vghistory

@vghistory nfaq (not frequently asked questions, which means never)

who are you?

see: @moshboy (x handle)

i'm just a human that is more interested in the culture and imagery surrounding videogames then actually playing the videogames themselves. i was previously involved in the altgames/indie games communities. my curation in that community has been featured on kotaku, ign and upvoted on reddit among other things. for complicated reasons that i will not bother going into, i don't do that stuff anymore. i was involved for many years but to put it simply, i lost my spark.

what is @vghistory?

the vg in vghistory obviously stands for videogames. the feed exists to discover things about videogames and videogame culture from decades past that i did not know about. i used to run this feed on twitter but since elon has successfully speedrun making twitter/x a dumpster fire, i am now exclusively on bluesky (and mastodon).

what does @vghistory feature?

i feature whatever interests me at the time, which is why some of the posts wind up popular and some don't.

there are a lot of videogame history feeds that are very hyperfocused on one area of videogames or hyperfocused on popular videogames. while i have been informed and influenced by some of those feeds, i felt that if i made the feed too hyperfocused, i would get bored, which is why it occasionally deviates into areas such as internet or tech history or features non-videogame related print ads that were featured in old videogame magazines. i try to limit the feed as little as possible.

the feed is a mishmash of other feeds that i am aware of. the things i feature could be anything related to videogame history, although i tend to gravitate towards lesser known and left of field quirky stuff. the tweets range from exploring the beauty of aesthetics of old systems and magazines to tweets that could possibly be construed as shitposts to tweets that could be seen as being political or topical to current events and tweets that hold up a mirror to industry practices. nothing is stated implicitly. people can interpret the feed however they like.

it's a chaotic feed which i'm sure has some formatting mistakes and irregularities. however, i do try to keep the information in the tweets as accurate as possible.

do you run any other feeds?

i previously ran 2 other sparodic feeds on twitter: @shades_in_vgs (featuring characters from videogames wearing shades) and @c_ngrat_lations (featuring congratulation screens from videogames). since i refuse to support a corrupt billionaire that only wants to bend the world for his own whims, they are inactive (and i have no immediate plans to resuscitate them on bluesky or mastodon).

i want to start a similar feed. how would i go about this?

my main sources are mobygames.com and archive.org but there are countless websites that populate the world wide web that have archived information about various systems and games. never underestimate google (as bad as it is).

my only other pieces of advice would be source your posts (most feeds don't) and use alt text (it takes some work to get used to doing this but becomes second nature if you keep at it).

i like @vghistory. can i support you?

you can support me by following me and boosting the shit you like but you can also support me by donating to my ko-fi or paypal (links below):

paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=3XR45CYPR9EAS
https://ko-fi.com/moshboy/

believe it or not, i sink a good deal of time into @vg_history as it requires trawling a lot of material to find things that i think are interesting enough to post. while it will always be free, just like anyone else, i have bills to pay so any $$ helps. having said this, i understand how hard times are and that a lot of folks are doing it tough so i totally get it if folks can't or don't want to donate.

i don't get many donations so i *really* appreciate anyone that does. every dollar is super appreciated. and it is also another form of validation for the work that i do.

can i use the stuff from your feed?

the material i post isn't mine insofar as it's all already on the world wide web waiting for people to discover it. however, if you do decide to use it and @vghistory was the first place you discovered the material you would like to use, credit would be appreciated just as i include source links in as many posts as i am able to. i won't hold it against you if you don't.