Database of games developers

[Molloy]

If you look at a site like IMDB it's pretty easy to see what people worked on what films. Yes, for the incredibly anal fanboys it mightn't be 100% accurate but it's pretty damned close.

Mobygames trys to be like IMDB but it's absolutely woefully inaccurate. It's so full of incorrect information you wouldn't know where to begin correcting it.

A friend (benstylus) and I tried transcribing game credits for Mega Drive games for a while. There's an example of what we've got.

Frankly, I'd love to see all these misconceptions ironed out. I read on quite a few websites that the people behind Castlevania IV were the people who founded Treasure. That turned out to be complete bull****. You'll see alot of confustion surrounding the Shining Force games too; Camelot, Climax, Sonic Co. It's a complicated relationship.

I'd love to see questions answered connected with Gunners Heaven.

Who'd have known that Strider got a spiritual successor with a company other than Capcom. The name of the company is gone out of my head. Another small arcade publisher called Marshall or something.. read about it on Insert Credit.

[Rebelli0n]

Yeah, i agree. I've do a fair bit of research along these lines myself, and often find a lot of confusion exists over who actually did what game, and then what other games did they then go onto do. Moby games is extremely patchy, and often suffers from errors like ports developed by a 3rd party being credited to the original developer. Publishers being credited as the developer, and sometimes just totally incorrect information.

Theres also UVL.com (universal videogame list) and it's new incarnation UVL.net Which can sometimes turn up a bit more info for obscure titles.

Cross referencing Gamefaqs, UVL and Mobygames; thats my usual starting point moving on to platform specific databases, (e.g. hall of light for the amiga), followed up by a few google searches to see if any forum info exists usually gets me there, or enough leads to eventually find out. But you're right , atm there is no cohesive one stop database for all this info yet.

[Kubrick]

Who'd have known that Strider got a spiritual successor with a company other than Capcom. The name of the company is gone out of my head. Another small arcade publisher called Marshall or something.. read about it on Insert Credit.

Cannon Dancer/Osman by Mitchell Corp. I've always wanted to play that, but I don't think it works in MAME yet. They also made the Pang games.

Yeah, I would love to see an IMDB-style site for videogames. I guess wikipedia is as good as it gets for now.

[Molloy]

Cannon Dancer/Osman by Mitchell is correct.There's the insert credit interview I was talking about. It's a facinating read.

Part of the problem is that alot of publishers in the 80's and early 90's went out of their way to keep the developers names off the products. Games like Revenge of Shinobi don't have any credits at all.

There aren't a whole load of old films that don't have any credits sequence. So the information is easily retreived. But in 20 years time that equivalent information for many games will be lost for good because the only people who know are the developers themselves. The publishers aren't too hot when it comes to retaining records.

Even when you cross check all these websites they often all have the same incorrect information. Wikipedia could be the solution alright. We'll have to wait and see.