National Video Games Day

In the 1991 edition of Chase’s Calendar of Events — the fat American reference book that catalogues every observance from Groundhog Day to obscure trade promotions — there appears an entry for a “National Video Game Day”, sponsored by a man named David Earle, who is described as president of an organisation called Kid Video Warriors. Almost nothing else is known about either Earle or his warriors; no record of the group survives, and the date he submitted bounced around the calendar for years before settling. That single act of submission, more than any corporate launch or government decree, is the closest thing this celebration has to a founding moment. National Video Games Day, now most commonly observed on 12 September, is a day for players to put aside the medium’s lingering reputation as a children’s distraction and treat it as what it has become: the largest entertainment industry on the planet.

The man who filed the holiday

Entries in Chase’s are not handed down by any authority; they are submitted by sponsors who fill in a form. This is why the calendar is studded with days that have no institution behind them, and why the origins of National Video Games Day are so wonderfully thin. Earle’s listing first gave the date as 8 July, then in subsequent editions it drifted to 12 July, then to 10 September, before an entry in 1997 fixed it at 12 September — by which point Earle’s name had vanished from the sponsorship line entirely. The result is the slightly comic situation that the most widely cited “video games day” is one whose own creator quietly disappeared from the record. Researchers at the Video Game History Foundation, who went looking for Earle, turned up no trace of the Kid Video Warriors at all.

This tangled provenance explains the calendar confusion that follows the day to this hour. Some sources still observe a separate Video Game Day on 8 July, the original Earle date, while others hold firmly to 12 September. The disagreement is harmless, and most players are content to celebrate twice rather than adjudicate.

From cabinet to living room

The medium Earle was honouring was, in 1991, barely two decades into mass popularity. The arcade had been the first place gaming reached a crowd: coin-operated cabinets such as Pong, released by Atari in 1972, and Space Invaders, which Taito put into Japanese arcades in 1978, drew queues of players who scribbled their initials onto high-score tables glowing in dim, smoky rooms. Space Invaders was so popular in Japan that it was widely reported to have caused a shortage of the 100-yen coins it consumed, a story that has hardened into legend even as economists have cast doubt on its literal truth.

Home consoles followed and changed the audience entirely. The Atari 2600 brought arcade-style play into the living room from 1977; a North American glut of poor-quality cartridges then triggered the industry crash of 1983, which many commentators assumed had killed console gaming for good. It was Nintendo, with the Famicom in Japan and the Nintendo Entertainment System abroad, that rebuilt the market from 1985 and imposed the quality controls that stabilised it. Each subsequent generation — the 16-bit rivalry of Sega and Nintendo, the optical discs of Sony’s PlayStation in 1994, the online networks of the 2000s — widened both what games could do and who was playing them.

Why an interactive art form matters

What sets games apart from books, films and music is that the audience acts rather than merely watches. A reader cannot change the ending of a novel; a player routinely changes the ending of a game. That single difference has consequences. Decades of research, much of it from cognitive psychologists studying action games, has linked regular play to measurable gains in spatial reasoning, visual attention and the ability to track several moving objects at once. Games have also become a serious narrative form: titles such as Disco Elysium or The Last of Us are discussed in terms once reserved for literature and cinema, with their writing, scoring and performance subjected to the same scrutiny.

There is a strong case, too, for games as instruments of empathy, placing a player inside a perspective they would never otherwise inhabit — a refugee, a carer, a soldier, a parent in crisis. The day is, in part, an invitation to take all of this seriously, and to notice the patient labour of the artists, writers, composers and programmers whose names rarely reach the player.

A larger industry than film and music combined

The scale is genuinely difficult to overstate. By the mid-2020s the global games market was generating well over 180 billion US dollars a year, comfortably exceeding the worldwide box office and recorded-music revenues put together. Single releases now rival blockbuster cinema for spectacle: Grand Theft Auto V, released by Rockstar in 2013, took an estimated 1 billion dollars in its first three days, a sum no film has matched on opening. Competitive play, or esports, fills arenas and draws online audiences that rival traditional sport, while a flourishing community of independent developers — often working alone or in tiny teams — keeps the medium experimental, producing inventive games such as Stardew Valley, built almost single-handedly by one developer over four years.

