Happy September, everyone! Now we're heading for the autumn, the weather here has gone full RNG. (Running total of unpleasant heatwaves: 4, running total of epic thunderstorms: 3.)

This has been an anomalously busy month, because I was pulled in by the MD at my day job to deliver a big project in a short time. That meant a lot of overtime over the past three weeks. Because the number of days I spent doing paid work was about 40% higher than in a normal month, the time I could spend doing Save State stuff was correspondingly less. I hate zero-sum games.

So, regrettably, I didn't hit all the goals I set out to at the beginning of the month. But here's everything I did manage in August, Month of Renewal:

Rebranding

The big push this month was to rebrand the YouTube channel, the Patreon, and my active social media accounts from Retrohistories to Save State. YouTube happened a few weeks ago (with an announcement video, the first video uploaded to the channel in years). I did Bluesky just now. I'm planning to do the same on Mastodon, but it seems it might be trickier. The Patreon rename will happen tomorrow, for reasons I'll get into.

Though it's at a minimum annoying to change all these accounts (and, worse, risks breaking incoming links), bringing everything together under one banner seems more intuitive to me than treating the site and the channel as separate projects; they're just different sides of the same practice. Of course I can't change the images or voiceovers in old videos, so Retrohistories will always be part of the back catalogue, but I won't be using the name again in anything I make from here on out.

Patreon is the trickiest of the bunch, because of a forced change by the site: every campaign still using per-creation charges have until November to switch to recurring monthly billing. So the task I'm faced with there is less of a rename, more of a full-blown rewrite for a very different proposition. I set a September 1st deadline for this change three months ago and that distant deadline has somehow now become tomorrow, but most of the new copy is already written and ready to go. (Edited to add: just found out at the eleventh hour that I have to go through Patreon's one-to-one support to migrate, so that September 1st goal might now look a bit dicey. Let's go with ASAP.)

That change by Patreon also requires a big shift in how I work, since it puts me on a cycle where something is expected monthly, rather than my natural 'when it's done' vibe. I've been trying to adjust to that through the summer, but it's difficult to time-block creative projects when they can end up taking a different form to what was initially envisioned. I hope I'll get used to it.

Oh, and this domain is now locked in through 2029; it's not going anywhere.

Videos

Besides the announcement video, I'm working on a short video about a well-known game that included malware. The script is more or less completely finished. I'd hoped to release the video this month; however, I haven't yet had chance to get on camera and record it (the first video I'm doing this way). I don't want to oversell it; it's shorter and simpler than most of the videos I've made before, but that's how I'm getting back into the game. It'll definitely land on the channel (and here) in September.

Scanning

I took the month off from scanning, knowing I'd have my hands full, but I'll be back to it in September with more issues of MCV.

Magazine Indexing

Database stats at the end of August 2026 (delta from July):

Titles indexed: 80 (+2)
Distinct issues indexed: 7,748 (+326)
Pages indexed: 1,048,468 (+52,569)

Not the biggest month for additions—I added only GamePro and Mean Machines—but roughly eighteen months out from an initially empty database, we passed the arbitrary but psychologically significant million page mark! That's still only a fraction of the ever-growing collection (in fact I'm almost certain the percentage of the collection that's been imported is shrinking), so onward and upward... or backward, as the case may be.

(The index isn't public, but if you're a game historian—pro or amateur—and you'd like me to run off a few queries, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)

Morgue File wiki

Each month I'm trying to put a few spare hours into seeding a new page on the wiki. The process involves a lot of reading, extracting pages from scanned magazines, and search-engine-fu, and the resulting page—which contains helpful links and a bunch of downloadable print media excerpts—will hopefully serve as a helpful resource for anyone looking to do some research. At the end of the month, I do a hard cutoff regardless of progress, and start populating a new page the following month. (I know that seems arbitrary—I could obviously work on a single page indefinitely—but the deadline's part of the plan of trying to build out and broaden the wiki.)

August's page of the month was ToeJam & Earl, and I managed to add most of the relevant material I was able to find by searching the magazine index. Shout-out to user Somewhere for their contributions to the page as well. Next month's goal: turning this placeholder page for SimCity 2000 into a real resource.

Now Playing

At the start of the year, I set myself a goal to finish twelve single-player games this year. In retrospect, I wasn't ambitious enough by half. I finished two more in August—the Dead Kings expansion to Assassin's Creed: Unity, and Ambrosia Sky—bringing my total for the year so far to 20! Some of those were short, single-sitting games, but even if you only count 'full-length' games (whatever that means), I'm still on 11/12.

Number 12, by that method, will assuredly be Trails in the Sky: 1st Chapter. I'm 45 hours in and have been enraptured by its charms, which probably means—oh dear—that I'm in this series for the haul.

After that, I need to throw in some older games. Only three so far this year, Metroid: Zero Mission, Star Fox 64 and Rhythm Tengoku, would qualify as retro in any way, and two of the three were post-2000. Something truly vintage next time, I think.

Acquisitions

The push for filming gear continued with some cheap LED lighting and stands. Haven't had a chance to use them yet (see above), but I'm hoping they hold up. (I tried to get a photo, but they're off-camera lights.)

But my favourite new thing this month was the birthday present from my partner:

Geeks-Line's console books are dense, technical and comprehensive while also serving as nice coffee-table books; for some reason I rarely see them mentioned. (If I were to criticise, the translations from the original French can be on the janky side.) I had six on my shelves already (which is over half of their English-language catalogue, I think), but they're expensive small-run volumes, and since I've been trying to economise, I didn't expect to get another any time soon.

But since all the volumes I have cover either Nintendo or Sony platforms, I had my eye on this one. I don't know the PC Engine well (though the few games I've played under emulation have all been bangers) but the capsule review section of this book calls out both the acclaimed classics and the hidden gems. I'm looking forward to whiling away the occasional relaxing weekend with this book, a No-Intro set, and Mednafen.

Okay, that's one thing off the to-do list, another three to write today.

Thanks for reading. See you again in the past!

Welcome to the dog days of summer! Dogs all over the place. (Running total of unpleasant heatwaves: 3.)

Website

There's a new resource on the site this month: a directory of all the chronogaming projects I could find (the definition I'm using is in there too). There are hundreds if not thousands of hours of quality material linked there. The list is certainly incomplete, so please let me know if I've missed anything obvious or obscure. I mean to keep it updated over time.

Videos

I'm keen to bring the YouTube channel back to life, starting with modest ambitions: videos a few minutes long. In the last few weeks I've worked on a short script, postponed it after a couple of weeks of work when I realised the same exact story had just been covered by a blog I read, and started work on a completely different script (about a well-known game that shipped with built-in malware) that will hopefully not end up with the same fate. I'm hoping to turn that video around in advance of the Patreon relaunch.

Because there's an eyewatering amount of AI slop on YouTube nowadays, I'm thinking about using an idea I heard from Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit: appearing on camera so the audience can tell for sure that this was made by a human. I don't know how well this'll work out; uncomfortably for all concerned, perhaps. But now I have some of the equipment I need to do it (more on that later) and I want to give it a shot.

