Video Game History Websites and People
- Retromags archives video game magazine scans, an indispensable time capsule showing how people talked about games before internet discourse took over, largely forgotten news, quietly cancelled projects, rumors that ended up being true, and what was being advertised to gamers. Includes magazines from around the world.
- Out of Print Archive focuses on UK magazine scans.
- Datassette has scans of video game magazines, though I don’t think they did any of the scanning.
- The Video Game History Foundation posts some interesting articles about video game history and has a text searchable library of scanned documents.
- Game Data Library has a nicely searchable database of Japanese game sales.
- Legends of Localization looks at how Japanese games are localized and has a lot of information about Japanese culture that comes up again and again in Japanese games.
- Game in Japanese translated some interviews from Japanese game developers.
- Consolevariations.com is chronicling every variant of every console and handheld.
- ROMchip is run by media and history professors and publishes scholarly articles.
- The Cutting Room Floor archives unused content from games.
- Retronauts is a long running podcast that examines video game history.
- The GDRI researches the actual developers of games, from pseudonymous credits to contracted development teams.
- Game UI Database is chronicling user interfaces.
- Gaming Alexandria scans books and magazines, preserves various game assets, and has informative history articles. They also have perhaps the biggest gaming history discord server.
- GamePressure had over 20,000 video game commercials, which seem to be mostly viewable with the Wayback Machine.
- Digital Press has manual scans and other mostly retro-focused video game media.
- Vimm’s Lair hosts a manual scan archive as well.
- Replacement Docs also has a large number of manual scans.
- The Internet Game Cars Database collects information about cars in video games.
- The Internet Movie Firearms Database has an extensive video game section.
- Unseen64 has lots of information on cancelled games.
- PS Instruction Manual has scans of Japanese PlayStation games.
- Midnight Meat Train has scans of Japanese manuals for various systems.
- Save State is Chris Chapman’s site chronicling his projects.
- Videogame Morgue File is a wiki that collects resources related to video games, such as ads, reviews, interviews, and writings run by Chris Chapman.
- Video Game Canon analyzes “best video games of all time” lists to find what are considered the best games of all time.
- Video Game Research Library is a catalog of thousands of interviews with developers, retrospectives, and analyses of video games.
- The Video Game Library aims to catalog every book about video games.
- Shmuplations translates interviews from important figures in video game history.
- Glitterberri translates articles, interviews, and more.
- Hit Save! archives various video game media.
- Forgotten Worlds is all about the history of video game magazines.
- The History of How We Play is Ethan Johnson’s blog about video game history.
- History of Hyrule and her Internet Archive page are home to Melora’s scans of various Japanese media related to The Legend of Zelda. She also has Its a me scanio for other media not related to Zelda.
- Hyrule Interviews, by Max Nichols, collects interviews from people who have worked on The Legend of Zelda games.
- Interactive Art Collection preserves and exhibits art relating to video games.
- Ozidual has scanned many Japanese video game magazines.
- Detchibe has scanned many Japanese video game magazines.
- VGDensetsu has a database of video game developers and much more about video game history.
- VGMuseum has screenshots from many games, especially the endings.
- Spriters Resource hosts sprites from many games.
- Foone has done all sorts of things.
Commonly Used Sources
- Wikipedia, especially lists of games. Rarely exhaustive and inconsistently formatted, but covers many topics and easy to copy into a spreadsheet.
- The Internet Archive hosts a huge trove of preserved information, if you can find it. They also run the Wayback Machine, archiving old webpages.
- MobyGames is probably the largest and most comprehensive video game database site.
- Gamerankings.com was shut down and now redirects to Metacritic. I liked this site a lot because you could filter games easily and I have enjoyed quite a few games that I found browsing it. Thankfully, there are a few archives: 1, 2.
- GameFAQs has some data on obscure games and is a great place to learn about game mechanics.
- ESRB.org has most of the ratings it has given out since its founding.
- The My Nintendo Store.
- The PlayStation Store.
- The Microsoft Store.
- YouTube videos showing something from a game that isn’t easily found elsewhere.
- Various fan made wikis.
Video game History youTubers
These are some YouTube channels focused on video game history or thoughtful analysis of games. I know there’s a lot more out there.