RGB Classic Games Forum

MrFlibble wrote:Sorry to hear you've got such a tight schedule!

DOSGuy wrote:But how much time does it really take to add a game to the site? I thought it might be interesting to describe the process of adding a game to the site, from beginning to end.

After I find a game that I feel deserves to be on the site, I search the internet and try to find a copy of every version of that game. If I can't find every version on the current internet, I sometimes have to use archive.org's Wayback Machine to see if I can find the files I need from webpages that no longer exist. When I have a copy of as many versions as I can find, I have to check each archive and make sure that no files were added, removed, or modified. Finding an original, unaltered archive is sometimes impossible.

Once I have all of the files, I have to play the game extensively. The game has to be played so that I can give a fair and thorough review, but that's only a small part of it. I need to take a screenshot of each game, and that's usually the most difficult part of the process. I have to play the game extensively to decide what I want to capture. I want a screenshot that captures the feel of the game, but also something that's visually interesting. I'm such a perfectionist about this that I have to play each game in DOSBox (even the Win9x games) and record a video in DOSBox's lossless ZMBV format. Then I watch the video to find the location and action that I want to use for the screenshot, and when I get to a part that I like, I advance the video a frame at a time until I find the frame that I like best. Yes, I really do search individual frames to get the exact screenshot that I want.

I try to write the review based mostly on my experience of playing the game, but there are always interesting facts that you can't learn from playtesting alone, so I often read the Wikipedia article about the game to see if I've missed any important background information, or anything that makes the game memorable or unique.

Finally, I have to research whether or not the game is still for sale, which means trying to find the author's website, either on the current internet or from the past. If a game wasn't originally freeware, I try to find contact information for the copyright holder so that I can ask about a freeware release. Just this morning, I phoned the father of a programmer for a classic game in order to ask for a phone number for his son so that I could ask about a freeware release. He was amazed that I was able to track him down, but adding to the difficulty was the fact that neither he nor his father speak English, and I don't speak French!

Between searching for copies of every version of a game, playing it, recording a video and playing it back to find the perfect screenshot, searching for and hopefully contacting the author, it usually takes a minimum of 6 hours to add a game to the site, and very often takes all day. I work 5 days a week, so the best case scenario is that I add two games a week on Saturdays and Sundays, and that's if I'm not busy working on the house or buying things for the house, or just taking care of the people who live in the house. So that's where the goal of 100 games a year comes from, but it's not easy to achieve.

DOSGuy wrote:I remember playing Age of Empires non-stop for two days when I was adding it to the site

leilei wrote:Probably another abandonware-influenced kid. A lot of people misinform old games being free thanks to all that ill irresponsibility on the internet displacing legal statuses.

leilei wrote:The closest-to-free release Claw ever had was a RealArcade trial in 2000 in which the whole game had its audio MP3 compressed for a small web download

MrFlibble wrote:Initially I thought that RealArcade was a game compilation (like the Microsoft Arcade Something releases), but turns out it's some online gaming service.