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"You don't understand a game by playing it."

Frank Cifaldi, Video Game History Foundation

The Morgue File is a wiki for materials that give videogames context.

Our aim is to build an archive of information, links and media open to all researchers of videogame history, bringing scattered, difficult-to-find resources together into a single reference. And we need your help to build it!

Who is this for?

• Researchers
• Academics
• Journalists
• YouTubers
• Anyone else interested in the history of videogames

What's with the name?

"A morgue file originally was a collection of paper folders containing old files and notes kept by criminal investigators, as well as old article clippings kept by newspaper reporters, in case they became of later use as a quick reference collection."

definition from Wikipedia

Want to help?

This wiki is still young. Please, join in and help shape this community project! We have a Getting Started guide, and we're open to suggestions.

What belongs here?

If it's relevant to videogames, and it's not made of code, this is probably the place for it. A non-exhaustive list:

• Design documents
• Advertisements
• Trade press
• Newspaper clippings
• Reviews
• Interviews
• Talks
• Histories
• Letters to the editor
• Old messageboard threads
• Cultural ephemera

Sample Collections

Why not take a look at the resources we've gathered for...

• ...the first commercial videogame?
• ...an obscure Dutch first-person shooter?
• ...one of the most ported games of all time?

Or see the list of all 277 games on the wiki.