Long before digital storefronts, achievement trackers, game wikis, and enormous searchable databases became ordinary parts of gaming culture, finding reliable information about an old video game could be surprisingly difficult. A player looking for the programmer of a DOS game, the composer behind its music, the hardware it supported, or even a screenshot showing what the game looked like might have to search magazines, Usenet discussions, personal websites, manuals, and scattered fan pages. Even then, the answer might remain uncertain.
That problem bothered Jim Leonard during the late 1990s. Leonard had already operated a website devoted to classic IBM PC games, combining descriptions, screenshots, technical information, and reviews with downloadable copies of older software. In 1997, the Interactive Digital Software Association, later known as the Entertainment Software Association, sent him a cease-and-desist letter concerning the downloadable games. Leonard removed the site, but the experience did not eliminate his interest in documenting older computer games.
When he began searching for information about old games again, Leonard discovered that the larger problem had not disappeared. Usenet contained knowledgeable people but scattered information. Individual websites could be useful but offered little consistency or editorial control. What he wanted was not another collection of game reviews. He imagined a connected database in which games, developers, publishers, platforms, genres, screenshots, credits, and other information could be tied together and checked for accuracy.
That idea would become MobyGames.
From an Old PC Site to MobyGames
In January 1998, Leonard began outlining what he envisioned as an online database attached to his Oldskool.org website. His surviving retrospective identifies a design document from that period as the original foundation of MobyGames. Even the name was taking shape. Leonard planned to call the database’s search feature “MobySearch,” using “moby” in the hacker sense of something extremely large.
The project remained beyond what Leonard felt he could comfortably program alone. That changed in December 1998 when he discussed the idea with longtime friend Brian Hirt. Leonard later recalled explaining the larger concept to Hirt during a telephone conversation, only for Hirt to contact him roughly two days later with a working prototype. Hirt had already assembled a basic relational SQL database and a web interface capable of browsing its contents.
The partnership transformed the idea into a practical website. Leonard provided much of the original concept, organization, and historical enthusiasm, while Hirt handled the difficult technical work required to turn the idea into a scalable database. During approximately six weeks of concentrated development, the two refined the structure and navigation. By early February 1999, they had settled on an Apache server feeding a large Perl program, and shortly before launch Hirt entered the first game into the database, The X-Files Game.
MobyGames’ own current historical documentation identifies Leonard and Hirt as its original founders in 1999. David Berk became an important business-side figure and early co-owner, which has led some later accounts to describe the early leadership differently, but the site’s present official history distinguishes Leonard and Hirt as the founders and Berk as the business mind who joined the project during its early years.
MobyGames Opens on March 1, 1999
One of the most valuable pieces of evidence for MobyGames’ beginning survives not as a later corporate history but as a message posted by Leonard himself to Usenet on March 1, 1999.
The discussion had begun with complaints about game magazine reviews. Leonard entered the conversation by explaining that dissatisfaction with inaccurate or commercially influenced reviews was one reason he and a friend had created MobyGames. He invited readers to visit the new site, explaining that reviews would come from users and that ratings would be tailored to the type of game being discussed. Most importantly for historians, Leonard added that MobyGames had opened only the night before and contained approximately thirty games. He also described plans for web forms through which users would eventually be able to create database entries.
That contemporary message captures MobyGames before anyone could know what it would become. There was no enormous catalog, no decades of accumulated credits, and no assumption that historians would one day treat the database as a research tool. There were roughly thirty games and two creators trying to solve a problem.
Growth began immediately. Leonard later recalled that he and Hirt spent much of March entering information manually, scanning covers, taking screenshots, researching games, and responding to corrections sent by email. By the end of that first month, more than 200 games had entered the database. The pace was impressive for two people working largely during their free time, but it also demonstrated that the project could never document the history of electronic games through two editors alone.
The future of MobyGames depended on finding a way to let the public help without surrendering the quality control that had inspired the database in the first place.