Scanning

Scanned the last two outstanding issues of MCV from September 2005. These are the third and fourth issues of a contiguous 17-issue run that covers the last four months of the year and are as yet unpreserved. It's a brief but eventful span: the Euro releases of the PSP and Xbox 360 and the first demo of the Wiimote all fall into that four-month period. I'll continue to try to scan a couple of issues a month; I've sanded off most of the friction now, and unlike consumer magazines, each of these only takes a few hours.

Magazine Indexing

Database stats at the end of July 2026 (delta from June):

Titles indexed: 78 (+7)
Distinct issues indexed: 7,422 (+980)
Pages indexed: 995,899 (+115,627)

The index was again quite hungry this month, and ingested almost a thousand magazines, including full runs of Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power. It's now just barely shy of a million pages.

(The index isn't public, but if you're a game historian—pro or amateur—and you'd like me to run off a few queries, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)

Morgue File wiki

Each month I'm trying to put a few spare hours into seeding a new page on the wiki. The process involves a lot of reading, extracting pages from scanned magazines, and search-engine-fu, and the resulting page—which contains helpful links and a bunch of downloadable print media excerpts—will hopefully serve as a helpful resource for anyone looking to do some research for articles or YouTube videos.

July's page of the month was Star Fox 64. The result could stand to be more comprehensive; it's limited by my index, which doesn't currently include a lot of Nintendo stuff, and no Japanese material yet. But I need to remind myself that nothing is ever finished on a wiki, and that a page that didn't exist a month ago now contains over 30 downloadable resources as well as several useful offsite links, and that it's more useful to more people to seed a bunch of pages over the space of a year than to dwell on one until it meets some nebulous, unreachable 'finished' state. So I'll leave it there for now and I'll populate a different page in August.

Now Playing

At the start of the year, I set myself a goal to finish twelve single-player games this year. In retrospect, I wasn't ambitious enough by half. I finished five in July, bringing my total for the year so far to 18!

• A Highland Song
• Starship (PC port of Star Fox 64)
• Assassin's Creed: Unity (not including DLC)
• Rhythm Tengoku ('complete' according to RetroAchievements)
• Orb of Creation (first ascension)

Once I've finished up the Dead Kings DLC for AC: Unity, I'm diving in to Trails in the Sky: 1st Chapter. That'll be my first Trails game, and I've played only a handful of JRPGs before, so I've genuinely no idea whether I'm going to bounce off it or be engulfed.

Acquisitions

I've invested in some new gear: first, a cheap tripod for my phone, and second, a not-so-cheap new mic setup.

My old microphone is a condenser on a stand, set up at standing height in the room where my clothes are hanging (i.e. the least echoey room). When I want to record something, I have to lug an old laptop in there, set it on the carpet, realise it has no charge, plug in the charger, plug in the mic, install a bunch of updates, open Audacity and then finally stand there and read. The result sounds pretty good, but it takes at least 20 minutes before I record the first second of audio.

So I've invested in a decent wireless mic/receiver package that should give acceptable audio quality anywhere, and will happily record untethered to a computer, making recording much easier. It won't replace the condenser, but it's a second, more video-friendly option. I recorded a thing on it the other day and was quite satisfied with the quality of the result.

Oh, and a new mini-bookshelf! Six years after losing every book I owned, I was again at the point of overflowing my existing bookcase. I took this to be a good sign and definitely not an indication that I buy too many books.

And with that, I'm just a month away from a Patreon relaunch, and another month closer to the inevitable end. I should probably focus my attention on the first one.

Thanks for reading. See you again in the past!

Here's another issue of British trade weekly MCV. This is the fourth of a consecutive run of 17 unpreserved issues that I'll be scanning over the coming months, running from September 2005 to the end of December — a period that includes the launch of the Xbox 360, the European release of the PSP, and the first public demo of the Wiimote.

In this issue:

• Nintendo took the wraps off the Revolution controller (i.e. Wiimote). Industry response is favourable (Kieron Gillen has an op-ed), but not everyone's convinced.
• Reports suggest that Capcom and Konami are next in line for a merger. The source isn't credited, but I assume it was somebody's fan fiction?
• Digital distribution: will Apple will be the first to truly crack it? No mention of Steam in the article, but at the time of writing, that was still Valve-only... for another three weeks.
• 'Super budget publisher' Phoenix Games launches a range of £6.99 PS2 titles. Okay, they may be terrible, but you can't argue with the price.
• Leading the all-formats chart this week, The Sims 2: Nightlife, with Burnout Legends and Fahrenheit making an all-new-entry top 3. A record 40.6% of the total market share was PC... maybe it might make it through after all?

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/mcv-355-2005-09-23

Here's another issue of British trade weekly MCV. This is the third of a consecutive run of 17 issues that I'll be scanning over the coming months, running from September 2005 to the end of December — a period that includes the launch of the Xbox 360, the European release of the PSP, and the first public demo of the Wiimote.

In this issue:

• Actual headline from this issue: "Nintendo loves Sony PSP". Hard to contemplate Nintendo acknowledging another company's device nowadays.
• "News that Criterion's Renderware is likely to go in-house exclusively with EA has been met with a mixed response". Hey, there's a video about that!
• Sega signs as publisher for an unannounced game from Bizarre Creations. That would be The Club, one of only two Bizarre games still available (if I counted correctly). RIP PGR.
• There's a footnote about a new magazine, Retro Bytes. I'd never heard of it, and that might be because beyond a small preview issue, it may never have made it to publication.
• Leading the all-formats chart this week, Ubisoft continued to monetise Tom Clancy's corpse with Rainbow Six: Lockdown. The PC CD-ROM chart was also headed by a new entry: Dungeon Siege II. Those dungeons weren't going to besiege themselves, after all.

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/mcv-354-2005-09-16

After a glorious May in Norway (where I made my bed and then lay in it, literally), headlong into the Summer of Save State we go. Running total of unpleasant heatwaves: 1.

Patreon

A couple of days ago (in a public post, so I won't repeat most of it) I announced to Patreon backers that, since the platform was going ahead with the removal of per-creation billing, I'd be switching the campaign over to monthly billing at the beginning of September and, since the sporadic YouTube model doesn't really work with monthly fees, I'd be refocusing the whole thing toward general history and preservation work.

This is a forced and not particularly welcome change by Patreon, but we did get sufficient warning, and I've been planning this for a while. Setting up this site was a cornerstone of that planning.

No major changes anticipated here, though I'll be trying to post more often in the coming months.

Videos

I'm getting the itch to make some game history videos again. One of the benefits of the Patreon change is that I'll no longer feel the (mostly self-inflicted) pressure to make every video extremely labour-intensive in order to justify to myself that it's okay to charge patrons. (My last video was in 2022, and since then, I've abandoned a couple of others that didn't feel 'enough'.) With the new setup, videos will just be a part of the package, and they don't all have to be complicated.

I've got a couple of topics for short videos in mind; I hope to get something out on the channel in the next two months.

