fortified city in Iraq, and Nan Madol, an island site in the northwest Pacific. These landmarks are designated as at risk due to threats like earthquakes and conflict in the regions. Enjoy some of the beautifully restored landmarks with this brief article.

Play a space junk collection game

Developed by Astroscale, a company with a contract from the UK to remove satellites from orbit safely, the game enables players to simulate the company's planned COSMIC mission and test their space debris-catching skills.

Mario's archnemesis hosted a children's show in the 1980s

"Super Mario Bros." grew so popular in the '80s, even King Koopa, the video game's villain, had his own television show, though it's been all but erased from TV history. There's good reason for that: It was a bizarre enterprise, featuring '30s cartoons, a grumpy stand-up comedian, and cheap production.

Explore a digital graveyard of over 300 products, services, and devices that have been discontinued by Google, including Chromecast, Google+, and Google Goggles.

Play an incremental game that teaches the history of particle physics

Developed during the CERN Summer Student Webfest 2014, this game tasks you with building the reputation of your particle accelerator as you discover particles and hire staff to collect data. A historical breakdown accompanies each discovery, allowing you to recreate the timeline of the field.

Explore a database of free games you can play in your web browser, including classics like Mahjongg.

Atari's 'Pong', VCRs, and CD players all launched at CES

This roundup highlights major tech milestones at CES, including the launch of the Nintendo NES in 1985, the DVD in 1996, and the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift in 2013.

The art of 'undiscovering' phantom islands

Centuries of maps include islands and isles that appear to only exist on atlases. This article explores the discovery and "undiscovery" of such landscapes, which still persist despite modern technology. As recently as 2012, Google Maps showed an...

An archive of some of America's most significant shipwrecks

From The Portland—known as New England's "Titanic"—to the Civil War's USS Monitor, this archive from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides overviews of some of the most well-known shipwrecks in US history.

Atlantis and the apocalypse: the world of fringe archaeology

A Netflix series called "Ancient Apocalypse" claims that a thriving civilization was wiped out during the ice age by comets and floods, but left humanity with science and technology. Experts call this “pseudo-archaeology.” This hour-long podcast...

Read an oral history of the Y2K panic

This oral history brings together programmers, engineers, and officials who first identified the date flaw and then spent years alerting the public to the danger and racing to repair millions of lines of code.

Nintendo began in 1889 as a playing card company

As a leading video game publisher, Nintendo has contributed to expanding the prevalence of handheld and console technologies for over a century. It has also developed franchise mascots that have appeared in other media, including Mario and Sonic.

An archive of the art of the Sanborn fire insurance maps

For a century, US insurance companies used Sanborn Fire Maps to decide the premiums customers would pay for fire insurance. These maps were designed to show the building materials used in each structure in 12,000 communities across 300,000 maps. While they have become obsolete, these maps are still useful for historians and urban designers, and anyone interested in lovely, original typography. Dive into the most artful Sanborn Fire Maps with this passion project collection.

A visual guide to the athletic events the Olympics left behind

The series of competitions in today's version of the Olympic Games are the survivors of years of experimentation. This illustrated guide details some of the sports and creative competitions that didn't make the cut. Some sports were dropped due to their lack of visual appeal, while others were simply too specific, like the swim limited to sailors of the Royal Greek Navy.

A rich archive of the visual imagination of the Cold War era

The blog aggregates art, design, fashion, and technology from the atomic and space age, spanning mid-century American futurism and its Soviet counterpart. The content has a broad range: escape pods from a B-58 bomber sit alongside Tour de France caravan vehicles and unidentified industrial designs.

Many early computer viruses were not created for malicious purposes

Besides those authored in research labs as proofs of concept for self-replicating software, hobbyists would create malware that played music or displayed text and animations that intentionally revealed the infection as a means of showing off, rather than hiding their spread.

Relive the millennial panic with 'Surviving Y2K'

This multi-episode series follows host Dan Taberski as he interviews coders, survivalists, conspiracy believers, and others who lived the Y2K scare firsthand—while weaving in his own personal story from 1999, providing a more intimate view of the crisis.

