- Credits
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Atari, or at least the company currently holding the rights to use that name, announced earlier this week that it had spent $1.5 million buying MobyGames, a website most of you have probably used at one point or another in your lives without ever thinking about its monetary worth.
The site, founded in 1999, is basically a huge database for video game credits, and is the closest thing the industry has to a central credits register since publishers themselves are so notoriously terrible at keeping track of such things. It’s also, very quietly, a great repository of quality screenshots for retro/pixel art video games.
Originally created by three high school friends (Jim Leonard, Brian Hirt and David Berk), this isn’t the first time the site has been sold; it controversially changed hands in 2010 when GameFly bought it and redesigned the whole site, before it was purchased again in 2013 by Jeremiah Freyholtz, who quickly reverted most of those unpopular changes. Freyholtz, along with Simon Carless, has been running the site ever since.
Both parties released these statements:
The site, founded in 1999, is basically a huge database for video game credits, and is the closest thing the industry has to a central credits register since publishers themselves are so notoriously terrible at keeping track of such things. It’s also, very quietly, a great repository of quality screenshots for retro/pixel art video games.
Originally created by three high school friends (Jim Leonard, Brian Hirt and David Berk), this isn’t the first time the site has been sold; it controversially changed hands in 2010 when GameFly bought it and redesigned the whole site, before it was purchased again in 2013 by Jeremiah Freyholtz, who quickly reverted most of those unpopular changes. Freyholtz, along with Simon Carless, has been running the site ever since.
Both parties released these statements:
