Video Game History Websites and People
Scans And Preservation
- 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.
- 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.
- History of Hyrule and Melora’s Internet Archive page are home to 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.
- VGMuseum has screenshots from many games, especially the endings.
- Spriters Resource hosts sprites from many games.
- Ozidual has scanned many Japanese video game magazines.
- Detchibe (Joey Wawzonek) has scanned many Japanese video game magazines.
- Hit Save! archives various video game media.
- PS Instruction Manual has scans of Japanese PlayStation game manuals.
- Midnight Meat Train has scans of Japanese manuals for various systems.
People, Organizations, And YouTube
- The Video Game History Foundation has a YouTube channel, a blog, a podcast and a text searchable library of scanned magazines, catalogs, and other documents.
- ROMchip is run by media and history professors and publishes scholarly articles.
- 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.
- 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.
- Unseen64 has lots of information on cancelled games.
- Save State is Chris Chapman’s site chronicling his projects. Those projects include YouTube channel Retrohistories and Videogame Morgue File, a wiki that collects resources related to video games, such as ads, reviews, interviews, and writings.
- Jeremy Parish has a YouTube channel and has written many books about game history.
- The Stacks is Joey Wawzonek’s website, hosting their scans and featuring articles about “media outside the zeitgeist”.
- Video Game Canon analyzes “best video games of all time” lists to find what are considered the best games of all time.
- Kate Willært has a YouTube channel and her website is A Critical Hit!
- The History of How We Play is Ethan Johnson’s blog about video game history, there’s also a YouTube channel.
- Video Game Research Library is a catalog of thousands of interviews with developers, retrospectives, and analyses of video games.
- Forgotten Worlds is all about the history of video game magazines.
- VGDensetsu has a database of video game developers and much more about video game history.
- Did You Know Gaming? is uncovering new interviews and making game history videos.
- They Create Worlds is a podcast that does deep dives into various game history subjects.
- Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games is Drew Mackie’s site where he writes about retro games. Many of the articles are focused on etymology.
- Foxhack’s new website when it launches.
- Foone has done all sorts of things.
Translation
- Shmuplations translates Japanese interviews.
- Glitterberri translates articles, interviews, and more.
- Game in Japanese translated some interviews from Japanese game developers.
- Source Gaming has translated various Japanese interviews.
- 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.
Single Subject Databases
- Game UI Database is chronicling user interfaces.
- The Video Game Library aims to catalog every book about video games.
- The Cutting Room Floor archives unused content from games.
- Game Data Library has a nicely searchable database of Japanese game sales.
- Consolevariations.com is chronicling every variant of every console and handheld.
- KeitaiWiki is all about Japanese feature phone games.
- The Internet Game Cars Database collects information about cars in video games.
- The Internet Movie Firearms Database has an extensive video game section.
- The Video Game Soda Machine Project hosts screenshots of thousands of soda machines in video games.
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.
- 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.
- Various gaming magazines, scanned by people mentioned above.
Special Thanks
Thank you to Vince19, whose YouTube channel was exactly the kind of thing I hungered for. His videos reinvigorated my love of statistics and my desire to learn more about video game history. Thank you to everyone who had kind things to say about the Nintendo Game Project on Reddit.
Thank you to all the people above who are building websites, making videos, writing blogs, or recording podcasts about video games.
Thank you to everyone contributing to wikis and databases, scanning, archiving, and preserving video game history and keeping it accessible.