VGCollect Forum

General and Gaming => General => Topic started by: disgaeniac on August 12, 2013, 04:43:09 pm

Title: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: disgaeniac on August 12, 2013, 04:43:09 pm: The "What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been" Topic/Thread:

Just an idea for a simple thread about how each of us found our way/ended up here at VGCollect...

My answer's simple enough (and has been stated before) - I was lucky enough to see one of Jobocan's posts on a G*Faqs' Board (iirc, the "PS3" one) and click-on his link (in his sig) to here.

How about the rest of you all?
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: foxhack on August 12, 2013, 04:47:14 pm: Some dork made a post at DigitalPress about this site. I came here and started throwing out demands and suggestions, and I guess they found me bossy enough to make me part of the staff. :P
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: desocietas on August 12, 2013, 04:59:55 pm: I was getting antsy about getting my game collection organized, especially for the sake of keeping track of my backlog, so I started looking for ways to manage my collection. After being disappointed with Backloggery (why, oh why, would users want to "catalog" each and every one of their games when they knowingly know that plenty of other people have already typed in the same information?), I'm pretty sure I came across VGC in a Google search and was pleasantly surprised at the clean look and the open community.

I never got that backlog feature I whined about back then ;) but the system here is great, and the community is still awesome. I'm sure it's 'caused my collecting habits to go through the roof, and I've got more tabletop gaming experience under my belt thanks to Scott... been a fun ride so far.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: pacpix on August 12, 2013, 05:00:31 pm: Tpugmire mentioned it in a thread on Atariage (http://atariage.com/forums/topic/186283-tracking-your-collection/page__hl__%20vgcollectAtariage"). I fell in love with the site and really like the forum community so I decided to stay.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: redblaze57 on August 12, 2013, 05:00:45 pm: I was over on the cover project and saw the little image of someones collection in their signature, my collection was starting to really grow and wanted to use something other than notepad
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: soera on August 12, 2013, 05:56:58 pm: I used to go to another collection site (For the life of me, I cant remember what it was called. It was really cool image wise but thats all it had was images). Darko mentioned this place to me and once I joined, I was asked to stay cause of my cool factor so I figured what the hell, I could let others soak in my coolness.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: elraiser on August 12, 2013, 06:04:14 pm: I got hooked by watching a video by a youtuber called Atarileaf
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: disgaeniac on August 12, 2013, 06:06:26 pm: Quote from: soera on August 12, 2013, 05:56:58 pm
Darko mentioned this place to me and once I joined, I was asked to stay cause of my cool factor so I figured what the hell, I could let others *marinate* in my coolness.

Gotta' get that daily "fix" of mine ;)
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: jobocan on August 12, 2013, 06:18:06 pm: Quote from: disgaeniac on August 12, 2013, 04:43:09 pm
My answer's simple enough (and has been stated before) - I was lucky enough to see one of Jobocan's posts on a G*Faqs' Board (iirc, the "PS3" one) and click-on his link (in his sig) to here.

You saw me on the PS3 board? Man, that must have been a really hateful post then, I DESPISE that board (even though the PS3 is my favorite 7th gen console), surprised you even wanted to check the site after that :P

As for me, I used to use a site called Playfire to track my collection and such, but the site kinda sucked, and got even WORSE when it became a crappy achievement aggregation site rather than a collection site (they removed the whole collection feature at some point). So I went to google and looked for a collection site and came along this one. It was actually not too long after it started up its beta IIRC.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: burningdoom on August 12, 2013, 07:03:48 pm: I saw a collection widget in somebody's signature over at GameSpot.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: thelung on August 12, 2013, 08:05:46 pm: I thought this was going to be a Grateful Dead thread :'(

I was looking for a way to keep track of my collection. I got mad at NA's deal they have cause I spent a lot of time clicking boxes and right before I clicked send the site failed so all that work was lost. I found it from Google. Never really noticed the link in peoples post over on NA till after I put it in mine.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: turf on August 12, 2013, 08:49:08 pm: I was trying to find an app on the android marketplace and stumbled across a buggy little thing called "VGCollect". But what the hell, it's free. The thing kept redirecting me to the support thread on this forum.
Well, I ended up staying. You're welcome.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: varkias on August 12, 2013, 10:38:05 pm: I was researching building my own online database for Sega Saturn, like a simple/cleaner version of Satakore.com. Google led me straight here, so I grabbed my shovel!
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: atariboy on August 12, 2013, 11:00:48 pm: Like Foxhack I saw the post over at DigitalPress, I checked it out thought it was just what I was looking for and begun editing entries. They must've liked what I was doing cause they made me an administrator. ;D
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: stethebubble on August 13, 2013, 12:23:47 pm: by chance.
i needed somewhere to add my collection so i knew what i had. i looked at several and thought this was the best.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: tpugmire on August 13, 2013, 04:30:23 pm: 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.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: disgaeniac on August 13, 2013, 04:32:24 pm: Quote from: tpugmire on August 13, 2013, 04:30:23 pm
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" ;)
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: scott on August 13, 2013, 04:35:28 pm: 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!
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: jcalder8 on August 13, 2013, 05:44:05 pm: Foxhack posted about it on DP so I checked it out and joined
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: soera on August 13, 2013, 07:21:12 pm: Quote from: disgaeniac on August 13, 2013, 04:32:24 pm
Quote from: tpugmire on August 13, 2013, 04:30:23 pm
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!
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: sin2beta on August 13, 2013, 11:03:26 pm: 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.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: Oheao on August 13, 2013, 11:52:07 pm: I wasn't satisfied with VGChartz's way of listing your game collection, so I searched Google and found this.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: darko on August 14, 2013, 01:14:51 am: 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.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: matt on August 14, 2013, 09:54:27 am: Quote from: scott on August 13, 2013, 04:35:28 pm
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.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: blipcs76 on August 15, 2013, 10:31:33 am: 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.
Title: Re: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...
Post by: disgaeniac on August 15, 2013, 11:28:45 am: Quote from: blipcs76 on August 15, 2013, 10:31:33 am
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?