Scanning

I scanned a couple of issues of MCV this month, 352 and 353 from September 2005. These are the first and second issues of a contiguous 17-issue run that covers the last four months of the year and are as yet unpreserved. It's a brief but eventful span: the Euro releases of the PSP and Xbox 360 and the first demo of the Wiimote all fall into that four-month period. I'll continue to try to scan a couple of issues a month; I've sanded off most of the friction now, and unlike consumer magazines, each of these only takes a few hours.

Magazine Indexing

Database stats at the end of June 2026 (delta from April):

Titles indexed: 71 (+9)
Distinct issues indexed: 6,442 (+936)
Pages indexed: 880,272 (+105,891)

The index was very hungry this month, and ravenously ingested almost a thousand magazines, mostly relating to British home computers.

(The index isn't public, but if you're a game historian—pro or amateur—and you'd like me to run off a query or two, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)

Morgue File wiki

A meaningful update in this section for once: I spent a few hours in June researching a game and creating a page for it, and I plan to do the same thing every month for a new game. The process involves a lot of reading, extracting pages from scanned magazines, and search-engine-fu, and the resulting page—which contains helpful links and a bunch of downloadable print media excerpts—will hopefully serve as a helpful resource for anyone looking to do some research for an article or a YouTube video.

June's page of the month is one of the first games I ever played... Chuckie Egg.

Playing

I start far, far more games than I finish. One of these updates I'll have to share the sad list of games I started playing in 2026, but lost interest in or got diverted from. But here's the list of currently unabandoned playthroughs:

• Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker
• Ghost Recon: Wildlands
• Orb of Creation 1.0
• Is This Seat Taken?
• Etrian Odyssey HD

I picked up Endwalker again after not playing for the best part of a year (I stopped around level 83) and quickly got back into the story. Not sure why I stopped, but I'm once again thoroughly Scion-pilled. Picked up Wildlands, which is my first Ghost Recon, after a free Ubisoft+ weekend where I messed around and kind of enjoyed it. I'm sure it'll outstay its welcome soon enough—it's a Ubisoft game—so I'm not expecting to finish it, but it's good for a mindless hour.

Picked up Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter (and some cheaper bits and bobs) in the Steam sale. Haven't started this yet, waiting to wrap another game first. But if my understanding is correct, either I bounce off it in the first few hours or end up playing through the entire series at the cost of everything else in my life.

I've played some very good demos, too. Like ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs, which is a lovely meditative game about fixing Nokia phones and Atari 2600s in a tiny shop. And a demo with a brain-breaking gimmick: Object Impermanence. In the world of this game, things only exist while you can see them.

Acquisitions

Another issue of PC Strategy Games (issue 12 from February 2001) appeared on eBay, so I snagged it. The seller threw in a PC Zone for good measure; all issued have been scanned, but the scan I have of this one isn't great, so I might be in a position to do an upgrade at some point.

Also in print, I picked up Robert Napier's book Voices from a Future Passed, a history of Acorn Computers and the BBC Micro told by those who were there. Yup, brain's still cranking away at that mad Acornucopia idea.

And that's another month checked off. Somehow we're halfway through the year? I don't know what to do with that information.

Thanks for reading. See you again in the past!

Here's another issue of British trade weekly MCV. This is the second of a consecutive run of 17 issues that I'll be scanning over the coming months, running from September 2005 to the end of December — a period that includes the launch of the Xbox 360, the European release of the PSP, and the first public demo of the Wiimote.

In this issue:

• Sony's PSP launches and sells 185,000 units in the UK in the first weekend... more than double that of the Nintendo DS, which previously held the record.
• Microsoft pledges to 'put the game back into Windows', a platform that had no shortage of games, with the unlamented Games for Windows initiative.
• Future, Highbury, Imagine and Emap were all invited to Nintendo to pitch for the rights to Official Nintendo Magazine! You won't find that on Wikipedia. (Future's bid won.)
• Leading the all-formats chart this week is a new entry: Ridge Racer PSP. In fact, PSP launch titles make up 80% of the Top 10. Lumines, the actual best launch title, comes in twelfth.

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/mcv-353-2005-09-09

The first issue of MCV that followed a switch to a smaller format. At 76 pages, it's also a bit thicker than most of the issues I've scanned. This is the first of a consecutive run of 17 issues I own that haven't been preserved before, going all the way to the end of 2005 — a period that includes the release of the Xbox 360 and the first public demo of the Wiimote.

Like PCSG, but unlike previous issues of MCV, I scanned this one on the bed a page at a time (rather than putting it through the document feeder) and gave it the full post-processing workflow, so the quality should be somewhat higher.

In this issue, all the week's news in retail:

• High street retailer WH Smith (RIP) confirms they're dropping GBA and DS (six months in!) due to low sales.
• Microsoft still hasn't announced a European release date for the Xbox 360 beyond '2005'. With time running out, publishers and retailers are struggling to plan.
• Less than 20% of new releases in Q4 will be based on original IP, and EA openly admits they don't think they'll have any competition over Christmas. Yeah... when you think about it, this era kind of sucked.
• With the 360 and PS3 announced, who's winning the marketing battle for the next generation? MCV turns to a panel of real experts: RLLMUK posters.
• Top of the all-formats chart (also printed on a poster in this issue, weirdly): Brian Lara Cricket 2005, Madagascar and Fantastic Four. Those were certainly some games that existed.

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/mcv-352-2005-09-02

Hi gang! I've got a flight to catch in less than 24 hours and a very long list of things that need to be done before that, so what better time than to sit down and write the wrapup post for April?

Scanning

I scanned and uploaded two more full issues of PC Strategy Games from 2000. That'll do it for the ones I've got; there were twelve more issues published, and I'd love to pick more of them up given the opportunity. Until then, I'll move on to other things in the pile. But for now, four issues of this magazine are preserved and freely downloadable. At the start of the year, that number was zero.

I found a better workflow with the last two scans, after realising that XnConvert, which I was already using to rotate, crop and resize scans off the scanner, could also be used for the most onerous part of the process that I'd been doing manually in Affinity: the small (usually less than a degree) rotations required to straighten scans that weren't perfectly aligned on the scanner and then crop them back to their original dimensions. This was a slow process in Affinity; leaving it to the automated tool has saved hours per scan (even if it misreads the rotation of about 1% of pages). I'm pretty happy now that this Adobe-free processing method is comparable in overall speed and efficiency to what I used to do in Photoshop — not quite as fast, but close enough that doing it this way and saving the money is an easy choice.

I'm still waiting for Retromags upload rights, but the PCSGs (and future scans) should also end up there when I'm approved to do so.

I also updated the 'what we know about these magazines' page with new information gleaned from issues of Strategy Player I picked up recently; I also added links to the new scans.

Acornucopia

I'm, yup, still working on this deranged idea.

The spreadsheet now has month estimates for over 200 games from 1982, and I now have a decent idea of the first games (both printed listings and commercial releases) available for the BBC Micro. Surprisingly, it looks like these early commercial games must have been written on one of the first few hundred computers to leave the factory, and were available before there was much of a market to sustain them.

