The Virtual Boy, that poor little system that really couldn't. It included a built in feature to automatically pause itself every 10 minutes so as to prevent the user from sustaining permanent eye damage, and yet no one thought this might be indicative of larger flaws in the system.

Still, it managed to have some diversity in the scant 22 games released during its lifetime. It had a Wario game that to this day has not been ported to any other platform. It had a 3D flight game, a first-person shooter, two different bowling games, and even the first appearance of the Shin Megami Tensei series outside of Japan. And, of course, there was a Gundam game.

Today we remember the Virtual Boy for what it was: a strange forgotten relic with some interesting stories to tell. Exactly the sort of thing we love here at MobyGames.

Our resident cosmopolitan contributor חד-קרן·山猫 (the man formerly known as Unicorn Lynx) continues to alphabetically go through the Japanese PC-98 game library, easily breaking the 90,000 points barrier along the way as the second guy to ever reach that humongous feat. The #1 Israeli obviously made it as far as to letter K by now, adding many - to Western audiences - highly obscure games with enjoyable descriptions and delicious screen shots for each. And although I didn't see a regular native Japanese/Chinese contributor show up by now, I strongly believe that Oleg's valuable work will pay off for the project sooner or later in that regard, too.

#1 German contribution machine joyvalley continues to give חד-קרן·山猫 a run for his money, as he blasted into the 80K points area as the third man ever recently. While Thomas contributed most of his points submitting covers in his starting days, he more or less shifted his focus to avoiding the front page lately, with his latest project being the addition of missing tech info all over the place counting for over 16,000 points for 2010 alone. Furthermore it must be noted that he is one of the most active approvers out there, where his preferred realms are the lucky queues of the Dos/Windows platforms.

"Scan Master" (as he was called in another thread) Charly2.0 recently completed a second bulk of his contributions worth 10,000 points after roughly one and a half year of MobyAddiction™. Looking through the contribution profile of this silent German contributor, he obviously still does what many of us started out doing here: going through his game collection, adding all the missing games along the way, scanning all the boxes, bringing home all the points others left lying out in the cold. He already scored the award for the #6 German contributor this way and will target the #5 spot next which needs another 10K points by now.

Being another more or less silent worker bee, US-American contributor qwertyuiop broke the 20,000 points barrier, too, claiming the title of the #7 US contributor along the way while fighting off the intense attacks of two other fellow 20K candidates as of now. Just like Charly2.0 above, qwertyuiop's 2010 contribution profile (heavy on covers with a little bit of everything else) looks as if he would systematically go through his game collection, completing or adding the respective database entries while doing so. Furthermore, he also is one of the few contributors that submitted at least one game hint, adding to this much neglected contribution field so severely suffering from inappropriate remuneration.

And last, but in no way least, Russian contributor Kyler.ural finally proved he has no life, too, by joining the 10K points club as its 57th member ever. He scored most of his points by adding Russian covers to the database, but also started to broaden his approach with a first game hint and three ranking sources submitted. And because Eugene is the first Russian I'm writing a celebration item for, I also have to state that the fact that he already is the #3 Russian contributor is quite sad for this aspiring video game nation. Go recruiting, guys! :o)

And when you've read this far in what must be one the longest news items in history (knocking at the 4,000 character limit), then speak after me:

C O N G R A T U L A T I O N S !!! =)

The last look I took at the list of top contributors revealed only two of Moby's finest reaching a new personal milestone. But naturally, the Moby community couldn't bear this kind of drought and struck back with a vengeance. With no less than five people completing their first or another 10,000 points since the last update, I see myself forced to split up this update into two posts - this here being the first.

And while I always used to scan the top contributor's list from top to bottom, today I will make an exception to the rule as there's a special new member of the 10K points club to celebrate: MobyGames co-founder and sole coding slave Brian Hirt stuck his head out of the programmer's dungeon and finally broke through the five digit barrier!

At first glance, Brian's contribution profile looks as if he just tested every new contribution area released over the years, more or less. But as this wouldn't be enough for scoring 10,000 points, a closer look reveals that he added 7,351 alternate company names as of today, making him the unreachable #1 contributor in this field, a feat obviously achieved in the starting days of MobyGames. Two other items in Brian's contribution list catch the eye of the regular MobyUser, too: He scored 106 points for contributing genres - another pole position that he will hold for eternity - and he got exactly one point for a hardware image - clicking through his profile recommended for a sneak peak at this will-hopefully-soon-be new feature.

Furthermore I would like to take this opportunity to thank Brian for all the thought and endless hours he put into this project. The site is far from being without problems and there has been much gnashing of teeth lately, but I think we should never forget what a might job it is to cram the world-wide history of video games into a database design, and to put a usable website interface over it for convenient read/write access for both contributors and approvers. And what a surprisingly successful attempt in doing all this MobyGames has become!

Congratulations and thanks, Brian. :o)

So let's keep this thread free of gnashed teeth, let's hold on for a moment instead and remember why we came here and why we're still here, after all.