MobyGames

• 1. Introduction

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  MobyGames opened on the 1st of March 1999, its first entries drawn from the personal game collections of its two founders. Jim Leonard had a clear purpose: gather scattered knowledge about computer games and put it somewhere permanent and shared. Brian Hirt co-founded the site from the start. Eighteen months later, David Berk joined them; all three had known each other since high school. The database began with IBM PC compatibles, the machines the founders knew best, before the project expanded to welcome contributions from the public. What grew from those personal shelves would eventually span over 300,000 games across hundreds of platforms. The path to that scale passed through three distinct changes of ownership, each one testing what the archive would stand for.

• 2. Approvers and Archives

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  MobyGames relies on unpaid volunteers called approvers to fact-check every submission before it goes live. These submissions cover screenshots, box art, developer information, and game summaries, among other materials. The review process can take anywhere from a few minutes to several months. The most commonly referenced sources are the game's own website, its packaging, and its credit screens. A published standard governs how game information and copy-editing should be handled across the site. Contributors earn points through a ranking system linked to the accuracy of what they submit.

  Registered users on MobyGames can rate and review games in addition to using the catalog as reference. They can also maintain personal lists of games they own or want, and those lists can generate matches with other members willing to trade. Each game listed on the site has its own sub-forum, giving the archive a conversational dimension alongside its reference function.

  In a 2003 interview, David Berk described the stakes as he saw them. He stressed the site's commitment to taking video games more seriously than broader society had managed. Preservation, he argued, was essential because of the games' cultural importance. GameFly's purchase of the site would be the first real test of that commitment.

• 3. An Unwelcome Buyer

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  In mid-2010, the acquisition closed before the community had been told it was happening. An unpopular redesign of the site's interface followed the change in ownership. A few major contributors left, unwilling to continue volunteering for a commercial operation.

  Their departures put a long-standing tension on display. The database depended on volunteer labor, but who owned the archive was a separate and private matter, never subject to community input. Within a few years, a new owner would arrive with a different approach.

• 4. The Freyholtz Years

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  Jeremiah Freyholtz took ownership of MobyGames on the 18th of December 2013. He ran Blue Flame Labs, a game and web development company based in San Francisco. He also operated VGBoxArt, a site for fan-made video game box art. Blue Flame Labs rolled back the site's interface to the version that had existed before the GameFly overhaul. For the next eight years, Freyholtz ran MobyGames alongside Simon Carless, who organized the Independent Games Festival.

  The collaboration held for nearly a decade, until an outside buyer tabled a proposal large enough to change the site's direction permanently.

• 5. Under Atari

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  On the 24th of November 2021, Atari SA announced a potential deal to purchase MobyGames from Blue Flame Labs for 1.5 million dollars. The transaction closed on the 8th of March 2022, with Freyholtz remaining as general manager.

  Atari's financial support made possible a rebuild the site had never previously undertaken. The entire backend codebase was written from scratch. Full-time developers replaced the part-time arrangement that had kept the site running before. Both the mobile and desktop user interfaces were updated as part of the overhaul.

  In 2024, MobyGames introduced a paid Pro membership tier. Free users lost certain capabilities at the same time, including the ability to browse beyond the sixth page of any game list. Before the Pro tier, the site had relied entirely on banner advertising. From March 2014 onward, it had also received contributions from a small number of patrons through the Patreon platform.

  On the 13th of February 2025, Freyholtz stepped down as site lead to move on to other projects. Operations passed to Tracy Poff, a veteran coder on the site, working alongside Atari staff. Underneath the rebuilt interface, the volunteer approval process still governs what gets added to the archive and what gets rejected.