Crowdsourcing Without Becoming a Free-for-All
The solution became one of MobyGames’ most important innovations.
Leonard was initially reluctant to allow outside users to enter information directly because inaccurate contributions could undermine the entire purpose of the site. Hirt pushed for a system that could accept community submissions while forcing information into standardized categories and allowing other people to review it before publication. From that work emerged the Add Game Wizard.
Rather than merely presenting contributors with an empty text box, the system guided them through information such as the game’s title, developer, publisher, release details, genre, description, and other classifications. Contributors could return to correct errors before submitting their work. The structure helped keep information consistent even as a growing number of people began entering it.
MobyGames also introduced contribution points. Adding games, screenshots, and other material earned points that appeared alongside a contributor’s name. The system transformed archival work into something resembling a game itself. Contributors could watch their scores increase while seeing who else was spending hours documenting forgotten releases, photographing packaging, transcribing credits, or correcting database entries. Leonard later described it as an early form of gamification.
More significant was the approval structure behind those points. Submissions did not automatically become accepted facts. As contributions increased, Leonard and Hirt recruited trusted members of the community to help review incoming material. Research might involve manuals, magazines, game files, Usenet discussions, packaging, or other documentation. A hierarchy of approvers allowed easier submissions to be processed while difficult questions could move upward for closer examination.
That distinction remains central to MobyGames. The current site allows registered users to contribute information, but trusted contributors and approvers vet submissions. Its modern standards emphasize evidence such as developer and publisher material, packaging, manuals, official stores, press material, screenshots, and in-game credits. MobyGames therefore developed into something different from either a traditional professionally written reference book or an entirely open wiki.
Opening the Database Beyond the PC
The MobyGames familiar to modern researchers covers the enormous history of electronic games, but the original project was much narrower.
For roughly its first two years, MobyGames concentrated on DOS and Windows games. Leonard believed limiting the database to systems that he and Hirt understood well would make it easier to maintain quality. Hirt favored broader platform support from the beginning. Eventually the growing approval structure made expansion practical, and Leonard came to agree that a historical database should cover far more than IBM-compatible computers.
MobyGames began adding contemporary consoles including the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Nintendo 64, Xbox, Dreamcast, and GameCube. Once the structure proved capable of handling additional hardware, the database could keep expanding backward and outward into increasingly obscure platforms.
The change altered the site’s historical value. A database devoted only to personal computer games could have become an exceptional specialist resource. A database capable of linking the same game across multiple platforms, releases, companies, credits, and regional versions could become something closer to an index of the medium itself.
An archived MobyGames homepage from late 1999 already demonstrates much of the philosophy before the first anniversary. Visitors could browse through games by title, company, genre, and year, while contributor rankings and submission tools reflected the growing importance of community participation. The surviving interface looks simple by modern standards, but the underlying idea of interconnected historical information was already visible.
From Fan Project to Industry Reference
During the 2000s, MobyGames increasingly escaped the boundaries of a hobbyist database.
Leonard and other members of the project promoted the site at events including the Classic Gaming Expo in 2003 and 2004 and the Game Developers Conference in 2007. His memories of the 2007 conference illustrate how much the site’s reputation had changed. Visitors to the MobyGames booth repeatedly wondered why the organization needed to promote itself because people working in the industry already knew what it was.
The site’s value came from depth. A conventional game page might identify a title and platform. MobyGames attempted to preserve screenshots, packaging, release information, technical attributes, companies, developers, reviews, credits, alternate versions, and relationships between games. That structure allowed someone researching an individual programmer to follow that person’s credits across companies and decades, while another researcher could trace a game through regional or platform releases.
Outside recognition followed. MobyGames became a Webby Awards nominee in 2006, while researchers concerned with digital preservation increasingly treated large community databases as useful sources of game metadata. The site’s contribution was not simply the number of titles it listed. Its greatest value was the accumulation of relationships among the people, companies, platforms, and physical evidence behind those titles.