The reach of mobile play deserves its own mention, because it quietly upended the demographics. A phone in nearly every pocket means the median player is no longer a teenage boy at all; surveys in the United States and Britain consistently find the player base split close to evenly by gender and with an average age well into the thirties.

How players mark the day

Celebration tends to be refreshingly direct: players play. Many use the date to revisit a classic, to finally begin a game that has waited on the shelf, or to gather friends on a sofa or across an online network. Some dig out old hardware and explore the medium’s history; others share recommendations, run charity streams, or introduce a younger relative to the games of their own childhood. Online communities rally around the date with discussions, retrospectives and tributes to particular studios and developers. Because the day asks for nothing more elaborate than picking up a controller, it is among the easiest observances to keep, and among the most honestly enjoyed.

The link between games and other quiet, screen-bound or contemplative pastimes is closer than it looks; the same impulse that fills World Read Aloud Day with shared stories animates the cooperative campaign played across a single weekend, and the craft of the programmers honoured on International Programmers’ Day is exactly the craft that makes any of these worlds run at all.

Preservation and the problem of a vanishing medium

There is a particular urgency that gives the day more weight than its frivolous origins suggest: games are alarmingly easy to lose. Unlike a book or a film, a game often depends on hardware that ceases to be manufactured, on servers that are switched off, and on companies that fold without depositing their work anywhere. A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, found that nearly nine in ten classic video games released before 2010 were effectively out of print and commercially unavailable — a survival rate worse than that of silent-era cinema, much of which has at least been catalogued. When an online-only game is discontinued, it can simply cease to exist, playable by no one, leaving behind not even a copy to be rediscovered.

This is why a day spent dusting off old consoles is more than nostalgia. Enthusiasts who maintain emulators, archive cartridges, document forgotten studios and keep dead servers alive through fan-run projects are, in effect, performing the work that libraries and film archives do for older media. Marking the day by revisiting something old, rather than only buying something new, quietly supports the case that games are part of the cultural record and deserve to be kept.

The shape of a player’s library

One reason the medium has aged in such an uneven way is that “video game” is not one thing but a sprawl of forms that share little beyond a screen and an input device. The sweeping role-playing epic that asks for a hundred hours has almost nothing in common, mechanically, with the three-minute puzzle played on a phone in a queue, and neither resembles the competitive shooter built to be replayed forever or the gentle, plotless simulation designed to soothe rather than challenge. This breadth is precisely what lets the day mean different things to different people: for one player it is an excuse to finish a story they have been savouring, for another a tournament with friends, for a third a slow afternoon tending a virtual garden. The medium is large enough to contain all of these at once, which is itself a fairly recent development and a reasonable thing to celebrate.

Fun facts

• The day’s likely originator, David Earle, and his organisation the Kid Video Warriors have left no trace in any record beyond the Chase’s Calendar listings themselves, making him one of the more mysterious holiday founders anywhere.
• The date migrated across the calendar — 8 July, 12 July, 10 September, then 12 September — before settling, which is why a rival “Video Game Day” is still observed on 8 July by some.
• The 1983 North American video game crash was so severe that retailers and analysts widely declared home consoles a dead fad; the recovery was led almost single-handedly by Nintendo two years later.
• Grand Theft Auto V earned an estimated one billion dollars within three days of its 2013 launch — faster than any film in history has reached the same figure.
• The global games industry now out-earns the worldwide film box office and recorded-music sales combined, having grown from a pursuit that barely existed within living memory.

A closing reflection

There is something fitting in a celebration whose own origins are this uncertain, because games themselves have always been built by people who were not waiting for permission — the lone coder, the small studio, the modder tinkering after hours. A day filed on a form by a man nobody can now identify has outlived its author and gathered millions of players to it, which is roughly how the medium itself grew: not by decree, but by the accumulated enthusiasm of people who simply wanted to play, and to make things worth playing.