Stage Clear: June/July 2025

Stage Clear is a month(ish)ly roundup of the projects I've been working on.

God dag og god sommer! I've spent almost half of the time since the last update on holiday in Norway, so this roundup will be on the lighter side, since I can't plausibly spin 'walking in the woods' or 'seeing the Oslo Pride Parade' as game-history-related. (I did get one of Kate Willaert's T-shirts on Norwegian TV, though.)

Scanning

My magazine acquisition over the last few years has been focused on picking up sporadic issues of the UK trade press magazine MCV — which are particularly hard to find, because such newspaper-like publications were very often discarded after reading. Unexpectedly, in June, the Video Game History Foundation unexpectedly dropped over 200 digitised issues in their online archive, thanks to their former editor James Batchelor.

This is a very good thing, but it's also made a good chunk of the contents of the boxes under my desk obsolete! By my count, 61 of the physical issues I've collected have now been uploaded by the VGHF, and scanning them would be somewhat redundant.

But that still leaves over 100 unscanned physical issues that don't overlap with the VGHF's holdings! This means I can tighten my focus to everything before issue 516, knowing that 2009–2013 (and a fair bit of what came after) are already well covered.

Making good use of this new focus, I scanned issue 66 from the tail end of 1999, and 67 is next. (I don't have 68, though; there aren't many sequential runs in my hoard, unfortunately. I've grabbed whatever I could, but there are hundreds of issues I've never seen on eBay in the years I've been monitoring it.)

The preservation of that issue of Total PC Gaming was so well received that I'm also on the hunt for more unscanned issues. No purchases yet, since I refuse to pay £20+ for an issue, but at some point the right deal will present itself.

Magazine Indexing

Database stats as of the end of July 2025 (delta from May):

Titles indexed: 43 (+17)
Distinct issues indexed: 3,914 (+1,158)
Pages indexed: 573,501 (+123,144)

It's been a busy couple of months for indexing, with a big jump in the number of titles. I'm still focusing on English-language PC and multiplatform publications; once I've got all the major ones in, I'll start to cast a wider net. Among the titles indexed in June and July:

• Computer Games Strategy Plus/Computer Games
• Every issue of MCV that I have in digital form
• Develop
• A bunch of other trade mags
• All 97 issues of Play (US)
• Fills of PC Games (US) as kitsunebi has been releasing them
• the first few years of PC Gamer (US; already done UK)

Next in the queue, I'll continue indexing the long US run of PC Gamer, which for many years was a distinct magazine with no editorial overlap. (In recent years, it's simply been a rebadge of the UK version.)

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

Video Game Morgue File wiki

A few more additions to the Baldur's Gate page and a start on the Tales of the Sword Coast one, but nothing to shout about.

I'm more concerned at the next big thing I need to do with it. The version of MediaWiki installed, 1.39, is end-of-life in November, so I'll need to jump at least four major versions forward to the next long term support release.

That in itself is fine, but if I'm not mistaken, it means I'll also have to update the skin I'm using to a later version. And updating the skin means everything will move from Bootstrap 4 to 5... which means I might have to change all my templates for things like the gallery layouts (which use Bootstrap cards). So the knock-on effects of that necessary security update will mean a substantial amount of work.

I'm mentioning this here because it's a task I've been procrastinating on for a while, but has got to be done, so this paragraph will either make me do it or force an embarrassing admission in the next update.

And that's it for the roundup; as mentioned, it was a short one, but it was an absolute delight to have a break. I'll have more to report in August.