What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...

[tpugmire]

I saw the same post on digitalpress, so I checked it out. I started going through the database and making huge lists of duplicate entries. I guess Matt liked what I was doing and put me on the payroll.  Speaking of which, I haven't actually gotten paid yet, unless we can put a dollar amount on Soera's coolness factor.

[disgaeniac]

I saw the same post on digitalpress, so I checked it out. I started going through the database and making huge lists of duplicate entries. I guess Matt liked what I was doing and put me on the payroll.  Speaking of which, I haven't actually gotten paid yet, unless we can put a dollar amount on Soera's coolness factor.

"Priceless"   

[scott]

One of my best friends owns the place. I've been here since the beginning. I've watched the site grow from a little add-on idea on our old website into a full-fledged and thought out self contained database of awesomeness!

[jcalder8]

Foxhack posted about it on DP so I checked it out and joined

[soera]

I saw the same post on digitalpress, so I checked it out. I started going through the database and making huge lists of duplicate entries. I guess Matt liked what I was doing and put me on the payroll.  Speaking of which, I haven't actually gotten paid yet, unless we can put a dollar amount on Soera's coolness factor.

"Priceless"   

I agree!

[sin2beta]

I used to hang out on the UK game collecting site, RetroCollect. It's a great site, but everything in their database was PAL. One time out of frustration, I went to google to see if there was the same thing with an NTSC-U bias. And this was the site I found.

[Oheao]

I wasn't satisfied with VGChartz's way of listing your game collection, so I searched Google and found this.

[darko]

I was also one of the first to migrate here from DigitPress. I wasn't a huge contributor to anything on there anyway - so I decided what the hell? I put a ton of effort into getting my collection up back in the day (back when 90% of what I had needed adding). It's been great so far. I might have even pulled a few other collectors here over the years.

[matt]

One of my best friends owns the place. I've been here since the beginning. I've watched the site grow from a little add-on idea on our old website into a full-fledged and thought out self contained database of awesomeness!

To expand on this...

An abridged history of VGCollect.com

VGCollect really started about 12 years ago. I was a young college student who worked part time at a Software Etc. who also was big into collection anything Sega and Nintendo. I was always interested in software development and was working towards my CS degree. I wanted to get into web development and actually registered icollectvideogames.com. I spent a few months working on it but not really being a web developer, I quickly gave up. The thought of having a database of EVERY game EVER published was frightening. That project was quickly abandoned.

Fast forward a few years and I decided to start a little video game news site over at digitalsomething.com. DS grew and grew and for a short period of time, we actually felt like we were a part of the gaming journalism community. Hell...I got to go and cover E3.  At one point I added MySpace-like user profiles. Users could build out a list of games they were playing based off a staff created database. This feature was never full baked and around this time, maintaining DS became too much work and we all but abandoned it.

Shortly after DS fell apart, I copied over our games database and began working on VGCollect. I felt like I had a good idea and was also completely unsatisfied with any of the other options out there.  I was also confident enough in my development skills to no longer fear the large data set. I created a few accounts for friends and posted on both digitpress and reddit for testers. Most people were pessimistic at first  (remember kids - anonymous internet people are always assholes) but that quickly changed after they saw my dedication to making it simple and accurate. The rest is history!

Fun fact, the games table in our database is actually still called "ds_games", as it is the same database that ran the games section of Digital Something.

[blipcs76]

I had tried several different collection management sites and just never really liked any of them.  They were either clunky, lacked features or you had to pay for them.  Somehow I stumbled across VGCollect and it was exactly what I was looking for.  I referred one of my NES collecting buddies over here too when he asked about managing your collection online.

[disgaeniac]

I referred one of my NES collecting buddies over here too when he asked about managing your collection online.

Did they come here/are they still around?