MobyGames - FAQ - Design Goals and Manifesto

What is MobyGames?

MobyGames is the working name of an extremely ambitious project: to meticulously catalog all relevant information - credits, screenshots, formats, and release info - about electronic games (computer, console, and arcade) on a game-by-game basis, and then offer up that information through flexible queries and "data mining". In layman's terms, it's a huge game database.

How about an example of MobyGames? Using Civilization as an example, let's say you want to play more games by the person who wrote Civilization. Just click on the designer (Sid Meier) from the full list of development credits and a new sheet comes up with all of Sid's games on it. You can then click any of those games, and their sheets come up, and the cycle continues.

MobyGames is the world's largest and most flexible electronic game documentation project in existence. And best of all, it's added to, rated, and reviewed by you -- the gaming public. MobyGames is, literally, built by gamers.

What are MobyGames' main design goals?

MobyGames' main design goals are:

• To accurately record all relevant information about a game, including (but not limited to): system requirements; sound/video/input devices supported; game creators (programmers, graphic artists, musicians, etc.); publisher; and so on
• To allow anyone to easily retrieve the information -- including complex queries that can span multiple genres, time periods, system requirements, etc.
• To open up the database to multiple contributors
• To rate (and optionally review at greater length) each game in the database, and allow multiple ratings by different people for accuracy

What gaming platforms and time periods are covered by MobyGames?

During our first two years of operation, MobyGames concentrated on PC platforms exclusively (booters, DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x/NT/2000, and Linux). This was an effort to get the MobyGames database populated as quickly as possible and happened to be the platform we were the most familar with. But on our 2nd birthday, we officially implemented a multi-platform codebase and added modern console platforms as proof of concept (PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, and Nintendo 64). Over the years we have added Intellivision, Vectrex, Xbox, Colecovision, Atari 2600, TI 99/4A, Neo Geo, GameCube, Jaguar and many others - including the long-awaited Arcade format in 2014. As MobyGames matures and grows, we will add additional platforms both modern and classic.