Kayburt (31857) on 2/22/2024 11:30 AM · Reply · Permalink · Report

MobyGames has allowed me to find and view games that I have fond memories of and ones that I never knew existed. There's also room to document those obscure games to raise awareness about them, so people are free to look them up and if they are lucky, find a good copy of them. While I have multiple goals to fulfil in the contributing process, I can only finish one at a time. Last year I completed three libraries of games for forgotten consoles such as the Casio Loopy. Mobygames keeps the old and new games going and keeps interested parties informed. While sites like GameFAQs and Wikipedia list virtually all existing games. Mobygames goes the extra mile and provides more details, virtually everything a gamer could possible want. As long as volunteers continue to do their parts, this site will thrive and gain the support of gamers everywhere.

Artha Lister I hope I can change this (25) on 2/24/2024 3:02 PM · Reply · Permalink · Report

MobyGames to me means a very large video game database and while I was initially shocked to learn it was imperfect. When I made an account I was giddy to contribute

I contribute because I wanna help the database. I guess my favorite approved contribution would be the approved Xevious trailer

The most interesting information I learned thanks to this website is holy fuck there are so many video games

The most useful/valuable thing on this site would be just the sheer volume of info

I've been visiting it for like, a week tops. I use it to ocassionally contribute and stare at how much shit it has. The most it impacted me was when I read that study from the video game history foundation. Not a whole lot memorable besides when I saw how many tower defense games there are

hoeksmas (149556) on 2/24/2024 8:48 PM · Reply · Permalink · Report

I originally started contributing because there was a game I was interested in, and realized it wasn't on Mobygames. I then realized despite there being a ton of games here, Mobygames coverage of early 80s PC games was rather abysmal, so I decided to try my best to remedy that. 4500+ games later, and I'm only a bit closer to my goal.

I can now say that Moby's coverage of 70s - 80s American PC releases is second to none. It's important to me because a lot of the early history of video gaming has been lost. These games were a labor of love of some very talented people, and the games deserve to be documented.

That, plus the CRPG Addict keeps getting annoyed that he ends up playing the terrible 80s RPGs I keep digging up.

steve cook (26) on 2/25/2024 10:15 PM · Reply · Permalink · Report

i've been visiting mobygames since at least 2005. i did make a few contributions way back when in regards to some freeware games because that is the community of gaming i was involved in at the time.

now mobygames is one of the main sources for my videogame history bluesky / mastodon feed (formerly x): https://bsky.app/profile/vghistory.bsky.social / https://mastodon.social/@moshboy. its impact has been huge on me and is hard to measure, honestly.

the people that contribute here are invaluable.

Koterminus (241138) on 2/26/2024 10:05 AM · Reply · Permalink · Report

I joined MobyGames back in 2020 when I noticed that Counter-Strike Online 2 and the White Memories series were missing and set out to fix that. The feeling of having contributed to the reservoir of human knowledge that is MobyGames was such a good one that I continued by adding some of my favourite Flash games from my childhood, such as Junkbot and The Last Dalek, as well as many missing games from Steam and foreign oddities like Final Combat. I can't count how many other rewarding submissions I've made since, but replaying Paranoia 2: Savior for the Moby entry gave me much nostalgia and prompted me to reconnect with old friends.

After four years, I can say that MobyGames is an opportunity to be a part of history by documenting history. With any luck, this database (or at least a successor built on it) will be around for years, decades, maybe even centuries from now, and the people of those times will be able to read about the earlier days of one of humanity's most prominent and enduring mediums of entertainment thanks to us. Everyone who has ever contributed here in good faith should give themselves a pat on the back. I'm proud to be a contributor and approver and look forward to finding more weird and wonderful games to immortalize in the future through MobyGames.

vedder (70822) on 2/26/2024 10:10 AM · Reply · Permalink · Report

Around 2003 or so I started on a quest to watch all the films in the IMDB top 250. I really enjoyed that and once I had seen them all I figured I'd do something similar with games. That's when I really noticed the existence of MobyGames I guess. I started using the site to find old games worth playing based on their MobyRank. That quickly evolved into finding gaps of information. Soon after I started transcribing reviews from magazines I owned, which led to adding completely missing games.

At some point I became more interested in the data than playing the actual games. Specifically how games had grown and evolved over time. Especially the early dark ages for which information did exist online but was very fragmented and not easily discoverable deserved a better spotlight.

Lugamo (3132) on 2/27/2024 3:47 PM · Reply · Permalink · Report

I've been visiting MobyGames for more than a decade and a half. I mainly use it for its cover art collection, and to keep track of the games I've played.

I contribute to the database to make information about Argentine releases and games more readily available, I also like to contribute info about relatively obscure games such as those included with Humble Monthly bundles. My favourite contribution is probably Spaguetti Party: La familia Pomodoro.