I'll repeat what I said last time: despite putting double-digit hours into this, I'll more than likely never produce this series. It's a challenging project on all levels, it'll absorb an almost unlimited amount of time, and the audience for it is practically nonexistent.

But even if I leave the series unmade, there's a chunk of it I've already started writing that could easily be turned into a standalone video: an explanation of the British home computer scene in the early-mid 1980s, and the ways in which it was significantly different to what was going on elsewhere in the world. Feels like that would be a small act of deprogramming for the US-centric version of game history that people often pick up from YouTube.

So I'm going to continue to work on this thing for as long as I'm motivated, partly because I'm finding it a deeply satisfying challenge to figure out, and partly because I've learned from years of experience that I need to harness impulses while I have them, and that there's no such thing as wasted creative effort. Even abandoned projects give ample opportunities to learn and practice, and very often from the remnants of one that didn't work out, another five ideas will sprout. And despite my better judgment, I'm still not cured of the desire to do this for real.

Magazine Indexing

Database stats at the end of April 2026 (delta from March):

Titles indexed: 62 (+2)
Distinct issues indexed: 5,506 (+64)
Pages indexed: 774,381 (+3,812)

A light month with only a couple of new additions to the index as I continue to add early 1980s UK home computer magazines: Popular Computing Weekly and MicroComputer Printout.

(The index isn't public, but if you're a game historian—pro or amateur—and you'd like me to run off a query or two, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)

Wiki

Security patches applied, upgraded to 1.43.8.

Playing

As of this writing, I have these games on the go:

• Ghost of Tsushima
• Escape Simulator 2
• Vampire Crawlers
• Assassin's Creed: Unity

My partner and I finished all the main rooms in Escape Simulator 2 and are going back for unlockables and the advanced puzzles; there's Steam Workshop stuff after that. I burned out on The Division 2 after finishing the campaign and realising I had no motivation to do anything else. Vampire Crawlers got its teeth into me, though I kind of wish there was more exploration and puzzle solving in the dungeons to make it a proper dungeon crawler. Or perhaps I just wish that proper dungeon crawlers had engaging combat.

And that was April. This year's really flying, huh?

I'm heading off for my main break in Norway for most of next month; I'm not expecting to accomplish anything of any real relevance while I'm out there. So the next update will be at the end of June, and it's a straight run through the summer.

Thanks for reading. See you again in the past!

The last scan of this rare title for now. (I researched and wrote an article summarising everything we know about this magazine; if you're curious, learn more about PC Strategy Games.)

In this issue:

• Mark Shaw pays a visit to an up-and-coming French company called Ubi Soft — probably best known at the time for Rayman — not to play one of their upcoming games, but because they're the distributor for Everquest in Europe.
• Star Wars, Dune, the upcoming Lord of the Rings movies... the editors look at PC game licensing. "If it's on at the cinema or running on TV, chances are someone, somewhere, is working on a PC game based on it."
• Mike Siggins bemoans the lack of originality in games a quarter-century ago and tries to explain the publisher herd mentality.
• Reviews include Shogun: Total War, Star Trek: Armada and the almost forgotten XCOM-like Shadow Watch.

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/pc-strategy-games-issue-4-2000-07/

Another issue of this rare specialist publication, scanned for the first time. (I researched and wrote an article summarising everything we know about this magazine and another related one; if you're curious, learn more about PC Strategy Games.)

In this issue:

• Is the single-player game about to become a thing of the past? Catch up on this new 'online gaming' thing and the connectivity innovation that makes it possible, which—of course—is flat-rate dialup.
• Martin Croft interviews Demis Hassabis, back when he was a guy making interesting simulation-based computer games like Republic: The Revolution, and not... y'know... the Demis Hassabis.
• Do RPGs count as strategy games? Two writers weigh in on opposite sides, but the real winner is 'for purposes of filling this magazine's page count, they do'.
• Reviews include Battlezone II, Earth 2150, the timeless classic Thief 2: The Metal Age and, last but least, Airport Inc.

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/pc-strategy-games-issue-3-2000-06/

Save State is now a one-year-old, which means it's well ahead of its age developmentally. (Most toddlers can't even do basic CSS styling.) To celebrate, let's run down the things I got up to in March: a month where I finally got rid of the cough from the cold I caught in January, only to catch my second cold of the year. Not that I'm bitter about that or anything. I love being continuously ill.

Podcasts

I resurrected the first three podcast feeds of 2026: CGW Radio, GFW Radio and PC Project/LAN Party, which form the entire history of 1UP's PC-focused audio and which are still held in high regard. The audio for the first two podcasts was already on archive.org, but the third one wasn't; I tracked down all ten mp3s in the Wayback Machine (across several different hosts) and uploaded them as a new item. So this set of podcasts wasn't just a straightforward act of feed reconstruction, it also involved some digital archaeology. Historylicious!

I also recreated the cover art in 3000x3000px, compared to the tiny 300x300 iTunes images that were used at the time. These aren't upscales, they're recreations made from scratch in Affinity, as close as I could get them to the originals. This is the hardest step of the process, and I kind of wish I hadn't committed to it...

My goal is to resurrect 12 podcasts in 2026, so with these three feeds I've caught up to where I was supposed to be. Expect more over the coming months, including, I hope, some slightly more obscure than 1UP's.

Writing

The bulk of my writing in March was focused on the still-tentative chronogaming project:

I've been watching interviews and old TV shows from the BBC archives, and have continued to build a research spreadsheet and work on the first few scripts. I'm also close to pulling the trigger on a couple of books and a few inexpensive eBay purchases.

I'll repeat what I said last time: despite putting hours into this, I'll more than likely never produce this series. It's a challenging project on all levels, it'll absorb an almost unlimited amount of time, and the audience for it is practically nonexistent.

But even if I abandon the overall project, there's one chunk of it that could easily be turned into a standalone video: an explanation of the British home computer scene in the early-mid 1980s, and the ways in which it was significantly different to what was going on elsewhere in the world.

So I'm going to continue to work on this thing for as long as I'm motivated, partly because I'm finding it a deeply satisfying challenge to figure out, and partly because I've learned from years of experience that I need to harness impulses while I have them, and that there's no such thing as wasted creative effort. Even abandoned projects give ample opportunities to learn and practice, and very often from the remnants of one that didn't work out, another five ideas will sprout. And despite my better judgment, I'm still not cured of the desire to do this for real.

Scanning

I've fully scanned, but have not yet finished editing, the June 2000 issue of PC Strategy Games. It should be up in the next few days; I didn't want to delay this update further by waiting until it was finished.

In all honesty, I'm not satisfied with Affinity as a tool for this job. It's fine. And it's free. And it's probably the second best option. But cleaning up and straightening scanned pages is much more laborious than it was with Photoshop, and I'm wondering if I should just re-up my Adobe subscription.

I'm still waiting for Retromags upload rights, but the PCSGs (and future scans) should also end up there when I'm approved to do so.

Magazine Indexing

Database stats at the end of March 2026 (delta from February):

Titles indexed: 60 (+1)
Distinct issues indexed: 5,442 (+106)
Pages indexed: 770,569 (+18,730)

The sole addition this month: Practical Computing.

