Stage Clear: September 2026

And another month is behind us, with the year seemingly accelerating at breakneck speed towards winter. How is time passing this quickly?

September is the month of, according to the Internet, the Seven Sorrows of Mary. I don't know what that is, but it doesn't sound like it was much fun to be her. Since I'm not, here's what I managed to get done in September:

Video

The big win: for the first time since 2022, I uploaded a new video! At time of writing, it's unlisted on YouTube and only Patreon members can see it, but it'll be public in a few days; there'll be a post here too with an embed, references and the like.

The video is about the time that a major company intentionally shipped malware with a bestselling game, and it might be obvious from the finished video that this is still a bugbear of mine almost 30 years later. I was aiming for 3-4 minutes and an easy on-ramp to making videos again, but it ended up at almost 7 and quite technical, because of the decision to be on camera for part of it.

I don't have another topic lined up right now, but now that I've got a setup, I'll be aiming for a video every few months from now on. Which isn't a high frequency, I'll admit, but it's a massive improvement on 0 in 3.5 years.

Patreon

The big switch from per-creation billing (which is being retired, because apparently it's more acceptable to Patreon to retool their entire creator offering than remove in-app payments from their iOS app) to subscription billing happened mid-month, with help from Patreon's support team. What's very cool is that, despite paying monthly being a very different proposition to paying almost never, most patrons have stuck around and kept their support active. Thanks y'all.

So I might be making a little pocket money from Patreon from now on. This will go straight back into preservation activities; the more I make, the more time I can justify spending and the more materials I can acquire. And a chunk of it will go back to the game history community through my own Patreon pledges.

There's a new supporters page on the site with the names of all patrons of Hero tier and above. $3/month gets your name on there (and on any videos), and for $10/month I'll personally draw a pixel art version of your avatar that'll go alongside your name. Don't pretend you're not a little bit curious about that.

Scanning

I scanned and uploaded two more issues of British industry magazine MCV: issues 356 and 357, from the weeks leading up to the launch of the Xbox 360. The trade perspective makes an interesting contrast to the consumer perspective of most publications; chief among retailers' concerns in the lead-up was whether or not they'd actually receive any units to sell.

Magazine Indexing

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

Titles indexed: 80 (+1)
Distinct issues indexed: 7,942 (+194)
Pages indexed: 1,089,646 (+41,178)

The first non-English additions to the index, with four full years of Famitsu. Later I found out I could have likely OCRed these locally (using NDLOCR-Lite, which the Video Game History Foundation used to index their archive's first Japanese additions this month) and saved money not paying for cloud models, but you live and learn.

(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.)

Wiki

Each month I'm trying to put a few spare hours into seeding a new page on the VGMF 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.

September's page was SimCity 2000. I added almost 30 pieces of coverage from American, British and Japanese magazines, and started researching a list of versions, filling out a few authors, release dates and other details for particular ports. (Did you know SC2K came out for the GBA? Wild.)

However, I'm now in a bit of a pickle. I've been doing this page-of-the-month deal for a few months now, but every time my script ends up extracting many hundreds of page-matches from my magazine index and I invariably end up looking through less than a quarter of them before the end of the month hits and I need to move on.

I wouldn't mind, but the folders of remaining unprocessed pages sit around indefinitely. I still have 300+ Star Fox 64 matches to process, and the Sim City 2000 situation is even direr: 1200+ files taking up almost 12GB of storage space! And I don't feel like I can delete them; they were assembled with purpose and should only be deleted once that purpose is fulfilled.

So next month, I'll be working on triaging, processing and uploading this backlog of exported material for the last couple of pages I made. It's going to take hours, but I need my disk space back.

Sporcle

A quick but fun one: I published my first quiz on Sporcle, Name the Fable Games. (I think you probably need to have worked at Lionhead to get them all.)

Was pretty enjoyable to create, even more fun to see people attempt, and I'll definitely set some more quizzes on Sporcle.

And that's about it. No acquisition or Now Playing sections this month—I've given myself cubital tunnel syndrome by playing stupid tidy-the-library games for hours on end, so the less said about that the better.

Thanks for reading. See you again in the past!