By the end of the decade, however, MobyGames was approaching the first major ownership transition in its history.
GameFly and the Most Controversial Redesign
GameFly acquired MobyGames in 2010. The transaction received relatively little public attention at first. When Game Developer reported on the ownership change in February 2011, it described MobyGames as a veteran video game information and documentation resource containing information on more than 33,000 games. The article also highlighted the system in which users contributed material while volunteer approvers reviewed submissions.
For several years the site continued under GameFly without a complete transformation. That changed in 2013 when a major redesign replaced the familiar interface.
The response from longtime contributors was severe. The controversy was not simply nostalgia for an old-looking website. MobyGames relied heavily on volunteers who had learned workflows for entering, comparing, correcting, and approving large amounts of information. Changes that made those activities more cumbersome threatened the community responsible for creating the database in the first place.
By the end of 2013, another ownership change offered a way out. Blue Flame Labs, led by Jeremiah Freyholtz, acquired MobyGames from GameFly. One of the first visible decisions was to restore the older site design. Game Developer described the rollback as an attempt to repair relations with a community angered by GameFly’s redesign and to restore MobyGames’ position as an authoritative industry resource. Simon Carless also became involved as an investor and supporter of the acquisition.
The episode demonstrated a reality that would repeatedly shape MobyGames. The database was valuable, but its accumulated information could not easily be separated from the community that had spent years creating it.
The Blue Flame Years
Freyholtz, known within the MobyGames community as Reed or MobyReed, would oversee the project for more than a decade.
The immediate task after the 2013 acquisition was stabilization. MobyGames had accumulated years of code, information, user accounts, submission systems, and editorial procedures. Restoring the familiar interface helped bring confidence back to contributors, but the technological problem underneath the site was becoming more serious with time.
The original architecture had roots stretching back to Hirt’s late 1990s work. A system created when the database held only dozens of games was now supporting an enormous historical collection. MobyGames remained useful precisely because so much of its old information had survived, yet maintaining the technology surrounding that information became increasingly difficult.
The corporate story also became more complicated during this period. United Kingdom Companies House records show MobyGames Limited was incorporated on July 8, 2020, with Antstream Limited recorded in its corporate filings as a person with significant control. Freyholtz served as a director of the company, placing MobyGames within a corporate structure connected to retro-game streaming company Antstream.
That connection would eventually lead MobyGames to one of the oldest names in the video game business.
Atari Buys MobyGames
On November 23, 2021, Atari announced a strategic investment of up to $3.5 million in Antstream Limited. Included in the arrangement was an option allowing Atari to purchase the assets of MobyGames Limited, including the website and database, for $1.5 million by the end of March 2022.
The acquisition was completed in March 2022 for the announced $1.5 million price. Freyholtz told the MobyGames community that Atari had acquired the site from Antstream and that he would continue running it. More important for the site’s future, he said Atari’s backing would permit investment in full-time development and completion of a replacement for a codebase whose roots were more than twenty years old.
For a project concerned with preserving video game history, Atari’s ownership created an unusual historical circle. A company whose name was inseparable from the formative years of the commercial video game industry now owned one of the largest community-built databases documenting that industry’s history.
The database itself, however, remained dependent on its contributors and approvers. Atari had purchased the infrastructure and assets, but decades of volunteer work remained the foundation of the collection.
Rebuilding a Twenty-Four-Year-Old Website
The most visible result of Atari’s investment appeared in February 2023 when MobyGames launched a completely rebuilt website.
This was not merely a cosmetic redesign. Freyholtz explained that the site’s backend and frontend had been reconstructed and that the old Perl backend had been replaced with Python. The migration preserved the existing database while providing modern infrastructure, desktop and mobile interfaces, improved search, contribution tools, and a revised approval workflow. Atari similarly described the project as a ground-up rebuild intended to make the contributor-driven database sustainable over the long term.
