Retro Gaming Australia

Retro Gaming Australia has jumped on the latest social media bandwagon – Instagram!

We’ll be publishing photos of items from our collection on a regular basis, and whatever other doofy crap we uncover along the way.

You can find our Instagram page here

Retro Gaming Australia had a bumper year in 2012. Traffic is way up and we’ve developed a solid following on social media, be it Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. We launched the Australian Gaming Database beta in March to a good response, but that project will continue to develop over time.

In spite of the success we’ve had, I always feel like we can be doing more. The forums, for instance, were suffering from the blight of spammers – which we’ve now fixed, but participation isn’t quite what we’d like, particularly when compared to the social media platforms. We missed several Video Game Ad of the Day postings – something I tried to rectify, but fell short of. Our editorial content, particularly our features, has not been quite as diverse or plentiful as I had planned. Community participation in the AGDB is non-existent, and my enthusiasm for that project has declined.

I feel that we are still headed in the right direction, but some enhancements are required.

Our focus in 2013 will be on improving our editorial content. Our Introduction features have done well, and we will continue to do them, however, we will be refining how we cover the actual games. Rather than just an Essentials or hidden gems article with a couple of paragraphs on a game here or there, we want to cover individual games in a greater depth, then bring them all together. We want the right balance of classic, popular games and obscure games you might not have heard of, and we want you to come out of these articles knowing a lot more about the game than when you came in. People have complained about my editorials in the past, telling me that they could read everything on Wikipedia – well, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say that Wikipedia should never be a primary resource for anything, and their video game coverage outside of anything popular is utterly abysmal.

We also want to leverage the multimedia options being a website enables us to use – in other words, more video. The capture set up we have now is not ideal – it produces the bare minimum result we need. I am planning on implementing a video capture set up that will properly capture gameplay footage at its native 240p and 288p resolutions. We will be assessing the feasibility of posting the video on RGA itself as well as YouTube, so videos can be enjoyed in their full 50fps/60fps glory. Of course this requires new and expensive equipment which will take us some time to acquire – specialist capture equipment, extra console hardware, RGB modifications and so on. This is not a cash grab however – RGA will be funding the new equipment purchases itself. We will continue posting Retro Gaming Theatre videos, but hope to add some more video series to our cache later in the year.

We want to continue to expand throughout the year. While RGA’s content is currently created just by myself and Charly, we want to invite all of you to contribute to the site, be it through editorial content, art, or some other creative outlet. If you’re a budding PHP developer and want to expand your portfolio a bit, we’d be happy to allow you to experiment with designs on our site. I am a little concerned that the Australia in the site’s name is limiting our audience – the Australian community has been very supportive of us, but I continue to wonder if we’d have more success targeting the global retro gaming audience.

It wouldn’t be an RGA update without the announcement of some ridiculously ambitious project.

Over the past 18 months, the Video Game Ad of the Day feature has been one of the most popular things on RGA. However, Video Game Ad of the Day was only part of a grander vision that has been in the works for over two years. See, there were two mythical projects that began in the early days of RGA – Project A and B. A was the AGDB, released into beta in March 2012. B is what I’ve dubbed the Video Game Advertising Archive, or VGADA.

Video Game Ad of the Day was basically phase 1 on the project – gauging interest from the audience to see if they liked looking at old gaming ads. We’ve got too many ads to feature on Ad of the Day; 13,000 in fact, which at the current pace would take 34 years to post, not-withstanding the fact that current and future generations of consoles would be considered “retro” by then, and that not all games are worthy of being posted. VGADA is going to be an archive of all of the video game ads I’ve ever found. Video Game Ad of the Day will continue, featuring ads that you can see on the archive.

So when will VGADA launch? There are some logistics to figure out with regard to multiplatform games, but I anticipate the site launch in its first form…now.

What, you don’t like the N-Gage? Look for the rest of the systems to join VGADA throughout January.

My personal favourite part of the Australian Gaming Database (which we launched yesterday) is the magazine section, where we focus on detailing the history of video game magazines in Australia.

Over the last couple of months, you may recall that we put out a call for anyone with collections of Australian magazines to provide cover scans for us to help us get as many covers together as we could. We’re over halfway towards having a full set (with a hundred or so sitting on my hard drive waiting to be uploaded), so I thought it’d be a good time to show off what we have so far, and publicly thank those who have contributed.

A special thanks goes out to Anthony Tran, Jason New, KiwiArcader and John K, who all took time out to provide scans.

