I’m trying to play every video game.
The idea came to me when I was flipping through some old issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly, God rest its soul. Growing up, I loved video games, which makes me really unique, I know. There were a lot of other things I loved—Pokemon, football, airplanes—but video games fascinated me most of all. Part of the reason was their sheer unavailability. I was luckier than most kids in that my parents (atheists the both of them) saw no problem with video games, so I could play as much as I liked, but financially we could still only get a few new games for year. Many, many hours were spent poring over magazines like EGM dreaming of the games we’d never get to play.
You can’t relive your childhood, I realized, but with the help of technology, we can go back in time. All of the games are right there, after all. Confronted with a huge list of old games I’d seemingly never get around to playing, I thought: what if I just went through them in order? What if I just went through “video games” in order? As gamers of a certain age, we were incredibly lucky to live through the birth of the medium and its growth and transformation to a cultural institution it is today. Technologically, games have arguably evolved as much as they are ever going to: graphical improvements are incremental at best now, and the idea of the “console generation” is as good as dead. But in the 70s, 80s and 90s, the evolution of gaming was happening at an absurd speed. We are lucky enough that this is all in living memory, and thanks to the work of game preservationists, almost all of it can be revisited.
So we’re going to go back in time. I’ve painstakingly compiled a list of every game for every major console released since Nintendo dropped the Family Computer on July 15th, 1983, in chronological order. The choice of the Famicom as the starting point is about as arbitrary as any, but it feels right to me, especially as someone whose primary interest lies in the history of Japanese gaming. The West was on the brink of giving up video games altogether when Nintendo came on the scene and singlehandedly saved the medium, ushering in an era of Japanese dominance of the space that continues today. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to define “pre-modern” and “modern” eras of gaming, with the release of the Famicom as the epoch. I won’t just be playing the games, but revisiting old gaming magazines and media of the era, trying to immerse myself and understand the context for the history as best as possible.
I don’t know how far my time machine will take me. The scope of this project is such that if done according to plan, it would probably take the rest of my life. It’s sobering to take on a task that could take 20 or 30 years, or more, but imagine how cool it would be to say I’ve played every game since the Famicom came out. At time of writing, I’m about to wrap up the year 1985, and it’s already made my regular trips to used game shops more fulfilling. No matter how far we get, my knowledge and understanding of gaming history should be hugely enriched. And through logging my reviews online, maybe I can introduce some things to other people that they may not have looked at otherwise. I feel that despite the fact that the history is so recent and so available, gamers know shockingly little about their own history, and have experienced even less of it. Remakes and remasters have been keeping old titles alive, but also obliterating knowledge by removing those games from their context. Only by playing every game can you really see the medium for what it is: an ongoing dialogue between creators that evolves over time.
This site will be a place for me to write longer essays about things I encounter on this adventure, as well as longer-form reviews about particular games. In particular, I am deeply interested in the history of Japanese RPGs, and I think I would like to write long-form reviews for each game in that genre as we go. I’ll also post things like wrap-up overviews of particular years, stuff I’ve found in the historical gaming press, and maybe even reviews of secondary and tertiary material like movies that popular games of the era were based on.
The individual short-form game log reviews are hosted on the project’s Tumblr account. You can see an overview of the methodology behind the project by clicking on “The Methodology” in the site’s navigation bar.
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