Websites that archive gaming culture, not just the history. - General Discussion

#1 Edited by boocreepyfootdoctor (808 posts) - 3 months, 29 days ago

A place like giantbomb is great to find release dates, cover art, user reviews, and fans of classic games. A site like unseen64.net further adds extremely rare footage and discussion of the beta and unreleased games, vaporware, long lost info about them, etc. But I'm wondering who exactly has any kind of info, pictures, stories about gaming culture in general, from the vintage days to the pre-youtube age of the PS2/Xbox?Gamecube. Without turning this into a youtube spam page, here's what I mean:

Or stories from people who worked at mom and pop video stores that sold games before blockbuster put them all out of business. Footage of said little game shops, to get an idea of what the balance of Sega vs. Nintendo vs. Everyone Else was like in terms of

Or archives of yesteryears equivalent of that Skyrim statue, goodies that got sent to the magazines of the 1990's to bribe positive publicity for 'em. Watching old "GameSpotTV's" has been cool. But there must be so much more to see from that era. Hopefully it all doesn't get lost and buried. By now, everyone knows how foolish it was to let sports cars of the 50's and 60's rot away in barns, and you can just about dig up every tidbit of information about the cars of the 1890's to 1920's right down to how often Henry Ford's poop went green. I hope someone takes the time to expose and preserve gaming culture of the 70s-90s beyond reissues of Sonic 2 t-shirts. ;-)

#2 Posted by boocreepyfootdoctor (808 posts) - 3 months, 29 days ago

Seeing that video does so much more than a wiki article showing boxart and telling you prices, you know? Going for inflation adjustment, you'd see that games costing the equivalent of $140 today were going against ones costing about $70 today. With no good reason why. Even if there was a good reason on the back of the box, you couldn't get to it. You brought a little voucher to the counter. That always led to the Nickelodeon fantasy of snatching all them motherfuckers like you were picking up your book report after a bully knocked it on the floor and end up owning all of video gaming.

#3 Posted by Oldirtybearon (3087 posts) - 3 months, 29 days ago

The closest you'll get to an archive of gaming culture form the 70's-90's period is from people like the AVGN who will randomly give a lesson or possibly Jeff Gerstmann. Sadly I don't think a lot of people are interested in that particular facet of video games's history. You also need to remember that the majority of people on this site were born after the SNES and their first console was probably a PS2. With the way the Internet is now, there's no doubt that from the PS2 era onward we'll have excellent documentation and context for the culture at the time, but anything before that is pretty much a lost cause at this point.

Fucking shame too, considering that video you posted has me all nostalgic now.

#4 Posted by Rowr (4857 posts) - 3 months, 29 days ago

Video game magazines are you're best bet for any sort of incidental chronicling of the culture of the time. I had a bunch of some sega magazine my mum used to get me every month, i had about 2 years worth of them in a box that would get dug up every few years when i was going through stuff when moving etc

I totally threw them out a few years ago and i'm kicking myself now, they are pretty fascinating to look at now days. I also had some early pc mag issues from roughly whenever quake came out (i can't be bothered to work out what year that was.)

I remember when i was that age reading through old mags my dad had around for years from the commodore 64/amiga days.

#5 Posted by boocreepyfootdoctor (808 posts) - 3 months, 29 days ago

Is it illegal to post old scans of magazines online? Or just no one has taken the time?