25-02-17

Experiencing Videogame History

So. This is probably a silly idea, and there's probably many fair reasons you don't really see people attempting to do this, but as of the last few months I've been working on a project that should span quite a few years of my life if I do keep up with it.

The basic idea is to go through videogame history by playing several different games that were important or influential or relevant in one way or another. I've been attempting this by following a "videogame canon" I constructed on my own, rather arbitrarily I'll admit. The canon itself is available as a Backloggd link at the end of the post if you want to check it out.

You may wonder what the objective or point of something like this is, and I suppose there's many answers to that. It started because I wanted to get better at analyzing videogames and consequently get better at analyzing media in general, but it serves other purposes as well, such as learning to appreciate more the medium I'm most interested in, both by thinking critically of it and also noticing the work that goes into the craft.

It's worth mentioning that I won't necessarily force myself to beat many of these games, but I instead want to get an idea of what the game was like, ideally closest to its original form as possible (but with the use of emulators as I don't have the capital or desire to buy a billion different platforms lol). I also want to check at least some materials on whichever game I'm playing, such as interviews, post mortems, other analyses and so on.

Finally, as I said, I've been going at this for a few months now, and have played and finished a few games so far, with the last one being Super Mario Bros. I plan to try and write about the ones I play from now on, though again not really forcing myself to. If I don't find space to talk about a game on its own, I can either let it be or try to implement it in an article with broader reach or subject.

The List

2025-05-04 Edit: I forgot to mention, but the Adventure (1980) article was a part of this project.