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Goodbye, GameDeed

I closed GameDeed today. It was the web site with a list of video games where the left part was sort of a mini database and the right part your personal checklist and backlog. It was my first complex web site project that started in 2013. I can’t believe it’s been so long now since I started it.

Since it was my first big web site (not counting WordPress blogs with my own theme) it was a sad feeling closing it down. I wanted to make it the go to web site for tracking your gaming, but it was never a success. Only a handful of visitors used it. Some even stuck around for years – but eventually, they also waved it goodbye. Suddenly the web site was a ghost town.

I waited for more than a month to make sure no one was visiting it anymore, and then…

But in spite of it not being a success, I wouldn’t say developing it was a waste of time. Putting it together taught me a lot about building and maintaining a complex web site using PHP and MySQL. I doubt I would have been able to create DeepSID without that experience.

For a bit more history on GameDeed, see The Story of DeepSID.

May 7, 2022October 5, 2024Chiptunes DeepSID GameDeed

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Commodore 64 SID

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The Story of DeepSID

It’s funny how it can sometimes feel like you’ve had your proudest creation behind you.

Maybe it was the time in the 80’s with the editor and the C64 tunes. The couple of maps I created for Half-Life. Or the years where I became overly obsessed with PC games and I fell off the face of the Earth for a few years. Then I created a games checklist-and-database called GameDeed and thought, I might actually have a web site that might steal some of the thunder from The BackLoggery and HowLongToBeat. Was I on the way to my proudest creation yet? No, not really.

GameDeed turned out to be a resounding fiasco.

GameDeed

Nevertheless, GameDeed was still very important and I don’t regret the time I spent coding it. I learned so much about web development from it that later benefit DeepSID. Before GameDeed I made a few static web sites and even my own theme for WordPress, but none of that would have prepared me for the monster site that DeepSID would eventually evolve into.

August 6, 2016September 28, 2016GameDeed

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4300+ Commodore 64 Games on GameDeed.com

I’ve just spent more than a month adding and adjusting a ton of Commodore 64 games for my sister site GameDeed.com, and I’m now proud to announce that the job is finally complete.

A quick thanks to all those friendly souls who put up YouTube videos of C64 games. It was very helpful for determining the gameplay and thus genres of a lot of games. Especially regarding flip-screen versus scrolling (multiple directions, vertically or sideways).

So with more than 4300 games available, almost any old C64 game you can think of should now be represented. There are local screenshots for most of them (courtesy of MobyGames) along with dynamic information from Wikipedia and Giant Bomb whenever available.

Normally GameDeed works as a checklist for whether you’ve completed a game, and you can certainly use the list of C64 games for this purpose, but it offers more than that. For example, the gallery viewer makes for faster and more efficient browsing of screenshots than a lot of other game databases.

Let me give you an example.