Checking old favorite games

First, I started visiting the entries for games I played decades ago, only to find out that there is often a lot of empty space to be filled. Many of the even more popular games lack of substantial elements. The first reaction is to read the Wikipedia-Entry and the MobyGames Database, checking out what the most brief summaries have to say. This leaves me in the urge to copy-paste the entry immediately, so I can be done with it.

Plagiarize ye not!

But of course, I know I must not do that. Every single item on the Giantbomb Wiki must be original material. Legal issues are the reason. And especially in the United States the law suits following the claims of copyright infringement are insane! So - I swallow my immediate instinct and actually turn on my own slow gray brain cells. There are some blurry memories to be found, but nothing that could compare with the ones of senior video game journalists. Even Shane Bettenhausen, who is a couple years younger than me, has an encyclopedic robo-brain of videogame knowledge.

I feel intimidated and want to stop before I even start editing.

Getting adventurous

Then the pride kicks in. I fire up the waybackmachine from archive.org reading old interviews. I visit fan-forums and try to find the earliest entries to recollect what people had to say about the game when it was published, slowly rebuilding my memory. And suddenly I want to contact all the old geezers who were building these games, to ask them about their memories and having a desire to write it down.

For example, nobody has written a biography of Tim Sweeney and the early years. He programmed on what became the very first Unreal-Engine while he was a school-kid. Or a more profound history of game programming, from Shigeru Miyamoto to John Carmack and John Romero. It could provide a more technical, fact based book than David Kushners "Masters of Doom" did for idsoftware.

I am not a journalist. I am not a writer. I am not interested in becoming either one of those. English was the 4th of many languages I still fail to conquer. So, if anybody feels inspired to do the work instead of me - please feel free to update the GB-Wiki instead of me.