Chris Chapman @retrohistories@digipres.club

Heya, I'm Chris, an amateur game historian.

I run a community wiki for game research materials (https://morguefile.wiki/), occasionally upload new things to the Archive (https://archive.org/details/@trioptimum), have an 8+TB hoard of old game magazines I'm slowly indexing (not online), and make mini-documentaries about interesting stories from game history (https://www.youtube.com/user/trioptimumuk).

Currently working on a video about the turbulent development of Vampire: Bloodlines.

Electronic Gaming Monthly interviews Ray Liotta (February 2003).

At this rate (gigabytes of new magazine scans uploaded to archive.org every day), this collection’s definitely breaking the 10TB barrier before the end of the year.

Current stats: 352 titles, 15,000 issues, 4.4 million pages. 30GB of sqlite3. 6.62TB of magazines; another 3TB awaiting processing.

0 good reasons to spend this many hours doing this, haha

While I’m doing my day job, PC is handling today’s index ingests: RUN (US), PlayStation Official Magazine (UK), Re:Play (RU), Beep! MegaDrive (JP)

Scripts are chewing slowly through issues of The PlayStation (ザ・プレイステーション).

It was a popular and long-running publication in Japan, published weekly at its peak, but it’s not well preserved; I’ve only found 13 issues of 400 (all on the Internet Archive).

Probably been 20 years since I’ve worked to Vangelis (I wrote part of my PhD thesis to it), an omission I shall rectify today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX30BN_2cZ4

Today’s users will never know the pain of finding every parody mp3 tagged ‘Weird Al’, especially tracks audibly not by Weird Al.

Vangelis was credited in the 'special thanks' section for Sierra's strategy classic Homeworld (1999), alongside some of the team's other influences.

Wish I could figure out a way to tap into the well of creative energy I somehow did when I made four videos (the Controversies series; all of them pretty good, IMO) in four months back in 2018.

I’ve been working on this one thing for so long now, and put so much time and money into it, that I’m starting to doubt both my ability and my desire to finish. Which is not a healthy relationship to have with a project.

Gotta keep reminding myself it’s just a YouTube video.

Why do I end up rewriting and rerecording lines for this Bloodlines video every time I open it?

When it's finished it's going to have VO recorded on, like, seven separate occasions in three separate calendar years. I'm not being figurative, that's the literal fact of it.

It’s a good day to import a bunch of PC magazines to the index, including the full 17-issue run of PC Life (ES, 2005–6) and new scans of random issues of PC Accelerator and PC Gamer (US), PC Format (UK) and PC Action (DE). Also throwing in some Game Day (CN) for good measure.

Today I learned that:
• Italy got its own version of Zzap!64
• unlike the original, it was multiplatform
• they're all scanned https://archive.org/details/zzap-italia

Magnus continuing to OCR/ingest Rev4 (FR) along with a handful of upgraded scans of Zzap!64 (UK).

JDownloader grabbing the new scans of 64Dream (JP) from Ozidual on archive.org along with this user’s uploads of Boot and a few other PC mags: https://archive.org/details/@ckeck

Still choosing to ignore the inconvenient reality that I’m consistently downloading magazines way faster than I can do anything with them — even put them into folders. My ‘incoming’ directory has 1045 items in it…

Whenever I’m struggling or stressed (when I’ve been sleeping as badly as I have been this last week, for instance) the first thing I jettison is the effort to maintain an online presence. I drop off Discord, Twitter, Mastodon until I’m doing better.

The timing’s often atrocious, but I’m a natural introvert and that’s the mode I revert to when I don’t have the spoons. I envy those for whom it’s effortless.

If I ever do/have done this to you and kept you hanging for a response, sorry!