The Video Game Research Library is a collection of articles, videos, and podcasts that offer a glimpse into gaming’s past, present, and future through historical, retrospective, and contemporary reporting and scholarship.
Within the library, you’ll find links to investigative reports, retrospective histories, biographical sketches, commentary and criticism, editorial opinions, book excerpts, interviews, oral histories, journal articles from academic and medical professionals, development materials, postmortems, and a lot more. My goal is to create a hand-built collection of links inspired by a bit the old web.
Does the library represent the full history of video games? No, of course not. But it is a good start and new links will be added as often as I can.
The Video Game Research Library grew out of an idea that’s been rattling around inside my head for over 20 years.
In 2003, I was part of the content team for Game Rankings, and my main job was gathering reviews from smaller sites across the Internet. In those days, the content team was looking to expand their scope beyond reviews. In a perfect world, Game Rankings would have been a one-stop-shop to track a game’s entire development history from announcement to release (and beyond).
For each game, that meant collecting the two-paragraph announcement article (and the press release it came from), and an interview with the developers at E3 where they talked about their vision, and previews and impressions before release. And then, of course, there was all the reviews. But we also wanted to track the after-release reaction from both players and critics, which meant tracking down retrospectives about how it all came together, and editorials about what it meant to the people playing it, and on and on and on.
Unfortunately, Game Rankings was soon after purchased by GameSpot and eventually supplanted in the public’s trust by Metacritic, so none of this ever happened. But I kept collecting links… as many as I could.
Contrary to popular belief, the Internet is not forever. As we’ve seen after the closure of countless publications over the years, the Internet is a fragile thing, and what was once a vibrant source of great writing about video games can be gone in a flash. On top of all that, it’s become much more difficult to find anything substantial or specific through search engines.
If you don’t have any particular destination in mind, give the Random Article button a shot, and let more than 60 years of video game history wash over you.
And Patreon subscribers can get a sneak peak at the full list of uncatalogued articles, videos, and podcasts that’ll be added in the future, which currently includes more than 2000 links from 1962 to today.
This library is a work in progress and largely the efforts of one person. Please reach out through the Contact Page if you’d like to tell me how I’m doing or if you have an article you’d like to see added.