The Video Game History Foundation Posts Colin Williamson's Photos of Japanese Game Culture From 1999 On, When a Working Reporter Happened to Carry a Digital Camera Through Dreamcast-Era Tokyo

Colin Williamson covered Japan for IGN, Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine and PC Gamer starting in 1999, and because he carried a digital camera when that was still unusual, the arcades, booths and street kiosks nobody thought to document survived; the Video Game History Foundation has published the collection with permission to reuse it with credit.

By Chris Pirillo · October 30, 2026 · 4 min read

Chris holding up a snow globe that preserves a tiny late-1990s game-expo scene, more globes on a stand, each holding its own little moment. — Illustration: LockerGnome

The reason this archive exists is almost an accident of timing. Around 1999 a working games journalist had access to show floors, press events and the streets of Akihabara, but very few of them were photographing it, because a camera that produced files you could email was still unusual and expensive. Williamson had one, and he pointed it at the things nobody files a photo of: a billboard, a kiosk, the back of a booth.

The Video Game History Foundation frames the value exactly there. These are not press shots of a product on a pedestal. They are the texture around the games, the arcade signage, the promotional stages, the vending and the crowds, the parts of a scene that no publisher archives because no publisher thinks they matter until they are gone.

The era on display is the one a lot of readers grew up inside. There is Tokyo Game Show from the Dreamcast years, when the show still ran twice a year, with a Shenmue booth built around a real forklift and a Sega stage demoing the new hardware. There is Nintendo’s Space World. There is the 2005 launch event for Electroplankton, the music toy for the Nintendo DS, with Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata and the game’s creator Toshio Iwai in the room.

The arcade and street photos are the ones that reward slowing down. A Sega Touring Car Championship cabinet built out of a full-size car body at a Sega indoor theme park. Jet Set Radio posters. Sega’s Akihabara arcade building. Tetsuya Mizuguchi holding the microphone prop from Space Channel 5. Each is a small, specific thing that the official record does not contain.

Why it matters

Nobody archives the ordinary surroundings. Companies keep their logos, their box art and their marketing. What they do not keep is the ordinary surroundings, the signage and the street and the half-built booth, and that is exactly what a bystander with a camera captures and an archive almost never does. The value here is that someone photographed the parts no one was assigned to.

Early digital photography quietly rewrote what survives. The reason this archive reaches back to 1999 and not further is that the tool arrived then. A reporter with a digital camera in that window was accidentally preserving a scene that the film-camera generation mostly let slip. The technology decided the cutoff.

Permission to reuse is what turns a shoebox into a resource. A private photo collection is a memory; a collection you may republish with credit is raw material for every history, video and article that comes after. The Foundation made the deliberate choice to license it for reuse, which is the difference between keeping the past and letting people build on it.

What makes the Foundation’s version of this more than a nice gallery is the reuse grant. In its own words, “you can use these photos with credit to Colin Williamson and the Video Game History Foundation.” That single line is what lets a creator pull a Dreamcast-era Tokyo Game Show photo into a retrospective legally, instead of hoping a rights holder never notices.

Steal this

Steal this

Photograph the boring surroundings now; they are the archive later. Williamson’s most valuable shots are the kiosks and billboards nobody thought worth a frame. Like keeping the receipts and ticket stubs from a trip instead of only the posed photos, the context is what you cannot reconstruct later. Document the ordinary parts of whatever scene you are in.
When you share a collection, say plainly how others may use it. The Foundation attached one clear sentence of reuse permission, and that sentence is what makes the work usable. If you publish anything you want people to build on, state the license in plain words up front instead of leaving it ambiguous.
Keep the originals, not just the posts. This archive is possible because the files survived for a quarter century. Back up your own source images somewhere durable, because the compressed copy on a dead social platform is not preservation.

The open question is how much more of this era is sitting on someone’s old hard drive. Williamson happened to have the tool and happened to keep the files, and the Foundation happened to ask. For every archive like this that surfaces, there are presumably others still unlabeled in a drawer, one failed backup away from being gone for good.

Search

The Video Game History Foundation Posts Colin Williamson's Photos of Japanese Game Culture From 1999 On, When a Working Reporter Happened to Carry a Digital Camera Through Dreamcast-Era Tokyo

More Retro