Projects
Retrohistories
This is a series of mini-documentaries (5–25 minutes long) about stories from video game history. The first episode dropped in 2015, and highlights include:
- a deep dive on Interplay's Secret of Vulcan Fury, featuring never-before-seen material from artists who worked on the cancelled adventure
- the story of a public feud between Manchester Cathedral and the publishers of Resistance: Fall of Man over the depiction of the building, told by the man who built the level in question
- an attempt to find the first ever instance of the words "Game Over"
- probably YouTube's only essay about RenderWare, the middleware that powered a substantial portion of the PS2/Xbox/GameCube library
- the longest and most polished episode, about the death and rebirth of Vampire: Bloodlines
I quit my job for a while to try to make a go of the channel full-time, and though I produced a bunch of work I was happy with in that period, it didn't really work out on a can-afford-rent level. Combine the need to return to work with some life-changingly disruptive events and the desire to only make videos that nobody else would, and I've only produced two episodes of Retrohistories in the five years since 2020.
Though I've been working on a new video for a while, it's no longer a daily routine. It'll be done when it's done. But the topics are evergreen, almost entirely free of topicality or trend-chasing, and I like to think the episodes (bar the very first) hold up as well-made, interesting and distinctive. Many of them involved a massive, unsustainable amount of work, but I'm very happy with the results.
Video Game Morgue File
I've been struggling to articulate a quick pitch for this project. I think the best way to describe it is to give a hypothetical example.
Say you're writing an article, or researching a video, about a game that was released a couple of decades ago. You go to morguefile.wiki, search for the title, and find the page for that game, where you will see:
- A link to a GDC talk the game's lead designer gave in 2013.
- A link to an episode of a discontinued podcast from 2008 where the same person was interviewed at length.
- A link to the Wayback Machine's archived copy of a 2004 interview with two of the game's developers originally published on the long-erased 1UP.com.
- A link to an oral history Eurogamer published on the closure of the studio in 2010 with lots of quotes on the making of the game from people who worked on it.
- Several downloadable pages from the design doc the producer tweeted years ago that are no longer online because she deleted her account in 2023.
- Some Polaroids of the people working on the game that were posted to a closed Facebook group in 2016.
- Downloadable PDFs, containing only the relevant pages, of every contemporary preview, review and feature on the game from every magazine that's been digitised, including some not in English, and some extracted from files that are no longer readily available.
- Links to books, articles, blogs, and YouTube videos where others have attempted to write their own histories of the game's production.
Hopefully, that explains the problem this wiki might someday solve: there's a lot of information out there that, though it is (or once was) publicly available, is very difficult to find with search engines, whether due to format, deletion or just plain obscurity. A wiki for pooling and sharing knowledge of these resources could be a useful research aid.
Of course, there are hundreds of thousands of games (a conservative estimate!), and it will take a gargantuan effort to get the wiki to this level of usefulness. Most games don't even have pages yet, and we need many more volunteers. Please come and help us out!
Scanning
Over the past five years I've been keeping an eye open for rare and undigitised magazines on eBay, and snapping up job lots when the price is right.
The majority of these are issues of MCV, a British trade and industry publication, printed weekly from 1998–2017 and monthly thereafter. These publications were circulated almost exclusively to video game retailers, and most copies were quickly tossed, so auctions are genuinely rare. But they often include information not usually found elsewhere, like sales figures and details of marketing campaigns—billboards, cinema ads, standees—that publishers would use to promote their games. Other than MCV, I've found a few other rare issues of other titles, like the obscure and forgotten British magazine PC Strategy Games.
I also invested in a 600dpi scanner substantial enough to require its own desk (A3, because many magazines' pages are larger than A4) in order to scan these magazines, as well as equipment to debind them (scanning requires first breaking down a magazine into loose leaves). So far, I've scanned and uploaded about 20 issues that were never previously online, have three boxes of unscanned material ready to go, and the backlog is growing faster than it's shrinking.
Magnus
Magnus (which ostensibly, but not meaningfully, stands for Magazine New Search Engine) is a series of Python scripts chained into a workflow for OCRing, indexing and searching old games magazines, as well as the database I'm building with these tools.
The V2 (written in 2025) version is a ground-up rewrite of the original (written in 2020), which used Tesseract OCR running locally. In the new version, pages are OCRed with much greater accuracy and speed in the cloud.
The size of the (V2) database at time of writing is 4,430 issues from 52 different titles, full-text indexed and searchable: a total of 629,217 pages. So far, these lean heavily toward English-language PC and multiplatform coverage and represent only a small fraction of my hoard of digital magazines; the database continues to grow as more publications are ingested.
This project is currently private, running locally with a command-line interface. I'd like to make it public someday (just the index, certainly not the files, which measure in the double-digit terabytes), but that's a 'someday not soon' project. But I'm happy to help historians with their research projects by running searches against my database—drop me a ping.
Links to the Past
Every Sunday, I send every backer on Patreon a link. Links to the Past is essentially a micro-newsletter; two or three paragraphs talking about one thing I enjoyed in game history that week. It can be a news story, a blog post, a YouTube video, a podcast, a piece of software or some useful resource I've encountered, but they're always—in my opinion—worth your time.
I've sent out 300+ of these weekly updates with only a few breaks for holidays; it's something I really enjoy doing. Available to all Patreon backers from the $1 level.
Secret Graphics Project
Underway, but not ready for the spotlight.
Secret Software Project
Just a thought experiment for now, but I might turn it into something concrete in 2026.