Sombre (2396) on 2/27/2024 5:42 PM · Reply · Permalink · Report

I'm a wikipedian and I've been using MobyGames as the starting point for writing Wikipedia articles about games since probably 2005. Obviously, MobyGames can't be used as a source, but it's great for finding information that can be later confirmed with reliable sources. Or even for searching for the sources themselves (great database of reviews, especially for old games).

Why do you contribute to MobyGames? Because it's incomplete :).

Rwolf (22827) on 2/27/2024 10:10 PM · Reply · Permalink · Report

I guess I'm just a version of this guy: https://xkcd.com/386

Patrick Bregger (301035) on 2/28/2024 5:28 PM · Reply · Permalink · Report

My 15 year anniversary is coming up. I don't remember when I first heard of MobyGames, but my journey started with the desire to catalogue my games collection. I used some third-party database, but it missed a lot of games and game info. So I used MobyGames to collect the information for my database. From there it was only a short jump to ditch the tool and just use MobyGames directly.

My first big project was adding all MobyRanks from my favorite German games magazines. But because we were missing a lot of games from the 90s and early 2000s (and almost all German games) it quickly evolved into a quest to add all of them. I learned how to do research, how to critically question sources and how to write a short, on-point description. Later my interests diversified into credits and other projects.

Before MobyGames I had another online database of something entirely different to obsess about, but MobyGames had a big advantage: it will never be finished. Even if my hours went down since 2009, I don't think I'll ever be able to leave it behind. It is unbelievable satisfying to be the one to add a game years or even decades after it was released. Not even Gamefly could kill my love for the site - and believe me, they tried. 11/09, never forget.

Lampbane (21081) on 3/2/2024 12:00 AM · edited · Reply · Permalink · Report

I've been here almost 20 years, so I guess my anniversary is coming up soon. I found the site somewhere mid-2004, made an account by end of year. IIRC, my boss at the time asked me to compile a list of video game relevant sites and keep an eye on them, and... I guess that's what I've been doing ever since, even longer than that job.

Honestly, the most valuable thing to me is the breadth of coverage that MobyGames has over other databases, not just in older systems that I've never heard of, but also in stuff like browser games, which tend to get ignored by other sites. I think I might have made myself the unofficial godparent of the browser console around here...

I'm proud of the work I did in cataloguing games that are no longer with us, including lots of Facebook titles like Restaurant City and the ShiftyLook oeuvre , as well as making sure Moby has the most complete list of newsgames on the whole Internet.

Iggi (35816) on 3/4/2024 9:33 PM · Reply · Permalink · Report

• What is this game I've just heard about?
• Which platforms was it released on?
• When was it released?
• Was it released in Germany in German?
• Was it distributed in a big box or just a cheap keep case?
• What's the difference between that strange version I've seen on eBay and the version I have?
• I love that game by xxx - what else did that company or person do?
• Who did the Linux port of that game?

All these questions I've been wondering about many times, and MobyGames is the resource to answer them. And if it wasn't able to answer them, I decided to find out myself and document it for others. Yes, I've bought numerous games just to be able to document them ;-)

Memorable moments:

• My first submission - I still remember the friendly words by Sciere :-)
• MobyGames acquisition by GameFly - and the discussions where to move all the knowledge to because everyone thought the site would by dead.
• Discussing with Kam1Kaz3NL77 who wants to add the next IndieBox release because we always received them in parallel it seems

I really care about all the knowledge gathered on MobyGames, to relive all the childhood memories and discover things I've missed back then. The database is so amazing that I'm even tolerating that it's not a free license the data is released with.

Tim Janssen (98941) on 3/24/2024 5:55 PM · Reply · Permalink · Report

When I bought a new PC in 2002 running Windows XP I found out most of my old Win95 and DOS-games would not run anymore. Around this time I also obtained some Warez CD-roms ('Crazybytes', 'The Legacy', 'Twilight') containing obscure DOS/Win titles that refused to run and I had no clue what they were about. I became nostalgic and curious to find more information about them. Searching the games in Altavista (remember?) MobyGames was one of the few websites that popped up that contained descriptions and screenshots about them. From then on I became a regular visitor.

For over two decades I mainly contributed information about C64 and Amiga games for dedicated sites like Lemon 64, EAB, Lemon Amiga, amr.abime.net and my own Amiga Reviews site. Basically, if screenshots, trivia or reviews for a game were missing, I contributed it. Around 2006 I felt I had a good overview what software was available for C64 and Amiga and not many new discoveries were done. I then slowly resorted to adding information about DOS/PC games.

My first entry for this site were screenshots for 'Evil Twin: Cyphrien's Chronicles': A beautiful game that was almost impossible to finish due to numerous bugs, camera-issues and Windows crashes. I assumed due to these frustrations not many would be able to see much of the game hence I provided some screenshots. My favorite contributions are the many coverscans of my brother's Atari Lynx games. I was able to scan them in and upload them to this site before he exchanged them for spare parts for his mountainbike(!). Nowadays my contributions are mostly critic reviews (both offline and online) and credits for new games. I find the media coverage for games and people/roles involved often more interesting than the games themselves.

