The blog has evolved over the years since I posted my original introduction here.
When I started, this was just about me wanting to play every video game, in chronological order, and write about my experiences in a similar way to the blogs and YouTube channels that inspired me. I also thought that it would be fun to review each game, give it a score, and throw it on a giant spreadsheet I called "The World's Biggest Video Game Tier List." I even added a YouTube channel at the start of 2025, so that we could all see the games I played in action, as a complementary piece.
At the time of writing this new channel introduction - June 2026 - the blog is in a somewhat different place. My writing has evolved, and the YouTube channel especially, has evolved. I'm now doing voiced content and adding in more detail to the videos, to match the blog. Where this has left me is in a state of dissatisfaction with the older posts and videos. The level of detail isn't matching what I'm doing now, and I find need to bring everything up to speed. That's why I'm doing a "soft reboot" of Obsessive Gaming Chronology, and going back to the beginning.
Here's what OGC is about now:
Not only am I playing every video game ever made in chronological order, but I'm also telling the story of each game as I go. The people, places and circumstances that made each game, and how they all fit into the larger canvas of video game history. The chronicles of video game history, if you like. I'm still doing personal reviews and scores of each game (including the ones I skipped over at the start), and chucking them all into "The World's Biggest Video Game Tier List" for fun, but that's not the focus for me anymore - the history is. Telling stories is. I've found that that's what I really love doing, is telling the stories of how the games were made.
On top of this, I've also expanded into doing articles on the broader world of games - pen & paper, logic games and board games, etc., and how they influenced video games. Going forward, I also want to do articles on individual people and companies from the video game industry. Kind of like the Magnavox Odyssey and PLATO articles - those were great fun (and hard work) to do, and they add much, I think, to the overall canvas of video game history that I'm trying to paint here.
I'm leaving up the old introduction for the sake of comparison, so that you can see where I started, and where I am now. It's good in that it tells my story; of what influenced me to start the blog in the first place.
Anyway, that's where we're at now. Thanks for reading, and I hope you stick around for the wild ride that is Obsessive Gaming Chronology: the chronicles of video game history - game by game, year by year.
God bless,
The Chronologist, June 2026.
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Well, I'm glad you asked.
To make things simple: I'm an Australian university student [ed. former uni student, now content creator and general nerd] with a mildly obsessive interest in history and video games twice my age.
And, before you ask: yes, Australia is a real place and no, we don't ride kangaroos to work. We actually ride emus.
For many years now my interests in history and gaming have intermingled, dragging me further into the annals of video game history. I always loved older games, growing up first with a NES, then SNES, then expanding into many consoles throughout my teenage years. But I often gravitated towards classic games, much more so as I got older (especially after chucking in multiplayer online FPS, devourer of time and controllers). I felt like I missed out on many classic titles due to my youth; never getting to experience the excitement of the arcade, and being too young to appreciate the games I did grow up with.
So, as an adult, I started going backwards – inspired by YouTube gaming channels that covered mostly retro gaming – into the backlog to discover all I missed out on. I started around the NES era, with games available on the Wii U Virtual Console and JRPGs from that era I could emulate. One fateful day I discovered the Atari Vault on Steam, and internally debated with myself on the idea of buying it out of sheer curiosity.
"These games are so old! Look at the graphics! I like old, but not that old! There's no way I would enjoy them, surely?" I thought to myself. Yet my curiosity got the better of me, and I purchased the collection and dived into Atari's greatest hits from the 70s and early 80s.
And I loved them.
It became an obsession for me, discovering a whole world I knew nothing about (other than Pong and Asteroids, of course) and finding a whole new array of classic games to enjoy. Adventure, Basketball, Superman, Battlezone, Night Driver, these are just some of the games that left a lasting impression on me. Then, as my love of history and curiosity around origins was blossoming at the same time, I became fascinated with the concept of the origins of video games. What was the first game? I had to know. I started diving into the history of the industry, discovering all these consoles and home computers I had never heard of, seminal arcade games, mainframes and, eventually, the beginning of the arcade and the earliest video games from the 1950s and 60s.
It was quite overwhelming, yet I wanted to try as many of these games as I could, and be as comprehensive as I could be. How could I organise such a monolithic task? In the end, I opted to compile everything into a single spreadsheet, ordered chronologically and by platform, using the year-by-year listings at MobyGames and Gaming-History (formerly Arcade-History) as my roadmap. I made it a quest to explore as much as I could. Later I also began adding ratings and rankings to each game to help summarise my thoughts on them.
Coming to today, that quest continues (and has been restarted several times), and my increased interest in writing (thanks much in part to university) has led me to here: blogging. I have dabbled in review writing over past year, but it seems less fun to keep it all to myself, so I decided, after being inspired by blogs such as CRPG Addict and Data Driven Gamer, that this is an ideal format for documenting my exploration of this wonderful hobby.
Well, that was a much larger introduction than I'd anticipated. But I digress, welcome to the quest, I hope you'll come along for the ride.
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