Akihabara’s arcade golden age resurfaces in a journalist’s never-seen photos of Club SEGA

Video game history is mostly preserved as software. Cartridges get dumped, arcade boards get emulated, soundtracks get remastered. What rarely survives is the place: the street corner, the shop window, the tower of televisions in a Tokyo electronics store at the turn of the millennium. That is the gap the Video Game History Foundation is now trying to close, one photograph at a time.

Its newest addition to the free VGHF Digital Library is the Colin Williamson Photography Collection, the work of an American journalist who covered Japan for IGN, PC Gamer and other outlets during the industry’s boom years. Williamson worked Tokyo Game Show and the JAMMA arcade show, interviewed developers such as Hideo Kojima and composer Nobuo Uematsu, and carried a digital camera when that was still a novelty. Between assignments, he walked the side streets of Akihabara and kept shooting.

The collection debuts with more than 300 images. Some are the trade-show snapshots you would expect: exhibits for Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec, a Shenmue display complete with a forklift, a street promotion for Space Channel 5 with producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and Nintendo‘s Space World event, where the company showed off the Game Boy Advance.

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The more valuable frames are the ones nobody thought to keep. The red facade of Club SEGA. The SEGA Hi Tech Land signage with Sonic the Hedgehog. Stacks of CRT televisions and PC monitors, and advertisements for Jet Set Radio and Final Fantasy IX. This is the texture of a gaming culture that lived in public, on the street, before it retreated almost entirely into screens and digital storefronts.

In the announcement, VGHF library director Phil Salvador puts it plainly: “We might consider pictures like these to be unremarkable when we take them, but decades later, they can be an important snapshot of history.” The images are free to browse and to use for educational purposes, and Williamson revisited his years in Japan on the foundation’s Video Game History Hour podcast.

The collection lands alongside the VGHF’s annual impact report. The Digital Library, which opened in 2025, now holds more than 8,000 cataloged items, some 61,000 individual files. The report also recalls the rescue of Xcavator, an unfinished NES game cancelled in 1991, whose source code the foundation recovered from the family of the late programmer Chris Oberth; it was later released with Mega Cat Studios and iam8bit, with profits funding preservation. The foundation also took ownership of Computer Entertainer, one of the first American video game magazines, and digitized it in full under a Creative Commons license.

“We knew people were interested in genuine, human-curated history, but we had no idea just how popular this resource would be,” said executive director Frank Cifaldi, who founded the non-profit in 2017. Next comes the annual Winter Fundraiser, which opens on Dec. 1, Giving Tuesday, and runs through December with videos and articles on influential trendsetters and cancelled projects.

A cabinet can be emulated forever. An Akihabara street corner cannot, unless someone happened to be standing on it with a camera.

Tags: Akihabara, Club SEGA, Colin Williamson, Frank Cifaldi, Tokyo Game Show, Video Game History Foundation

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