Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
What if we reported on the past like it was happening in the present day—not reflecting on it nostalgically like I do at Tedium, but literally trying to cover the past as if you had no knowledge of the future?
It sounds like an odd thought exercise, but in reality, it’s a whole lot of fun, based on the website Nintendo Times. Since 2015, the writer and blogger Craig Majaski, who cut his teeth at the long-running gaming site Gaming Age, has been editing and putting together a site in which 30-year-old discussions and interviews about the early days of the Nintendo Entertainment System are published as if they’re happening in real time.
For example, this post about a Nintendo press announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show has a publish date of January 11, 1987—as well as forward-thinking statements like “Nintendo is going to continue its aggressive marketing campaign for 1987.”
So how does one come up with an approach like this? Majaski cites an interest in preservation, one shared with other folks like historians Steve Lin and Frank Cifaldi, the two principals of the Video Game History Foundation who he cites as being very helpful to his cause.
“I had this idea back in 2013, and as I began researching the early days of the NES,…
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