(The index isn't public, but if you're a game historian—pro or amateur—and you'd like me to run off a query or two, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)

Playing

I'm actively playing as of this writing:

• Ghost of Tsushima
• Dead Island 2
• Escape Simulator 2
• CiniCross
• Zelda: A Link to the Past
• Assassin's Creed: Unity
• The Division 2

Really need to close the book on some of these. I'm stretched too thin, but I love starting new games. Damn those enticing initial hours!

Credits rolled in March:

• Hostile Volume (web)
• Rogue Light Deck Builder (Steam)
• Conspiracy! (Steam)
• Khimera: Puzzle Island (Steam)

Acquisitions

I, uh, bought a new kettle...?

Onward to April! I'm hoping to rack up some more wins next month, since I'll be taking my one big holiday in May (and skipping that month). March was fine—it certainly went better than January and February—but I'm hoping I can take the energy I have, focus it more, and bang out a whole list of stuff.

Thanks for reading. See you again in the past.

Happy new year! With record delay, here's the roundup of what I've been up to in December, January and February.

I've rolled these months up, because they've each been lighter than average. It wouldn't be appropriate to detail the weeks I've spent being ill with various crappy winter symptoms since I got back from the holiday break, but even without that setback, January and February in particular have always been months where I endure rather than thrive. It's both my least productive and least favourite time of the year, and reaching March is always cause for celebration.

Writing

In February I published an article summarising the known facts of two obscure British PC magazines, PC Strategy Games and Strategy Player, corresponding with the editor of the former, Martin Croft, to fill in some of the gaps. Even basic information on these magazines was tough to find; the objective here wasn't to write a comprehensive history, but to make the facts discoverable.

And also a month ago, I was able to go back to the first article I published here, Where was Ulala?, and add the one thing I'd always wanted it to end on: a video, newly found, of the full Ulala MTV VMAs ad spot! Given how I'd originally ended the piece with 'maybe the ad will show up someday and give closure after 25 years', it's an incredibly satisfying coda to that story.

YouTube

First off: a couple of guest appearances for one of my favourite game historians! I briefly showed up in voiceover in Kate Willaert's videos The History of the Word "Metroidvania" and How it Spread, as well as in the first episode of MetroidMania, a series of short videos about pre-Metroid games that are at least a little Metroidy. Jumpscared myself twice watching these since I'd genuinely forgotten that I'd recorded the lines, heh.

I also helped Kate with some video upscaling for the first video, using Topaz (which is now subscription-only and extortionately expensive, but I have the old version from when it was a straightforward purchase) to remove compression artifacts from a few seconds of low-resolution, low-bitrate G4TV; she mixed the upscale and the original to fine effect, offsetting some of the unnatural smoothness of the upscale but looking far superior to the original file. If any mutuals could use it, I'd like to do more of that kind of thing; while my channel's dormant I might as well put all this software to use helping others. Drop me a line.

Anyway. Here's the thing. Not an announcement; just a thing.

A few weeks ago I made the mistake of listening to Jeremy Parish on the Video Game History Hour podcast. He talked extensively about chronogaming—producing a series that comprehensively covers every release for a platform, like his own Works series—and how it would be far harder to give that treatment to a computer than a console.

That started something gestating that I haven't stopped thinking about since, despite recognising from the first moment that it's a terrible idea:

Coming up with any sort of chronological release list for the Beeb has to be done from scratch, and is an inherently speculative exercise; the dataset just doesn't exist. So I'm going through every British magazine I can find from 1981, 1982 and 1983 and creating a spreadsheet of every BBC Micro game reviewed, mentioned or advertised, sorted by the month of its first mention in print. This won't cover everything, and it'll be wrong in a bunch of other ways, but it's something.

I've also started breaking down the first few episodes, and begun to write several. It's very clear to me that I'd need to produce them in blocks, not one at a time, and that I would need to plan a long way ahead.

I want to be clear: despite putting quite a bit of thought into it, coming up with a name and a logo and a gameplan, I'll more than likely never produce this series. Everything I know tells me it would be an interminable slog... especially the first couple of years of uninspired releases, which would require over one thousand video segments before I even got to the good stuff. It's a challenging project on all levels, it'll absorb an almost unlimited amount of time, and the audience for it is practically nonexistent. 

But I'm not yet willing to rule it out entirely...

Morgue File wiki

Not much to report here. A minor version upgrade, and an attempt to set some sort of a standard for a top-of-page 'resources' section on the Baldur's Gate page, but honestly, the wiki hasn't been getting the attention it deserves; it's the project in the list that continues to run largely unattended, so anything that requires effort to bring into existence usually takes priority. Would very much welcome more contributors, though, with wiki experience or not. Let me know.

Scanning

I'm a bit happier with this, though; rather than slowing down over the winter, I've gained momentum on scanning. In December I scanned three issues of MCV, including a Zelda 25th anniversary special with some fun and unique contents. With this, I hit my self-imposed goal of 12 magazines scanned in 2025, a pattern I'll endeavour to repeat this year.

Then I started the year attacking (finally) the small pile of PC Strategy Games I've had since last summer, scanning and uploading the first and second issues. These magazines are getting the works: a slow and careful debind, full two-sided scanning (with no document feeder), methodical deskew and spot healing, and uploads to archive.org (including raw unedited images), RetroMags (once they send me upload credentials) and OldGameMags. I didn't time it, but getting each of these issues online easily took a double-digit number of hours.

The most recent scan was also my first attempt to do the job end-to-end with no Adobe software, since my subscription has lapsed and I'm on the fence about renewing it. That involved a lot of problem-solving. I ended up using NAPS2 for scanning (been using this since the start, actually), XnConvert for batch processing (wonderful software), and Affinity (which is free now) for straightening and cleanup. This step took a lot longer than it would have in Photoshop, due to a one-step straightening process in Photoshop requiring five steps in Affinity. img2pdf and ocrmypdf were used for the final PDF generation.

I'm set on moving my PC from Windows to Linux this year, so it'll be useful to know in advance about the free options, though both Photoshop and Affinity have the same problem there: they're both Win/Mac only. (I also tried Gimp and Krita, but neither seemed to have a serviceable healing brush—essential for cleanup.)

I love how surprised people have been—even those familiar with most PC gaming mags—by the fact that PCSG exists. Can't wait to share the other two issues, and I'm looking out (so far without success) for more listings.

Magazine Indexing

Database stats at the end of February 2026 (delta from November 2025):

Titles indexed: 59 (+7)
Distinct issues indexed: 5,336 (+815)
Pages indexed: 751,839 (+98,236)

I threw every issue of Official Xbox Magazine (US) at the indexer (since I needed to inventory them all anyway to help out another archivist), followed by a smorgasbord of Acorn-centric magazines for the tentative chronogaming project: Acorn User, BEEBUG, The Beebon, Laserbug, Personal Computer World and Your Computer. Haven't got to The Micro User yet; it's next up.

