New Site Announcement

So you may or may not have noticed that it has been a while since I’ve made a post. And by “a while” I mean “about 10 months”.  Normally I would attribute the lack of posting goodness to laziness, but this has not been the case. I do have a good reason. No, really, I do. I have been working on a little side project since October of 2009…To give a little background, I began development of a different side project about two years ago (that one will remain secret for now). Everything was going fine with the development until I hit a road block. I needed to be able to reach out to somewhere on the internet and download information about video games.  The trouble was there didn’t seem to be one authoritative site on the internet with an API. In other words, I needed a way to programmatically ask a website for specific information and receive it in common format (i.e. XML). The best site that I could find was GiantBomb.com. However, I had a few issues with that site:

1. The site seems bloated from an information and design perspective.
2. The information didn’t seem to be grouped logically (more on that below).
3. As a result of #2, it would take multiple API calls to get the information I needed. Meh.

Don’t get me wrong, I tip my hat at them for the amount of work and effort they have put into their site…it just didn’t fit my needs. So I did what every good programmer would do: I made (wrote) my own site.  Here are the design goals I had in mind:

1. Take a minimalistic approach to information gathering and sharing (see TheTVDB).
2. Provide an API for share information with anyone who wants it.
3. Provide the right amount of information.
4. Build the site on ASP.NET C# 3.5 with a Microsoft SQL Server. Make use of AJAX as needed.

The underlying idea is allow people to quickly add the appropriate amount of content needed to describe a video game. If someone needs more information such as FAQs, user ratings, game play videos, or achievement information, then they could build their own site and pull what data they need from this new site.

I also decided to deviate from a common video game-styled wiki practice of grouping each video game release into one article. For example, if you search for Super Mario Bros. on Wikipedia or Giantbomb, you will get one article that covers every regional and platform release of that game. I wanted to approach each release on a platform/region level. Why? Typically each release has a different box/covert art for each regional/platform release and there are game differences due to language barriers, platform limits, and time between various releases. Some games are even remade at a later date on a different platform.

The site launched June 4th and the API went live on June 18th. I’ve been making a few tweaks here and there but everything seems to be running fairly smoothly. My next task is to garner interest from the XBMC and Plex crowds looking to scrape video game information for video game emulators.

So without further ado, I give you The Video Game Database.

Enjoy!