Get lost in these historical libraries

The internet has changed a lot about how we learn, explore new ideas, and conduct research, particularly when it comes to the spaces we learn in. While few of us would trade our smartphones for a walk in a historical library, a walk through some of the beautifully designed cathedrals of learning could remind us to put them down sometimes. Explore 10 of the world's magnificent libraries with this quick video survey.

A comprehensive history of 'The Simpsons'

This documentary explores the wild trajectory of the show, from Matt Groening's early underground cartoons to its status as a groundbreaking pop culture phenomenon.

In 2021, someone paid $2M for an unopened 'Super Mario Bros.'

The collectibles site Rally announced in 2021 that an unopened "Super Mario Bros." cartridge sold for $2M. That's the highest price ever paid for a video game.

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

Web crawlers and internet archives and back-ups limit perfect erasure of online data

Crawlers are programs that automatically browse the internet for links and index pages for search engines to pull up when page content matches search queries. Networks of global data centers also create copies of content as fail-safes for potential failures to ensure access isn't ever lost.

Reimagining YouTube as cable TV, complete with channel-surfing

The site streams YouTube content as if it were broadcast television, providing the ability to flip through channels and enter videos mid-stream, and you also can't easily skip ahead. The product is designed in part to bring back serendipity to video discovery.

Losing the kids to video games

An estimated 60 million people suffer from internet gaming disorder worldwide, a category created by the World Health Organization in 2018 to help communities support individuals plagued by pathological play. As the world's most-played game of all...

Explore demonstrations of hundreds of viruses and other malware in action

On their YouTube channel, Malware historian Daniel White has documented what happens when various types of malware—mostly from the 1980s and 90s—run on a computer or Nokia cell phone. The demonstrations were safely conducted within virtual machines—older operating systems run within contained windows of modern software, resembling a picture-in-picture setup.

See a gallery of the early years of CES

This gallery showcases rare photos from the early decades of CES, featuring early personal computers and the first handheld cassette players. See how the world’s biggest tech show began and grew.

Nvidia pioneered the GPU industry via its origins as a video game company

From the mid-1990s to early 2000s, Nvidia carved out a niche as a maker of semiconductor chips specially designed for the video game industry. Nvidia broke through the competition to seal deals with TSMC and Microsoft, and popularized the term "graphics processing unit," aka GPU.

Court documents show that Anthropic bought and destructively scanned millions of books to gather high-quality text to train the software underlying its AI products.

Content frequently disappears from streaming services due to rights negotiations and tax incentives.

Why Saturday morning cartoons died

What ever happened to Saturday morning cartoons? This short article explains what ended the once-ubiquitous weekend favorite. In the 1980s, Saturday mornings were a cherished time for kids who would watch animated shows while eating breakfast. In...

The overnight collapse of Ello, a beloved, decade-old social network

Ello launched in 2014 with big dreams to avoid advertising and retain a user-friendly, simple style. But in 2023, the hip social network suddenly shut down, removing nine years of posts with no warning. Artists, writers, and other creators lost nearly a decade of work with no explanation. Read the troubling story here.

'Pac-Man' was the rare early video game aimed at both men and women

The early arcade games were mainly aimed at boys and young men, with a focus on sports and violence. Toru Iwatani was interested in appealing to a wider audience and created "Pac-Man," released in Japan in 1980.

Imagine thousands of alternate histories of the world

AlternateHistory.com has hosted fan-written "what if" timelines, discussions, and speculative fiction since 2000, making it the largest online gathering of alternate history enthusiasts, with over 10,000 active members and a wiki cataloging hundreds of user-created scenarios. Two highlights to pique your interest: what if the Vikings had settled North America? What would have had to happen for the storyline of George Orwell's "1984" to come true?

Explore the world of fan fiction

This guide to the genre's major platforms breaks down their strengths and weaknesses, offering an excellent primer for the uninitiated newcomers.