(The index isn't public, but if you're a game historian—pro or amateur—and you'd like me to run off a query or two, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)

Playing

Since the start of the year I've been tracking the games I've been playing, so I can now pull this section a lot easier than from memory.

Games I'm actively playing as of the time of writing:

• Ghost of Tsushima
• Dogpile
• Dead Island 2
• Escape Simulator 2
• Radiant Historia
• CiniCross
• Zelda: A Link to the Past

Yeah, I think that might be too many on the go.

Another thing I'm trying to do (it's on my bingo card) is to roll credits on more games, whether single-sitting, mid-length or long. (Ideally an even mixture of the three.)

How's that going? Pretty well!

• Strange Horticulture (beaten January 7th)
• Metroid: Zero Mission (beaten January 10th)
• Family (beaten January 13th)
• Tomb Raider (2013) (beaten January 14th)
• Lost in Translation (beaten January 19th)
• Dragonsweeper (beaten February 4th)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (base game beaten February 25th, Phantom Liberty still to play, but credits were rolled, so it counts)

Acquisitions

The sole eBay acquisition in the last three months: four more issues of Strategy Player. These date from after the acquisition and shutdown of PC Strategy Games, which I previously lacked any details of. But sure enough, they did carry both titles on the covers for at least six issues, and five writers moved from the closing publication to the other. So it seems like Paragon did merge the two publications for real, and I can now curb my skepticism in the article. (Will update it soon, as promised, with the new info and a link to the new scan.)

But the big purchase in the last quarter was the new graphics card—a 5070 Ti—I bought in mid-January, when it was strongly rumoured that no new cards would hit this year, and that that moment might be the best opportunity to buy one for a long while. I've no idea whether that will turn out to be true, as they do—six weeks later—still seem to be available for a price only a little higher than I paid. Even so, I needed a mid-cycle refresh of the old card; I bought it in 2020, it was low-midrange even then, and it had struggled with Cyberpunk and some other things. I don't anticipate buying any more PC components in 2026... and considering what's happening to prices, probably won't in 2027 either.

And finally, here's a thing I bought ages ago, but only began to use in January: a Hobonichi Techo five-year planner. (Hobonichi is Shigesato Itoi's stationery company.) This was a real treat: it's a premium product that's a pleasure to write in; sadly they aren't cheap to import. But it's also going to take five years to fill, so the cost works out to be a few pence a day. Two months later, I've successfully filled it in every day, which is the longest I've ever kept a journalling habit: it helps that there's not much space to fill, only really enough for two or three bullet points tracking the weather, media consumption and any interesting experiences that day. I'm looking forward to looping back round to the start and filling in entries next to the previous year's, which is when this five-year journal idea will start to pay dividends.

And that's the last three months in a nutshell. With spring on the way, things are back on the rails—expect monthly updates from here on out. The next one will be the site's one year anniversary post!

Thanks for reading. See you again in the past.

Another issue of this rare specialist publication. I researched and wrote an article summarising everything we know about this and another related magazine, so if you're curious, learn more about PC Strategy Games here.

In this second issue:

• The featured interview is with Richard Bartle, the creator of the first MUD and, therefore, the progenitor of every MMO.
• A five-page feature on why adults play games, featuring contributors' top 5s.
• Kristen Bowditch writes an editorial lamenting the marginalisation of women in the strategy games boys club.
• Reviews include The Sims, Theocracy, Age of Wonders and Planescape Torment (CRPGs are justified as containing some strategy).

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/pc-strategy-games-issue-2-2000-05/

This is a magazine I'm certain most people won't have heard of. I hadn't either, until I saw it mentioned in an issue of MCV last year. I researched and wrote an article summarising everything we know about this and another related magazine, so if you're curious, learn more about PC Strategy Games here.

In this premiere issue:

• A five-page article on the history of strategy games from ancient Mesopotamia to The Sims.
• An interview with Sid Meier. Features information about the game Firaxis was working on at the time, Dinosaurs, which never saw release.
• Reviews include Imperium Galactica II, the Alien Crossfire expansion for Alpha Centauri, and Lego Rockraiders. The biggest review: Risk II.
• Unusually, it's the publisher who gets the last word, with a back-page op-ed describing the kind of reader they're making the magazine for.

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/pc-strategy-games-issue-1-2000-04/

I've been collecting digital magazines for two decades at this point, and misspent a chunk of my teen years reading British computer mags in print. I've always thought myself somewhat in the know on the subject; not an expert, by any means, but at least acquainted.

So when I found out last year about not one, but two, PC gaming periodicals from the UK that I'd never heard of, magazines which were nowhere to be found on Retromags or the Internet Archive, magazines that have generated barely a trace of online discussion, I sat up and took notice.

This article is a record of everything I've been able to find out about these two magazines, some of which can't be found with a search engine (well, it can now).

There are still significant gaps in this knowledge, so I plan to update this page with any more details that come to light, as well as links to scans.

PC Strategy Games

Crimson Publishing, 2000–2001

Crimson Publishing was a small magazine press, founded in 1999 by David Lester. They had a small stable of publications; their first title, What Laptop, was performing relatively well. But Lester had an interest in strategy games that went beyond personal: he was the former head of Impressions Games, the British studio that had produced the Caesar and Lords of the Realm series before being sold to Sierra On-Line in 1995. PC Gamer and PC Zone were established as the big two PC games magazines in the UK, but their remit was broad. Lester saw an opening in the market for a specialist magazine aimed at strategy fans.

For the editor, he headhunted journalist Martin Croft. Previously, Croft was the strategy editor for Ziff-Davis's PC Gaming World magazine (another mostly unpreserved title), but he was a veteran journalist; a writer and editor on publications like Popular Computing Weekly, Micro Adventurer, and Dragon User going back to 1984.

The first issue of PC Strategy Games hit the shelves in Spring 2000, with an April cover date, costing £4.99 (with a coverdisc). Publisher David Lester staked out his goals on the back page:

I feel that the current magazines in the UK do a very good job entertaining their audience, with a frequently flippant, uncaring and irreverent look at games. I don't think any of them cater for the older, better-educated strategy gamer who's serious about gaming. We will.

According to the catalogue of the British Library, PC Strategy Games ran for sixteen issues, from April 2000 to June 2001. (This includes a Xmas 2000 issue.)

I've managed to pick up the first four issues of this magazine. As of April 2026, all the issues I've bought have been scanned.

• Issue 1 (April 2000) • archive.org • blog post
• Issue 2 (May 2000) • archive.org • blog post
• Issue 3 (June 2000) • archive.org • blog post
• Issue 4 (July 2000) • archive.org • blog post

Strategy Player

Paragon Publishing, 2000–2002

As if the discovery of one obscure British PC strategy games publication was insufficient, there's another one.

Paragon launched their strategy magazine six months after Crimson's; whether or not this was in response we'll likely never know. But two things are apparent: Strategy Player had more pages for the same price (112 to PCSG's 100), and Paragon was an established publisher with more shelf presence. Play, 64 Magazine, and Dreamcast Magazine were already familiar to many gamers, and it seems possible that Paragon had a more mature distribution network than Crimson. Five issues in, editor Geoff Spick mentioned that the title was:

now firmly established as the best selling PC Strategy magazine in the UK.

