Phil Salvador discovered his Call of Duty at five years old, when his parents bought him the 1993 game The Labyrinth of Time, a maze-filled adventure that unlocked a whole new world on the family’s Macintosh.

“I skipped that entire phase of thinking that video games were just blocky graphics and beeps and bloops like Space Invaders,” he says. “It was always so obvious to me that games were these incredible, immersive artistic experiences.”

As he got older, he realized they had cultural value too—stage one of his quest to becoming director of the Video Game History Foundation’s library.

Founded in 2017, the Oakland nonprofit is dedicated to celebrating, teaching, and preserving the history of classic video games—87 percent of which are “critically endangered” as a result of copyright battles, according to the foundation. What was once dismissed as fun and games is actually ripe for academic investigation and advocacy, Salvador says. “We are finally wising up to the fact that this is a cultural force.”

His job entails playing real-world Tetris while organizing thousands of company memos, magazines, and marketing materials that chronicle the history of the $180 billion industry, from Pong to Pokémon to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Having those controls in his hands wasn’t, however, an obvious career path. In 2008, Salvador came to AU planning to work in politics. When he found he enjoyed playing Halo in Hughes Hall more than being on Capitol Hill, he changed career modes from political science to library science, working as a staff member in AU’s visual media collection for 13 years until joining the foundation in 2022.

Although most of his gaming is done off the clock, Salvador has had plenty of virtual reality–like moments on the job, including cocktails with the creator of Myst last summer as part of a project to digitize more than 100 hours from the series. As he chatted with the developer of one of his favorite childhood video games, Salvador wondered what his younger self would think about how he’d leveled up. “That would have blown little Phil’s mind.”