MobyGames was and is my number one source for (retro) video games.

Emitewiki (516) on 3/29/2024 7:41 PM · Reply · Permalink · Report

How long have you been visiting MobyGames? What do you use it for? How has it impacted you, your gaming, your research, your work? Any memorable, favorite moments?

Around 2016 (it's hard to remember the exact year, I'd have to check my records) I wanted there to be a "list of every video game" on the Internet. Being immature, my Internet search skills were not well-developed, and I did not understanding that "databases" was a good keyword to search for instead of "lists"... I was narrow-mindedly looking for a literal "list" online with links to individual entries of every game ever made. 🙈

Upon not being able to find such a wiki-style list, I thought there was a hole in the market so I decided to take it upon myself to launch such a website. I began setting a regimented schedule of getting through a daily number of tutorials and DIY learned from the ground up how to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. 🖥️ I began experimenting with web servers and trying to figure out the best roadmap for how I could do permenant hosting. I also at the same time was taking some college classes to learn traditional programming and its principles.

I made what I thought was decent progress on the website (though in retrospect, I can recognize it was hardly anything for what would be needed 😅) until one day around 2018 I accidentally stumbled upon MobyGames. To be honest, when I discovered the site, I was devastated. Where had this site been a couple years ago, back when I started investing all of this time into learning how to create my own wiki database? I quickly learned to use "database" in my searches for game sites and found a whole swath of other sites that were mimicking the same functionality as Moby. RAWG, Giant Bomb, IGDB, the list was nearly endless. Of those websites I found, Moby seemed to have both the most legitimacy and the most comprehensive dataset of games, but when I looked into contributing I was appalled to find that their tools for submitting were, quite frankly, trash and outdated for the late 2010s. 👴 "Really? You're going to make me go through an old-school wizard with dozens of page reloads just to edit one simple piece of information, instead of adding simple AJAX Wikipedia-style editing tools that could go into an approval queue?" is how I thought.

I was both devastated that so much of my hard work over the past few years had been somewhat wasted and was honestly pretty livid that it appeared (from an outside perspective) as if the site was being allowed to languish without any significant updates to the tools or UI in a number of years. If I were to create my own site, it would simply further fragment the already scattered community of contributors who might edit a video game database site, so I felt that I had to give that up. I developed the crazy idea that maybe I could instead go make money doing something else and then buy MobyGames out one day in the long-term future and actually give it the love and attention it deserved. To do that, I thought I would need an "in" on the backend to become a trusted community member who could help develop the site, and so I sent Reed a very embarassing email asking if I could volunteer web dev help to the site in Perl coding or anything else that was needed.

I was soundly rejected in my offers by Reed over email 💔, but I did join the Discord server (just a little over a year old, at that point!) and began messaging with Simon Carless regularly, who was still more involved in helping with the site at that point. I lurked on the Discord for a few years, sending ocassional messages and regular life updates to Simon just to keep the relationship fresh. It wasn't until the Atari buy-out and the site revamp was announced that I became excited about and active in the community again.

I like to think that I have matured a bit from my past self haha, and the fact that Moby is actually receiving regular updates to its tools brings me a lot of comfort and erased any of the silly past ideas I had about wanting to buy out the site one day. My goal now is to support Moby in any way I can, advocate for the feature requests I think are important, but also to try and bridge the gaps between the fractured community of video game preservationists. My real goal is to bring people together to collaborate in our shared love of preserving video games and information instead of working against each other in competition. I don't see myself departing from the Moby community for the next few decades (that is kind of how I roll with things), and what my involvement in the community will specifically look like is to be seen!

What do you find the most useful / valuable? The most valuable thing I find about the site is that its features and tools are being (somewhat-)regularly updated and there is a pipeline for being able to make feature requests known. For any digital product, no matter how big or small, this is a hugely, hugely, important consideration for me.

What's the most interesting information you've learned or unearthed on the site? Just how many tiny, niche, consoles there were in existence over history! I thought I had a pretty good working knowledge of most video game consoles that were produced, but Moby's platforms consistently blow that out of the water!

If you're a contributor, why do you contribute? What's your favorite contribution? I contribute because I want to see all information be preserved! Not just for video games, but across all mediums.

What does MobyGames mean to you? Moby represents a shining example in my mind of what I would like to see out of databases for everything in life. I want movie databases, music databases, local history databases, flora & fauna databases, toy databases, etc. that exist just for preserving information and history, just like Moby does. I think Moby is a great example of a site that can provide breadth and comprehensiveness for an industry, and gives researchers who need raw data and want to dig in deeper to individual games a great place to start.

F off on 4/21/2024 9:49 AM · Reply · Permalink · Report

I join here since last year now the thing a place I don't like that new mobyplus which I have to pay for more pages in the browse section which I use so I can archive games BUT NOW BECAUSE OF MOBYPLUS I HAVE TO DEAL WKTH THIS BULLSHIT THING SO I CAN JUST USE IT