Inevitably, the competition between these two niche publications didn't last. In May 2001, Paragon purchased PC Strategy Games from Crimson for an undisclosed sum and merged the two titles.

In Paragon's announcement, they promised that though PCSG was being discontinued, its tone would live on:

Strategy Player, the new issue of which goes on-sale on 7 June, will combine a strong mix of both titles. Written for a more intelligent and discerning gamer, Strategy Player will adopt a unique reviewing style, reviewing and previewing the biggest strategy games from around the world.

The company hired several PCSG contributors: Mark Shaw, Damon Wilson, Barry Ryan, Sam Kieldsen and Kristen Bowditch (editor Martin Croft had already departed) and branded the cover with a 'now incorporating PC Strategy Games' element that stuck around for at least six months. At least outwardly, Paragon seem to have made a genuine effort to incorporate the best of both magazines.

The combined title lasted less than a year. According to the British Library catalogue, there were 18 issues of Strategy Player: October 2000 to January 2002. Like the other publication, it's listed as having 13 issues per year.

So far, I've managed to find five issues of Strategy Player. As was common with Paragon titles, there's no cover date, though likely dates of the issues I have are listed below. Alongside the magazines, I also have the accompanying cover disk for issue 5, which doesn't seem to have been dumped. All of this material will be digitised and uploaded in the future.

• Issue 5 (January 2001) • coming soon
• Issue 11 (July 2001) • coming soon
• Issue 12 (August 2001) • coming soon
• Issue 14 (October 2001) • coming soon
• Issue 16 (December 2001) • coming soon

My thanks to Martin Croft and Charles Fulton for their assistance in the research for this post.

A special (unnumbered) 20-page promotional issue of MCV created alongside Nintendo to commemorate the 25th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda and the upcoming release of Skyward Sword.

A digital export of this issue with low quality images (a 2.7MB PDF) has been available since the publisher released it in 2011, but this is likely the first scan of a rare physical copy.

In this issue:

• The favourite Zelda series moments of British games journalists and other figures from the trade...
• ...as well as the staff from Nintendo's UK office, of whom we seldom hear. Even Nintendo's managers have played Zelda.
• An interview with Zelda Williams on her history with the series and her fantasy movie casting for Link.
• An interview with Nintendo's Roger Langford on the 25th anniversary celebrations and the marketing push for Skyward Sword.
• A photo gallery of the 2011 UK Zelda tour and London Philharmonic anniversary concert.

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/mcv-zelda-25th-anniversary-2011-11-07

(Note that the front and back cover designs used a reflective gold ink—see photo above—that has scanned poorly.)

The second of four 2001 issues I'll be scanning of UK trade news sheet MCV.

In this issue:

• Nintendo UK's first office opens on this day; until 2001, their British operations were outsourced. Clearly a big deal for the retail sector.
• After years of licensing its hits to other publishers, Capcom enters the European market with its first two PS2 releases: Street Fighter EX3 and Onimusha.
• Dixons annoys people by discounting FFIX by £12 less than two weeks after release. Now Final Fantasy is still going but Dixons is long gone. Coincidence?
• Intel enters the PC peripherals market. Wait... Intel made peripherals? Huh.
• Top of the all-formats chart this week: Final Fantasy IX, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Theme Park World.

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/mcv-125-2001-03-01

The first of four 2001 issues (there were about fifty, I mean I only own four) of your favourite UK video game trade magazine and mine.

In this issue:

• Big changes at Nintendo UK for retail customers. Some real how-the-sausage stuff—distribution, price setting, minimum orders—we seldom hear outside the trade press.
• Eidos's Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is the fastest game to hit a million UK sales and the bestselling game of 2000. I can't even name a quiz game released in 2025, much less imagine it being the #1 game of the year. Different times.
• The Dreamcast dream is dead, as Sega announce games for the PS2 and GBA. In fact, there was bigger news: they'd killed the Dreamcast and left the hardware business on January 31st, between this issue being locked and being distributed. So we now have an insight into how many days out of date these issues were by the time anybody was reading them.
• Feature: everyone wants a piece of mobile gaming! Not smartphones, those are still six years away. Not even J2ME, which wouldn't land on phones for another year. God, no. We're talking Nokias and WAP (that acronym didn't age well). 
• Top of the all-formats chart this week: Millionaire (of course), Smackdown 2 and FIFA 2001.

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/mcv-121-2001-02-02

'Tis the season! The season of cold wet days and seasonal affective disorder, that is; what did you think I meant?

Here's November's roundup of activities, achieved despite the season's best efforts to thwart them.

This site

I finished and published a new section that I've wanted on the site from the beginning: a list of projects. This feels significant because every time I've posted to social media about magazine indexing, or old videos, or the wiki, people needed to know my whole thing to stand a chance of understanding what I was talking about. Of course, that's not how it works! People can (and do) see your stuff with no knowledge of who you are. It's quite possible you're reading this post right now having never read anything I've written before. (Hi!)

I already had a bio page (unnecessary, might remove it), but the purpose of the projects page is much more strategic: it's explicitly designed to catch people up. It's linked on the front page header and in the top-level site navigation, and I'll update it regularly.

Icons

At the start of the month, I stumbled upon a social media post featuring a screenshot from the BeOS operating system from the late nineties. The consistent dimetric projection and shading used on the icons was unlike anything I'd seen before, and I found the colour palette and overall look extremely pleasing to the eye.

I went from zero to utterly obsessed in five seconds flat, and started digging for more information. Helped by a poster who shared a gif of the icon editor from an old user guide, I managed to rip the full 247-colour BeOS palette, uploading it to Lospec, the undisputed hub for pixel art palettes.

This was a prelude to a new project: creating an icon set of computer and console platforms, matching the BeOS house style as closely as I could.

After the first four tests turned out better than I hoped and proved the concept had legs, I launched into the full set of Nintendo handhelds; so far I've made it through the ones with names that begin with "Game". (Itemisation is left as an exercise for the reader.) Next comes the DS range, and then... well, we're looking at over 200 icons if I do every platform listed in the IGDB. And the goal is to do everything. Pixel art is incredibly fun to make, and on average, one of these icons takes 20–30 minutes, so it's a bite-size task I can handle at least a couple of times a week.

Though I may end up using these icons on the Morgue File, that's not why I'm making them; I'm truly just doing them for the hell of it. But the tentative plan, once my workflow's polished and there are enough icons to merit doing so, is to release them for free for anyone to use for whatever they like, no strings attached.

This may not be a particularly profitable strategy, but as we all need reminding from time to time in this capitalist dystopia, not everything needs to be a side hustle.

Retrohistories YouTube channel

I actually worked on a video in November, gods be praised! I did a fair bit of rewriting on a script I wrote last year after noticing some imperfections I could fix, which necessitated recording a new VO. That's now out of the way. Still not 100% sure about this video, but I'm going to proceed with it as an excuse to get back in the saddle. It's not a long script, but it has some specific production needs that mean learning how to do particular things in Blender; tentative completion date is February.

