(in the worse way possible)
In 2021 it seems that I was bored because I started to list every video game ever made on my spare time.
The goal was to have a json file by platform with every video game, its studio, publisher, date of publication, etc.
The final result is here, but as always it's the process that we cherish, not the fruit of our labor.
You'll love to know that for this project I did no planning and pursued the first thing that came in mind until I had a result.
A very good and excellent source for information is Wikipedia.
This page lists DOS games : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_DOS_games
We just copy and paste everything in a spreadsheet:
Then we parse each entry to retrieve additional info:
This is a lot of games already.
Did you know that Tim Sweeney named ZZT like that because it would be well referenced in alphabetical order in bulletin boards?
Did you know that Tim Sweeney named ZZT like that because it would be well referenced in alphabetical order in bulletin boards?
We repeat this process for a lot of platforms. Manually copy-pasting front-end data from a database is the most efficient technique for data collection, and is very well worth the time because you will level up your copy-pasting skill, which you use all the time, whereas writing a script for data scrapping will level up your script writing for data scrapping, which you almost never use.
Now we have a ton of data but not Steam Games.
For collecting Steam games we go to
Oh Yes.
You thought that first part was stupid? Get ready.
You thought that first part was stupid? Get ready.
Turns out we can scroll this page for ever but it is very tiring on your hands.
Thankfully technology is here to help:
With this we can retrieve a perfectly formatted list of games:
What now?
We do the same for Gog
We do the same for Itch.io
We do the same for Roblox
And the we
REGEX
We RegEx EVERYTHING now
And when this is done our work is complete:
Going from the data we had to a perfectly formatted JSON file is very easy and there aren't any edge cases to consider so it's very quick and doesn't require any manual edits.
Now we can publish our work. Great job!
It's also immediately obsolete which is a great advantage of these advanced methods.
It's also immediately obsolete which is a great advantage of these advanced methods.
You can still use it in your discord bot like I did to make an annoying trivia bot that brings up completely obscure games most of the time, or NSFW Steam games if you're lucky.
What a great use of my time!
