It's been a tumultuous, momentous, monumental year. I'm not going to recap the events of my personal life in this post. This one is just for covering my video game history + preservation work.
Given everything else that was going on in my life this year, I'm really proud of what I accomplished. This has been a real breakthrough year in terms of being satisfied with my output and in getting recognition for it. I didn't get as much done as I wanted (because I never do), but I'm happy with what I did put out.
(I'm not going to get into 2024 plans in this post. I'll cover those next weekend.)
The PlayStation Experiment
I started working on the first episode of The PlayStation Experiment in the back half of 2022, and it was released on January 31st. Since then, it's gotten over 8,000 views on YouTube and a largely positive reception. It was a hugely ambitious project that resulted in a nearly two hour long video. I had only made a few shorter videos before this, so it was a huge learning experience. I'm really proud that this turned out as well as it did.
After that, I started working on the first episode of the Saturn companion series, Saturn Side, and the website for the broader PlayStation Experiment project. The debut episode of Saturn Side was released on July 11th and ended up being slightly longer than even the first episode of PlayStation Experiment.
I used Saturn Side as a canvas to refine the style I began with PlayStation Experiment, getting more ambitious with video production and going deeper into history and analysis in the scripts. It's my favorite single thing that I've done this year, and I'm really hugely proud of it. The reception was really positive from everyone who saw it, but it landed at a weird time when Twitter was collapsing and alternatives hadn't quite taken off yet, so it didn't do the same numbers as PlayStation Experiment.
I've been working on PlayStation Experiment 2 and actually have quite a bit of it done at this point. I'm planning on this one being shorter than the previous videos and focusing on in-depth coverage of the four games that came out right after the PlayStation's Japanese launch.
The videos are my favorite thing I've been working on, and I have big plans going forward that I'll write more about soon.
Game Mag Print Ads
I've been slowly plugging away on Game Mag Print Ads this year. I consider it a long-term project that I continually revisit and expand/improve on every year.
I added somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-200 ads. Not a huge amount, but I try to add a new batch every time I want to throw on a podcast or stream in the background and browse through some old magazines.
I also did quite a bit of cleanup of the backend that manages Game Mag Print Ads, including expanding the service to Bluesky. The biggest one for me, although it had no impact on the actual posts, was renaming the image files in a consistent way that will make it a lot easier to maintain going forward. This is going to be crucial to my more ambitious future plans to build out an online museum of video game print ads.
Rando Chrontendo
I ended up doing a lot more than you might suspect on Rando Chrontendo this year. As with Game Mag Print Ads, it was extended to Bluesky. I also added the alt text with episode name and timestamp to make it easier for folks to look up the context of a particular screenshot. Plus, I threw in Chronsega and Chronturbo episodes for good measure.
Of all my ongoing projects, Rando Chrontendo is the one that's had the weirdest and most unexpected life. It was a shitpost idea I put together in an afternoon, but a lot more people than I ever expected have really vibed with it.
Preservation
Preservation is always a secondary thing for me that I do alongside other projects, but I like to focus on a few special areas every year that have been neglected in the preservation space. This year it's been Byron Preiss Multimedia's 21st Century Classics, a series of Windows 3.1-era multimedia CD-ROMs covering literary classics. I've archived two of three so far: Slaughterhouse-Five: The Multimedia Experience and Trouble Is My Business: The Raymond Chandler Library. The third and final one will be coming early in 2024. I have some other nebulous plans for next year as well, so I'm sure there will be more to come.
Anyway, all in all not bad!