Morgue File wiki

After the server migration, a regular contributor alerted me to a problem where image thumbnails weren't being generated from file uploads. Turned out that when I set the new machine up, I'd missed installing a package. Fixed the root cause (which was easy) and then forced regeneration of the missing thumbs (not so easy).

I've struggled to come up with a snappy pitch for exactly who and what the wiki is for. In writing the projects page, I think I articulated it better than I ever have. Sometimes finding the right words rallies your brain around an idea that was originally kind of vague and loosey-goosey; I think that's what happened here.

There are a couple of pressing needs with the wiki as it stands. The first, as I've mentioned before, is the need for updated help and onboarding, which needs to be in place before I can make any serious appeal for potential new users.

The second is how sources should be presented. On a regular encyclopedia-style wiki, references go at the bottom of the page, in small print. But this is a resource wiki, and it feels like primary sources—interviews, talks, books—are the most important starting points for researchers, and the page should lead with them. I'm still trying to come up with a functional and appealing layout for that.

In other developments, while I was putting together graphics for the projects page, I stumbled upon a rough idea for a logo.

Don't have the faintest idea what I'm going to do with this, and it needs finessing before I do, but I love the throughlines on the V and M here. A fortuitous, if entirely accidental, discovery.

Podcasts

No new feeds this month, but things didn't stand still. I attempted to make a feed for the old Joystiq Podcast, but ran into several complications that hadn't impacted prior podcast feeds:

• Each Wayback snapshot of the RSS feed contained only a handful of episodes
• There were dozens of these snapshots across two different URLs
• There were gaps in between snapshots large enough that episodes appeared in the feed, then fell off the bottom, between snapshots, so have no recorded metadata
• The description tags were unusually dense, with both relevant information I wished to keep, and irrelevant links to the original site and share button functionality that I wanted to strip

I've been writing some new Python scripts to deal with these complications:

• A script that, given a feed URL, downloads every snapshot of that feed that can be found on the Wayback Machine, adding timestamps to the filenames and placing them into a directory
• Another script that merges a folder of RSS files into a single file, with items in the correct (reverse chronological) order and all duplicates removed

Run in tandem, these scripts will produce the most complete RSS feed that it's possible to derive from the Wayback Machine. I still need to write a third script that'll comb a folder for text scraps and remove anything matching one of those scraps from the description tags in the feed; that will hopefully be a general solution to information I want to drop from descriptions in the new feeds (usually because they link back to sites that no longer exist, or are otherwise irrelevant). I ran out of time in November, but I hope to get that done, and the Joystiq feed up, in December.

Also on the podcast front, I made another one of those audio-to-video clips, this one marking the 20th anniversary of the Xbox 360 with a clip of Jeff Gerstmann giving one of the earliest commentaries on Xbox Live Arcade several days in advance of the console's launch.

This segment got almost no traction, socially; I'm glad I made it, because it felt like good history to surface, and beneficial on its own terms, but making it wasn't a particularly worthwhile use of time from an outreach perspective. I'm not capitalism-brained about this, but I would like the things I make to be seen by the people I think would be into them. I'll persist, but Bluesky and Mastodon might not be the right venues. Maybe I'll try crossposting to YouTube next time, perhaps even to TikTok.

Scanning

Another issue of MCV, the last one I have from 2000, is scanned and uploaded.

December will be a short month—I'll be away for the back half of it—so I'm not going to attack the PC Strategy Games just yet (I plan to give them the full, time-consuming Retromags/OGM/archive.org treatment). I'll probably do another MCV this month instead. Sorry to keep you waiting a little longer.

And I picked up something new: all 12 issues of Personal Computer World from 1997. This isn't a games magazine, it's a business/enthusiast publication, and has a ludicrously high page count, largely due to the myriad multi-page adverts that constitute the vast majority of its contents. These twelve issues weigh—I kid you not—a combined 17 kilograms. The December issue alone is over 900 pages; in most other magazines, that would be 6–10 issues worth! They're full of foldouts and variable page sizes, are going to pose an inordinately complex scanning challenge, and will be useful to approximately nobody. I can't wait to get going with these stupid things.

I didn't buy these only because they were unscanned; I also bought them to help out a mutual with her research. Misty De Méo (who runs digipres.club, my home Mastodon server) had been trying to hunt down a particular review for months. Attributed to PC World magazine, she'd found that it wasn't in that magazine, and believed it might be found in PCW instead (but wasn't certain). After picking these issues up from eBay (at a pretty reasonable price), I found the review in question, photographing and pinging it over to Misty. Research assisted!

Magazine Indexing

Database stats at the end of November 2025 (delta from October):

Titles indexed: 52 (+2)
Distinct issues indexed: 4,521 (+113)
Pages indexed: 653,603 (+27,022)

Indexing was on the back burner again this month, but I did find time to import all the 1980s issues of Computer and Video Games; that's only about a third of the run, so I'll continue the process in December.

(The index isn't public, but if you're a game historian—pro or amateur—and you'd like me to run off a query or two, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)

Playing

• Rolled credits on Far Cry 6—the only Far Cry I ever finished other than Primal, I think. It did exactly what I expected it to do, no more, but at least Giancarlo Esposito added some credibility to the occasional cutscene. I'll probably get the Ubisoft bug again in a few months, but for now it's nice to have it out of my system.
• Grabbed Shiren the Wanderer 6 on sale. I never got into 5, but I'm enjoying this one; it's filling the role of the pick-up-and-play-for-20-minutes roguelite of the month.
• And I started Cyberpunk 2077; damn, this is a nice looking game, the current unbeaten champion of urban environments. I can forgive a lot in a game when the settings are enticing, but the rest of this game is also legitimately good. I'm 50 hours in and it doesn't feel like I'm nearing the end, but I already sense that it'll leave me wanting more; maybe I need to follow it up with Edgerunners?
• My wife and I are continuing to play Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams, which is an enjoyably chilled-out multiplayer activity. After playing the free version extensively, we both invested in the DLCs in the sale, which means we can now upload our own photos as puzzles. We're enjoying challenging one another with mystery images, turning off the preview so the photo is slowly revealed as we solve it.

That's it from me for this year. In a month's time, it'll be the middle of the holidays and I'll be spending that time with family. So, though I hope to get a few things done before the wind-down starts, there won't be another update post until the end of January, which will cover two partial months.

Enjoy the holidays, stay warm and toasty, and I'll see you in 2026!

The last of the early 2000 issues of British trade magazine MCV. Unfortunately, I don't have anything between this and issue 120 from January 2001; these early issues are seldom offered.

• The UK high street trade war is heating up, with retailers cutting into their margins and getting customers in the door with cheap Gran Turismo 2.
• A promising future is ahead for the Dreamcast with Eidos and LucasArts announcing new titles for the platform. Cool! Hindsight is overrated.
• Top of the charts this week is a new entry: Gran Turismo 2, generating over £3.8m in revenue — a new record.
• But next week sees the release of a little game called The Sims...

Find it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/mcv-71-2000-02-04-ocr