Interested in playing and writing about a game from the ‘90s? I’m looking for help in my project to write about the history of popular video games in the UK and would love to hear from you! You can contact me on Twitter or at iain.mew@gmail.com and the list of games I’d like articles on is here: Retro mountain. Read on for more background and detail…
For the last year and a half, I have been playing and writing about games which were at some point top of UK sales charts, in chronological order. So far I have written about more than 150 games, from Jet Set Willy in 1984 through to Grand Theft Auto at the beginning of 1998. I’ve also been joined by some wonderful guest writers for posts along the way. I’m fascinated by the different context on history that can be revealed by looking at what was most popular in the UK at the time and not just at what is best remembered now.
A large part of my inspiration for the project was Tom Ewing’s long-running Popular, where he is writing about pop music by journeying through every song to have been UK #1. For the singles chart, you can just go to officialcharts.com and look up what was #1 each week, right back to 1952. For games, there have been charts every week since 1984, but finding them is more complicated and there are many gaps. Even the official online database, which only went back to 2003, has now gone.
Drawing up my list for this project meant a lot of trawling through old websites and scans, and a couple of afternoons in the British Library going through stacks of magazines. It was still clear that I had an incomplete picture, with a lot of it consisting of monthly glimpses at weekly charts, often compiled on an inconsistent basis. The way that the history is so obscured makes it even more fascinating to uncover it.
I recently tweeted about how I would be missing out Final Fantasy VII and got a reply with a link showing that it had been UK #1. From there I found the Retro Game Charts site and discovered that someone else had been taking on the same task of uncovering UK games chart history, and had succeeded in a lot of places that I hadn’t.
I now have a list of more than 50 games confirmed as having been #1 which I have so far missed along the way. They go from the Spectrum through to the PlayStation, and include everything from Flashback to Doom 2 to ten different football games. Writing about them all on top of carrying on forward into 1998 is a daunting prospect, and I have decided to take it as an opportunity to open things up. I have set aside a very small number for myself, and everything left on the list I would like your help with. No writing experience is needed and this is open to anyone at all.
If you want to write about one of the games on the list, email or message me. I’ll add to the spreadsheet if anyone has expressed an interest in a game, but if your heart is set on something where that is already the case, let me know and I will try to work something out. I won’t start assigning anything until Friday (8 May).
If you are writing about a game you can approach it pretty much however you like. It could be about your memories of the game, or your experiences playing it now, the background of its creation, why it succeeded, or a particular aspect of how it works or what it says that you find interesting. So far I have used all those approaches and more, and welcome different ideas. You don’t have to love the game, but if you do it’s also fine to write about that. If you are able to provide screenshots or gifs that would be great, but I am happy to do those otherwise. There is no deadline for completion and I’ll put any submissions up over time to make sure I can properly highlight your work and try to get it the attention it deserves.
Last reminder: you can contact me on iain.mew@gmail.com and the list of games I’m interested in articles on is here: Retro mountain. Thank you for reading and I hope to hear from you soon!