More tips on adding credits: Just enter the full name of the person--no nicknames, etc. For example, "Jim Leonard" would be correct, but "Jim 'Trixter' Leonard" is not correct.

That is all. Now back to your regularly scheduled programme...

We're glad that people have already started to add developer credits to games--but please, people, type carefully. :-) We've had to correct a few typos already, and the system hasn't even been online for 24 hours.

(Correct spelling and capitalization is important so that the system can properly link games together based on people's names.)

You can thank Brian's numb fingers and wrists for this one: Due to popular demand, you can now add developer credits to any entry! To do so, just go to the entry you want to add developers for and click Contribute on the left-hand side of the screen.

As with everything you contribute, you get contribution points for adding developers. Each developer added is 1/4th of a point, but you get 2 points right off the bat for contributing developers. So, if you added 8 developers to an entry, you'd get 4 points: 2 for being willing to contribute developers, and 1/4th of a point for each developer.

We've retroactively granted more contribution points to people who have been willing to send them in, so check your contribution rating--it might have jumped up.

Fun fact of the day: There are over 670 box covers (both front, back, and inside flaps) on file in the database.

Being a historical preservation project, we try to track down rare covers, since they serve as a historical barometer of what gamers were looking for (and what companies were marketing). For example, we're trying to amass all of Electronic Arts' "flatbox" boxes; check out Pinball Construction Set, Music Construction Set, Starflight, or Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror for some examples (be sure to click on "More Covers").

We're honored to have been noticed by Tony Van, designer and producer of some influential PC games such as BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge and Rebel Assault. Tony's contributed a ton of games we were missing (we're still approving the entries), and added some very interesting commentary to Crescent Hawks.

Fun fact of the day: There are over 2000 screenshots in the MobyGames database.

I hate to follow up good news with bad, but we've just discovered that some of the descriptions for entries in the MobyGames database were plagarised from other sources without credit. If it wasn't obvious before, this is completely unacceptable. If you're going to use a description from another source, credit it (write who wrote the original description).

Jim`s a Father again. His wife just gave birth to a baby boy! I'm going to be at COMDEX this week and Jim is going to be obviously busy as well. If we're slow to approve your reviews and game entries, please don't send hate mail. :) Things should be back to normal by next Monday.

The second and third winner of the MobyGames Giveaway have just had their games shipped out: Jason Artman picked Half-Life as his game and Mark F picked Alone in the Dark.

It appears as if our back-end database was down for a couple of hours, making the home page appear completely devoid of any information. This has been fixed.

Now is probably a good time to mention that off-site backups of the code and database are made about once a week, so even if the server that housed MobyGames literally exploded, it could be reconstructed.

In an unfortunate coincidence, Gamespot is running a feature that is simiar to our own feature--but with the exact same title. Since I previewed Jason's article for MobyGames way back in early September, I know for a fact that he did not plagarize the title.

C'est la vie, I guess.

Congratulations to Jason Artman, who earned bonus contribution points for writing MobyGames' premiere feature article. You can read the article by following the link in the Feature's description located in the lower right-most section of this page.

Holy crazed-weasel coding frenzys, Batman! We're on a new release already thanks to Brian's mad coding skills. Here's some of the new features you can immediately enjoy:

• The Top Ten has now been expanded to the Top Twenty, and requires 5 votes to appear on it.
  
  
• Game Groups have been added. This is one of the most potentially powerful core features of MobyGames--it is now possible to relate games together with almost any criteria. For example, there are some games based on H. P. Lovecraft that should have been linked together, but weren't because they weren't sequels or prequels. Now they will. Watch for these "game groupings" in the upcoming weeks and we think you'll be as excited as we are.
  
  
• The Feature Article of the Month code is in place. Look for our first Feature article in the next 36 hours.
  
  
• You can now not only view past polls, but vote in them as well.
  
  
• The past Tips of the Day can now be viewed; same goes for Game of the Week.
  
  
• The ability to grant extra bonus Contributions Points exists. This feature will be used sparingly by us to grant recognition to those who contribute in ways directly unrelated to the database itself, such as a physical donation of games, writing a feature article, etc.
  
  
• "Platform" is clickable in the rap sheet.
  
  
• Users can choose which Rating Categories are relevant when adding a game entry. This is best illustrated when you add a game using the Game Wizard, so add a game today to see what we mean.
  
  

And, according to Brian, "a few nasty bug fixes that I should have rolled out a long time ago" for good measure.

The first winner of the MobyGames Giveaway has just had his title shipped out: Tomer Gabel picked The 7th Guest as his game, and it got shipped to Israel today.

Also, a quick reminder that we're happy to take requests. Someone wrote in describing a game that we recognized as Flightmare, so we added it to the database.

With the approval of MarkF's Street Sports Basketball last night, MobyGames has reached 400 games in the database. Great job, everyone!

A couple of these have come in, so I thought I'd clarify the company vs. developer policy: When a game has been written by a single person, don't enter that person as a company; just enter the developer credits information into the trivia field and we'll fix it later.

We've had to edit some entries recently because they were added as their "pirate" counterparts -- that is, the title was the name of the executable, the business model was freeware, and the program details were incomplete or inaccurate. Just a reminder: If you're not sure of something, don't enter it or leave it blank.

We've gotten some captures of text screens recently (thanks to those who contributed!), and thought it would be a good time to plug our free classic text-screen capture utility. It creates highly-compressed GIFs of text screens, rendered in the classic PC font, just like a real IBM PC from 1981.

Astute readers might be wondering why Star Control 2 has such high amount of user participation on MobyGames (76 ratings, 5 reviews, and counting)... well, the fan site The Pages of Now and Forever has directed their users to come here and participate. :-) If you run a fan site, feel free to do the same; we don't mind the traffic at all.

And, of course, if you run a fan site and don't see your favorite game here, add it! Or tell us to add it.

We've rolled out a new release, code-named "orange pumpkin". There are a lot of changes, many too small to mention, but five are quite notable:

Multi-Platform Support: Moby now represents five gaming platforms: Booters (no OS), DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98/NT/2000, and Linux. Seperating each platform allows us to track additional information about the games and also add a whole new class of games to Moby--Linux games! If a game was released for multiple platforms, there's only a single game entry to the database. Within the game, the ratings, requirements and reviews are associated with a particular platform.

MobyGames Giveaway: Jim and Brian have created the MobyGames Giveaway! We're giving away a portion of our personal game collection to people who have helped out above and beyond the call of duty. It basically boils down to this: free games. Check it out for details.

Game Trivia: Users can now contribute trivia about a game through the "Contribute" link on the Rap Sheet. Each trivia item contributed earns one contribution point. (Don't worry; the previous trivia items were converted and the original game contributors were retroactively credited.) A game can have as many trivia items as needed, so please feel free to share those interesting bits of information with everyone else.

Companies: Ask and ye shall receive: Users can now add companies to the database. If when adding a game you enter a company that doesn't exist in the database, you now have the option of adding it. Each company added earns one contribution point.

Login System: We have made a slight change to the logon system which will prevent the "Auto-Logout" problems that some users were experiencing (especially AOL users).

We are really excited about this new code rollout and invite everyone to try out the new features and modifications.