Stage Clear: June 2026
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!