Atomic MPC
Australian 360
Australian Commodore and Amiga Review
Australian GamePro
Australian Station
Cube Australia
Cut Throat Cheatz
Edge (Australian edition)
Games TM (Australian edition)
GameStar
Hyper
Megazone
N64 Gamer
Nintendo Gamer
Nintendo Magazine System
Nintendo: The Official Magazine
Official Australian PlayStation Magazine
Official Australian Xbox Magazine
Official PlayStation 2 Magazine Australia (ACP Edition)
Official PlayStation 2 Magazine Australia (Derwent Howard Edition)
Official PlayStation Magazine – Australia
Official Xbox 360 Magazine Australia
PC Games
PC Games Addict
PC Powerplay
PlayStation World
Ultimate Nintendo Magazine

There are still many covers out there which we do not have. If you wish to contribute to the cause, please do not hesistate to contact me.

One of the most exciting features we’ve been working on at Retro Gaming Australia launches today. After two years of work, we are proud to announce that our wiki, the Australian Gaming Database, is now accessible to the public.

The Australian Gaming Database is our attempt to catalogue the history of video gaming in Australia. You will find pages for
– Every console, computer and handheld released in Australia
– Every video and computer game magazine produced in Australia, with cover galleries
– Every video and computer game television programme produced in Australia
– Every video game developer based in Australia
– Every video game developed in Australia, including ones that were never released
– Publishers, distributors and other major companies involved in gaming in Australia
– Key people responsible for the development of the industry in Australia
– Major issues such as censorship
– Court cases involving video game companies

Here are a few pages we recommend looking at to start
– Beam Software
– Megazone
– The Zone
– Star Wars
– Nintendo Entertainment System

Please be aware that the AGDB is still in a beta state. We’ve been working on this project behind the scenes for a long time, and were itching to show it off and get some feedback. Originally we wanted to launch 18 months ago, but the release date kept slipping as our plans got more grandiose. Much of the categorisation needs to be formalised, and a good chunk of the pages are not yet complete.

Many pages are still incomplete, but if you feel like you have something to contribute, you can request an account. Open account registration is not available at this stage since we don’t want to deal with wiki spammers and vandals.

Retro Gaming Australia is looking for a few good people to help take it to the next level. Due to new professional obligations, the time I am able to dedicate to RGA is going to be reduced but with your help we can turn the site into something truly special.

We need people to occupy the following roles

– News writers
– Feature writers
– Archivists
– Community managers

All roles are currently volunteer (i.e. unpaid) positions. We do not require writers to be based in Australia, or even focus solely on Australian content.
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A couple of months ago I mentioned that I was working on two major projects for the site that would be ready in the first quarter of this year. Of course, neither of these projects actually eventuated by the end of March. One is a long way from being ready to launch in a form I am happy with. The other…I had no idea really what to do with it. Fortunately, inspiration struck and I found a form for the project that I am happy with.

From Sunday, Retro Gaming Australia will be updating daily with a new feature called the Video Game Ad of the Day. Each day, you will see an advertisement from a classic video game appear on the site. Some other sites post ads, but they are decidedly US centric (probably because US mags in the 90s had 150 pages of ads an issue – not exaggerating). In order to be different, we will be posting ads not only from the US, but from countries across the world. We’ve got ads from Australia, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Russia, South Africa and more. These posts would not be possible without the work of individuals from Out of Print Archive and Retromags who work painstakingly hard on preserving classic video game magazines, so please grace them with your traffic.

So, tune in daily, check out the new ad and link it to everybody you know!

We’re proud to announce that we’ve added a new section to Retro Gaming Australia today – TV commercials! We’ve rummaged around the Internet and scrapped together a small collection of commercials which aired on Australian television between the 1970s and 2005. We’ve got ads ranging from the well known Tim Ferguson Nintendo 64 ads to the obscure John Sands Sega SC-3000. The links currently redirect you to our Youtube channel – we’ll be reviewing this in the future, but it works fine for now.

We’ll be adding to this collection over time, so if you’ve got something that we don’t have here, please drop us a line at admin@thisurl.com

You can access our commercial library here.

Today sees the launch of Retro Gaming Australia’s first major new feature: the Australian Video Game Magazine Score Archive. The list currently contains over 4,000 review scores awarded by popular Australian computer and video games magazines such as Megazone, Hyper, PC Powerplay, N64 Gamer and the Official PlayStation Magazines.

In the Australian Video Game Magazine Score Archive you can search for the review scores for your favourite games, or witness infamous faux pas from our friends in the gaming press. Did you know Hyper gave the illustrious Alien Soldier a mere 50? Or that Shaq Fu scored a respectable 77? What about the ridiculous 101% awarded to Perfect Dark in N64 Gamer? You’ll find it all in here.

The Australian Video Game Magazine Score Archive is currently in an alpha state, but fully browsable. Specific entries can be found using the search function of your browser. For answers to common questions about the list, please click the more link. (continue reading…)