Happy new year and new decade! It's time to ask once again: what are your personal goals for 2021, MobyGames or gaming in general related? I guess nobody expected last year to be as crazy as it was, so here's our resolutions from last year. What about this year? Let us know in the comments below.

Special thanks to Kayburt for making quick work of the V.Flash goal! We now all of its games listed, though still in need of credits, covers and screenshots to fill them out.

Next up, a big goal to reach 5,000 browser games. With an emphasis on games made in flash, as Adobe is deprecating that on December 31st. After that it'll be more difficult to document flash games as 3rd party plugins will need to be installed, and flash portals are more likely to shut down.

Recommended sources: Kongregate, Armor Games, Not Doppler. Newgrounds is also good, though they have their own plugin and less likely to disappear.

Thanks in advance to all contributors, and let's see how quickly we can get to 5k!

Thanks to everyone who helped reach our goal of documenting 2,800 Arcade games! That was a big one. Whew.

And with that we're kicking off a new goal. A much smaller one, for a platform called V.Flash - an educational video game console that only had 10 games released. So the goal is to get the platform to 100% completion.

A new metric has been added to credit listings so you can get an exact count of how many people were credited on any particular release!

There are some fun and interesting ways to use this. For example, you can see how credits have grown between sequels:

Grand Theft Auto = 86 developers

Grand Theft Auto II = 158 developers

Grand Theft Auto III = 185 developers

Grand Theft Auto IV = 1,337 developers

Grand Theft Auto V = 3,692 developers

Note: In cases where credits include thanks, the numbers are shown separately. This is a useful distinction, especially for games that have backers which can easily exceed the number of developers. e.g., FTL: Faster Than Light has 1,053 credits, 1,046 of which are backers/thanks.

Some updates to kick off 2020!

First, special thanks to MobyGames contributor hoeksmas, who added hundreds of lesser known Apple II games and screenshots to the database! Helping make MobyGames the most accurate and complete collection of games published for the Apple II.

Now onto site updates:

• Optimized API queries (approx. 15x faster!)
• Behind the scenes infrastructure work for the API (moving to a new system soon that's easier to scale and develop)
• Improved page responsiveness for smaller screens (mobile)
• SEO tweaks to hopefully help improve our results on Google (if you're an SEO wizard and have any suggestions, please contact me)
• Changed credits display on combined game pages to show credits for the first release (was showing info from the first platform, alphabetically)
• Removed critic/user score overview section from game pages (discussion)
• Fixed combined game pages that were displaying the first alphabetical platform and release date in the page title
• Fixed issue with forms getting improperly cached

As per tradition, I present to you the database visualization! Made possible by the MobyGames API.

Previous editions:
January 2019 - January 2018 - June 2017 - January 2017 - January 2016 - January 2015 - January 2014 - January 2013 - January 2012 - January 2011 - January 2010 - January 2009



(Click to enlarge)

An explanation: each coloured shape in the graph represents a platform. The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis represents the number of games released. So the height of a shape on a given point in time indicates the number of games released for that platform that year. The total height of the graph on a given point in time shows the total releases that year. The graph is meant to represent game releases and thus excludes DLC, Special Edition and Compilation items. It does include each game for each platform it was released on.

Notable changes since last year:
- Where last year I had to switch to LibreOffice to make the graph due to limitations in Excel, I hit some more since. I decided to write my own code to draw the graphs and nicely colour everything. Makes it look better too with some nicer anti-aliasing.
- As usual we see a drop-off at the end, simply because we haven't been able to keep up with all the new game releases.
- Feel free to point out other interesting info in the graph!


[All data taken from MobyGames. Of course, the graph is only as complete as our database is. Come help us if you can!]

Happy new year! It's time to ask once again: what are your personal goals for 2020, MobyGames or gaming in general related? These are our resolutions from last year. What about this year? Let us know in the comments below.

Another year, another 52 weeks' (well, almost) worth of gaming opportunities. Like in previous years, let us reminisce at our gaming experiences of 2019 and share which games we liked playing the most during this year.

Note that this does not necessarily include new games (since the most of us are here for older titles, wink wink). Whether a game was released in 1989 or 2019, if it impressed you, it is worthy of discussion!

Our featured games section of the site has showcased numerous games over the past two decades, and reasons why they are interesting. However, the list of games which are about to enter that section is getting depleted.

We would therefore like to ask you to submit featured games. Just pick a few games which you have found interesting for some reason or another, and make a short write-up about what makes them unique. Have a look at recent features to better see what we are looking for in these short texts.

Another one of our amazing MobyGames contributors is Danfer. He has been building up a sizable PC game collection since 1997, and shows no sign of stopping!

Among over 4400 cover images that he has posted so far in just 2 years, comprised mainly of Italian releases, we've yet to see anything that isn't of high quality. For instance, the unique Italian cover for Dark Colony, a clean Dune II cover set, a rare retail cover of the Total Annihilation: Commander Pack, and, something which we'd been missing for a long time, a full cover set from the original prints of Shogun: Total War - Warlord Edition.

We'd like to thank him for his contributions so far, and encourage him to keep it up!

We finally cleared the previous MobyGoal - adding all those iOS games took a lot longer than we expected - so it's time to move on to another platform that's been sadly neglected here: Arcades!

We currently have 2472 arcade games catalogued on the site; we need your help get to 2800! We're missing a lot of early arcade games, and there's quite a few gaps in the 80s and 90s we need to fill in. And don't forget, a lot of the games we have on other platforms were originally Arcade games, so if you know of any classic game that's missing that platform, feel free to add it too!

Just wanted to point out - and thank - MobyGames contributor CaesarZX, who describes themselves as "a big-box game collector, mostly Chinese version, of course."

They've been adding a lots of rare Chinese PC game box scans, with highlights including Anachronox and Civilization II, to name just a couple. Much appreciated, and long may this continue!