MobyGames
Company
Documents about MobyGames
Whitepaper7 pages
chludens.ch: Developing an Interactive Archive for Swiss Vintage Games and Its Community
The paper presents the design and development of chludens.ch, a digital web archive for Swiss vintage games and their surrounding community, produced as part of the CH LUDENS research project at the Zurich University of the Arts.
- The chludens.ch project is a digital web archive for Swiss vintage games and their community, developed at the Zurich University of the Arts to preserve a largely overlooked pre-Internet game development scene.
- The archive adopts a 'archiving the game without the game' approach, focusing on contextual materials such as interviews, gameplay videos, metadata, and historical documents rather than collecting software or source code.
- A flexible wiki structure with a filter system, clear categorizations, and systematic file naming was found necessary to integrate heterogeneous data types and map relationships between people, games, and institutions.
DiGRAJun 2025
Whitepaper19 pages
Would You Like Games with That Computer? Revisiting Early Game History and Culture with the Commodore 64
Early 1980s video game history has long centered on consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Atari 2600, but this study argues that the home computer, and especially the Commodore 64, was the primary venue for game publishing in the decade.
- The Commodore 64 is argued to be the primary venue for early 1980s game publishing, hosting far more game releases than any competing platform according to MobyGames data, and selling roughly 12.5 million units as the best-selling desktop computer.
- The authors contend that the historical record has neglected home computers like the C64 by focusing on consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System and Atari 2600, skewing understanding of how games and computing developed together.
- Advertising for the C64 and VIC-20 from 1983 to 1985 framed the machines mainly around education, literacy, and career productivity, mentioning games only in passing, while also gendering computer use with men shown programming or gaming and women in brief professional or domestic roles.
DiGRAJun 2023