The scale of the migration showed how far MobyGames had traveled from the approximately thirty games Leonard mentioned in his launch-day Usenet post. Freyholtz reported 323,918 games across 311 platforms, more than 5.5 million credit entries, more than one million industry professionals, 45,642 companies, nearly 750,000 images of covers and packaging, almost one million player-captured screenshots, and hundreds of thousands of promotional images when the rebuilt site launched.
The redesign generated criticism from some longtime users, particularly concerning navigation and changes to familiar workflows. That reaction echoed the importance of institutional memory within the community. Yet unlike the disastrous relationship between contributors and the 2013 GameFly redesign, the 2023 rebuilding effort took place alongside continued development and preservation of the underlying database.
Two years later, another institutional era ended. In February 2025, Freyholtz announced that he was leaving after more than a decade running MobyGames. He explained that his responsibilities and the site’s components had been transferred to Atari’s team. MobyGames’ official history now credits Atari as owner, with veteran developer Tracy Poff and Atari personnel involved in the site’s continuing operation.
When a Fan Database Becomes Historical Infrastructure
Perhaps the strongest demonstration of MobyGames’ importance did not come from Atari, its founders, or its contributors.
It came from preservation researchers.
For the Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network’s 2023 Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States, researchers needed a large historical dataset against which they could compare games still commercially available. After examining possible databases, they selected MobyGames. Their report stated that MobyGames offered the largest and richest corpus for their research question and provided substantially stronger coverage of historical releases than alternatives they considered. At the time they designed the study, for example, MobyGames contained information on more than 5,000 Commodore 64 games, compared with roughly 290 in IGDB.
MobyGames engineer Tracy Poff worked with the researchers to provide the necessary dataset. The resulting export scripts and data were themselves preserved by the Video Game History Foundation Library, meaning that information accumulated by a fan database had crossed another boundary. MobyGames was no longer merely a website historians happened to consult. Its data had become archival research material preserved by a video game history institution.
That development speaks to one of the fundamental problems facing video game history. Games disappear. Servers close. Companies dissolve. Packaging is thrown away. Websites vanish. Digital storefronts remove releases. Developers sometimes lose their own records, while credits may be incomplete or difficult to access without running aging software on aging hardware.
A screenshot uploaded by a player, a scanned box entered by a collector, or a credit transcription made by a volunteer can seem insignificant when it is added. Decades later, after the original website has disappeared and the physical packaging has become scarce, the same contribution may be some of the easiest surviving evidence available to a researcher.
Why MobyGames Matters
MobyGames began because Jim Leonard could not easily answer questions about old computer games.
More than a quarter century later, that frustration has become one of the largest attempts to describe video game history as interconnected data. The site survived the dot-com era, changing web technologies, multiple ownership transfers, controversial redesigns, a twenty-year-old technical foundation, and the gradual departure of the people who had originally built it.
Its history also illustrates something larger about preservation. Archives do not always begin as archives. Sometimes they begin as two friends in 1998 discussing why information about old games is so difficult to find. Sometimes preservation begins with thirty database entries, scanned boxes, screenshots captured during late-night gaming sessions, and volunteers competing for contribution points.
Leonard and Hirt could not have entered every game themselves, which forced MobyGames to become a community project. That limitation ultimately became one of its greatest strengths. Thousands of contributors could document pieces of gaming history that no small editorial staff could hope to cover, while an approval system provided a measure of control over what entered the permanent database.
Ownership changed from the founders to GameFly, then to Blue Flame Labs and the Freyholtz era, through the Antstream corporate structure, and finally to Atari. The technology changed from a massive Perl program written at the end of the twentieth century to a rebuilt modern platform. Yet the underlying idea remained recognizable: collect detailed information about electronic games, connect that information, check it, and preserve it before it disappears.
For players, MobyGames can still be a place to look up an obscure game remembered from childhood. For developers, it can preserve a career credit that disappeared from public memory decades ago. For collectors, it records packaging and regional releases. For historians, it provides millions of connections among games, people, companies, platforms, images, and dates.
