History and Research

I’ve been doing a side project that involves tracking down some release dates of videogames. Because I’m a bit obsessed with finding authoritative sources I’m finding it difficult for some things. Strangely, although wikipedia has tons of release dates on games, hardly any of them are sourced. Perhaps stranger is that although wikipedia loves to put [citation needed] on everything, hardly any of these uncited dates have that tag.

Some release dates don’t seem to be known. For example, the exact day that Space Invaders first came out seems lost to the ages. And even though things like the ET Landfill thing were well documented in Atari Inc.: Business is Fun, there was still tons of coverage reporting that it was thought to be an “urban legend” and “no one knew what was buried there.”

What wikipedia does have though is a couple videogame sources that I wasn’t aware of until I stumbled on them the other day:

  • The first is wikipedia’s list of videogame source that they call their “reference library.” It contains links to gaming magazines and websites online and off as well as books and other things.
  • The second is wikipedia’s list of “books on video games” which is, cleverly enough, a list of books on videogames.

Neither of these is earth-shattering but they are useful sites to keep in mind when looking for something.

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