On a few occasions, I’ve bought a game and found that I already have it in my collection. To mitigate this, I decided to maintain a list of games. (I seem to have inherited this propensity toward collecting and cataloguing things from my Dad). I found a great website that has information on a massive array of titles; and this has invoked yet more nostalgia for me.
I seem to have amassed huge collections of digital media although, admittedly, I haven’t ‘consumed’ everything. My photography, ebooks and podcasts are just files in folders, indexed by Windows. I am reluctantly transitioning from mp3s to You Tube music – I say reluctantly because I feel like I’m forfeiting control. I abandoned DVDs a decade ago so my movies are on a Plex Media server. Plex is great because, you dump the movie on there and it supplements the movie with additional information, presumably from imdb.
That leaves gaming. I needed something to check, out and about, in case a title caught my eye. A Google Keep note got disordered and a spreadsheet seemed high maintenance if not a little formal. I needed something like imdb so that I could a title and the software does the rest. After trying out a few websites, bingo, I found rawg.io and it is the perfect solution. You can even just connect gaming profiles (e.g. Steam, Playstation Network, Xbox) and it will automatically pull in your game game library and their associated details. I just needed to know title and what platform I have the game on but it supplies so much more. You can see my game library on there: https://rawg.io/@retrojimmyx
I wouldn’t describe myself as a serious gamer (nor indeed particularly good) but as I started flicking through the catalogue of title dating back over several decades, I realised I do seem to have a long history of gaming, dating back to the 80s. Computer games have evolved at an incredible pace in my lifetime and the industry is estimated to be worth a phenomenal $180 billion this year alone. I would not of (but should of) anticipated that in the 90s.