## 57 Writing the Video Games History
There are many databases on cultural goods like movies, books and comic books, paintings, music but we often forget another kind of arts : Video Games, also known as the 10th Art for French People. IMDb included some games in its Movie Database as other sites like Metacritic, SensCritique, and Review Agregators. It's a way to write a kind of History of the Video Games, also with Wikipedia and many sites about Video Games.
As a former gamer, I looked for in my own memory how many and which games I have played at least once. So I began a list on a spreadsheet with the name, the platform (computers, consoles, arcade machines and even smartphone...), the year and what percentage of the game I have played and a score. I began with the first computer I owned : The Amstrad CPC, a very European computer with a Z80 at 4MHz ! It was the equivalent of a Commodore 64 for Americans. I have played at least one hundred of games in the almost 7 years I have owned this machine. And then I did the same with the other machines : MS-DOS, Windows, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, XBOX, XBOX 360, Nintendo Gamecube, Wii, Switch, Sega Saturn. And then the machines I have played at friend's house, at Arcade rooms. And finally all the games I have played with Emulation on several terminals.
If sometimes I doubt about the fact I was a gamer, because I'm a poor player, my passion for video games has lasted for almost 40 years. At this moment, I have listed 585 video games. And of course, the main period is between 1985 and 2005 with a hole in the 92-95, when I had no machine anymore, only a friend with an Amiga 500 computer. Now, I'm a big fan of retrogaming and it's very fun to play on my little Anbernic Handheld Console. Thousands of games in a pocket. This little personal database was good but what about sharing my little knowledge somewhere. I did some articles on the French blog but that's only for my prefered games.
So, I was looking for a site with a good database, to remember easily what I have played, the score, etc. Many databases are oriented on recent platforms to share your achievements, records, etc. That was not my goal. I was looking for a database with very old games (Yes, I have played on very old arcade systems of the 70s...). I tried Mobygames but between mistakes and bad search engine, and the not very nice team behind this site, I left my account and deleted it. I finally found a good website without ads, made by a passionate person (Andrea Doimo) who federated other passionate people. That's Universal Videogame List or uvlist.net. No ads, many information and much work to do to complete all the files and data. Now I'm a contributor and I discover some games everyday.
The work is like an inquiry with searches for proof of existence, screenshots, information, descriptions and dates. At this time, there are more than 160 000 video games, with many platform ports for each, 235 platforms, and I don't know how many contributors to do that. I don't know how many video games are released each month or each year but it must be colossal. On Steam, it's about 6000/year and quite the same on the three major console. So it's like the legend of the Danaïdes. As every project like this, the problem is that there are too few hands for many similar projects. UVL is not a fork of another database but it's trying to aggregate data from many project with links between them. I'm very admirative about the energy of Andrea in this because since 1997, he never abandoned that, despite many changes in the engine behind that and the format of the data.
Video Games are something visual and Wikipedia is not enough. When you are playing Retro games, you need sometimes to be guided, taken by the hand to understand the evolution, the best games on a platform, the styles and types of games, the great creators and studios, etc... I'm very interested in adding pictures and videos of the games because it's very helpful to understand what is behind an official or wikipedia description. I'm not sure that a young gamer of today is understanding what a "brick-breaker" can be or what is the goal of Boulder Dash. And trying an old racing game can be strange when we're not used to seeing stripes flashing on the side to give our visually impaired brains (compared to other species) an impression of speed. What is also fun is to see the size of the games : From 10 kiloOctets to now GigaOctets...but sometimes the more fun is not the bigger one.
This history of the video games is part of our beloved pop-culture, especially since the 80s, my golden years of video games with the 90s. Now I play very few recent games and more old ones or those I haven't finished. One life will not be enough but I'm also doint my part in writing this Video Games History.
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