Stage Clear: October 2026

In record time (the record is for lateness), here's the monthly debrief for October:

Video

I had an idea for a new type of video: a short unscripted screen recording, focused on specific aspects of researching game history that could be attempted by anybody. I thought this would be much more straightforward to make than the usual fully produced mini-docs, and that it would help mix the channel up a bit and show that, going forward, there'll be more than just one format on there.

Despite my assumptions of simplicity, I ended up recording it three times. In the first I was underprepared and my voiceover was utter nonsense. I realised after recording the second that my laptop wasn't powerful enough to hardware-encode H.264 in 4K and I'd recorded a frame about every five seconds. The third time I used software encoding and that worked. It's not the best thing I've ever made—I need practice talking off the cuff—but it's fine.

A rough cut of the first episode of A Researcher Is You has already been shared with Patreon backers, and the final version will go public this week.

I also spent an idle afternoon making a crunchy little logo bumper—a video version of the YouTube/Bluesky channel banner—in DaVinci Fusion. The background of the banner is a photo from Unsplash, but for the bumper, I had to create the same analogue noise in motion from scratch. You'll see (and hear) this logo in the first 1.5 seconds of the new video. No long 3D-text + dubstep intros here. Been there, done that.

Patreon

After an eventful relaunch in September, last month was blissfully routine. All backers get a link post containing something game-history-adjacent to read or watch every Sunday, and backers at behind-the-scenes tiers ($6+/month) got an essay where I described the potential chronogaming project and attempted to reason out whether or not I should do it. Apologies to the backers in question if this felt too much like therapy.

Thanks and welcome to new supporter Video Games Are Bad. Check out his extremely good YouTube channel!

Acornucopia

After spending most of the year on the fence about this project, I gave myself a deadline to decide—the end of October—and did as much as I could to make an informed decision.

I'm not going to get into all the decision factors (you can sign up for the Vault Dweller tier on Patreon if you're seriously interested), but I also sent out an anonymous survey to gauge whether the people following me on social media were hot or cold on the idea.

Here are the results:

So there's some curiosity—mostly mild, but still, curiosity—and, unsurprisingly, people who've never used a Beeb are in the clear majority. If these responses are any indication, I think there'd probably be a small but dedicated audience for this series.

But I've decided that I'm not going to proceed with this project, at least not starting on the original intended deadline of the 45th anniversary (December 1st). I might pull it out of the drawer later when I have more time or feel more able to tackle it. But three factors swung the decision against:

Things will be winding down at the end of the year as the holidays approach and I'm travelling all over the place; it's not a good time to try to do a big thing.
My childhood BBC Micro, which I planned to use in the first episode (and as a prop thereafter), hasn't yet turned up at my parents' place, and they seem unsure that it's even there.
My video production has been extremely sporadic in recent years; I should probably prove that I can sustainably turn around videos before committing whole-arsedly to a series of several hundred episodes.

P.S. If anyone wants to chronogame the C64, ZX Spectrum or Amiga, and needs a name for that project, I've got some I'm dying to share.

Scanning

I scanned and uploaded two more issues of British industry magazine MCV: issues 358 and 359, from the weeks leading up to the launch of the Xbox 360.

I'll round out the year with an issue of the—I believe—completely unpreserved early-2000s PC magazine Strategy Player.

Wiki

October was a month of maintenance and paying off accrued debt. I upgraded MediaWiki to the latest security point release, and when the PHP and eMudhra vulnerabilities went public on the same day, I needed to take the server down for 24 hours until patches made their way through the chain to my provider's package mirror.

I made good inroads into the backlog of exported material that I never triaged or uploaded to the wiki, reducing the 1200+ SimCity 2000 files sitting around on my laptop SSD to, currently, 397. I'll continue this process in November, because the footprint of these and other result output directories still totals around 12GB.

I'll also put a few spare hours into creating a new wiki page. 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 an assist for anyone looking to do some research. This month's will be the original Harvest Moon, and will likely need some SNES magazines to be imported into the index; a good excuse to do just that.

Sporcle

I set three new trivia quizzes in October:

Guess the Top 20 GameCube Bestsellers
Which JRPGs never became a series?
How many games that received a perfect 10 from Edge magazine can you name?

I'm enjoying these a lot, and I've got a list of topics brewing. The only downside to researching these quizzes is that I don't get to test my own knowledge with them, so here's a standing request: if anyone reading this creates their own videogame-themed quiz, please drop me a link!

That's it for another month. No interesting acquisitions in October, though I do have my eye on something this month that'll put me all-in on video editing and lock in Resolve as my NLE, closing the door on Premiere. But more on that next time.

Thanks for reading. See you again in the past!