That may be MobyGames’ most important legacy. It helped demonstrate that video games were not too trivial, too commercial, or too new to deserve systematic historical documentation. In 1999, Leonard announced a new website with about thirty games and hopes that users might eventually help fill the database.
The users did.
And in doing so, they helped build one of the documentary foundations upon which the history of video games can now be studied.
Sources & Further Reading
Leonard, Jim. “MobyGames Is Open.” Post to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic, March 1, 1999. Google Groups. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic/5Ph26P7PzuU/eUPDv-lHZVQJ.
MobyGames. “MobyGames.” Archived November 3, 1999. Internet Archive, Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/19991103110356/http://www.mobygames.com/.
Leonard, Jim. “20 Years of MobyGames.” Oldskooler Ramblings, February 28, 2019. https://trixter.oldskool.org/2019/02/28/.
MobyGames. “About.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/info/about/.
MobyGames. “FAQ: History.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/info/faq5/.
MobyGames. “FAQ: What Is MobyGames?” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/info/faq1/.
MobyGames. “Standards & Practices.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/info/standards/.
MobyGames. “Contribute.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/info/contribute/.
MobyGames. “Happy 25th Anniversary!” March 2024. https://www.mobygames.com/forum/3/thread/265850/happy-25th-anniversary/.
MobyGames. “MobyGames Birthday.” MobyGames Forums. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/forum/4/thread/71521/mobygames-birthday/.
MobyGames. “Uh… What’s Up with the GameFly Media Logo?” December 2010. https://www.mobygames.com/forum/4/thread/145938/uh-whats-up-with-the-gamefly-media-logo/.
Freyholtz, Jeremiah. “Announcement (The Old Site Is Coming Back).” MobyGames, December 18, 2013. https://www.mobygames.com/forum/4/thread/182637/announcement-the-old-site-is-coming-back/.
Carless, Simon. “The Weekly Whale: MobyGames News, Dec. 29th.” MobyGames, December 29, 2013. https://www.mobygames.com/forum/4/thread/184283/the-weekly-whale-mobygames-news-dec-29th/.
Companies House. “MOBYGAMES LIMITED, Company No. 12728327.” Find and Update Company Information. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12728327/filing-history.
Atari. “Atari Announces Strategic Transactions.” GlobeNewswire, November 23, 2021. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/11/23/2340059/0/en/atari-announces-strategic-transactions.html.
Freyholtz, Jeremiah. “MobyGames Ownership Update.” MobyGames, March 8, 2022. https://www.mobygames.com/forum/3/thread/258131/mobygames-ownership-update/.
Atari. “Atari Announces the Acquisition of MobyGames.” WebWire, March 2022. https://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=286523.
Atari. 2021/2022 Universal Registration Document. Paris: Atari, 2022. https://atari-investisseurs.fr/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/URD-2022-03-EN-version-.pdf.
MobyGames. “The Next Chapter of MobyGames.” February 2023. https://www.mobygames.com/forum/3/thread/261072/the-next-chapter-of-mobygames/.
Atari. “Atari Announces the Launch of a Fully Rebuilt and Optimized MobyGames Website.” GlobeNewswire, February 22, 2023. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/02/22/2613310/0/en/Atari-Announces-the-Launch-of-a-Fully-Rebuilt-and-Optimized-MobyGames-Website.html.
Freyholtz, Jeremiah. “An Update on MobyGames Leadership.” MobyGames, February 13, 2025. https://www.mobygames.com/forum/3/thread/269628/an-update-on-mobygames-leadership/.
MobyGames. “MobyGames: Video Game Database.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/.
PC Gamer. “The Joys of Retro-Gaming.” July 2000. https://www.99drop.com/PDF/TECH/pc_gamer_july2000.pdf.
The Webby Awards. “MobyGames.” 2006 Webby Awards Nominee, Games & Games Related. https://winners.webbyawards.com/2006/websites/general-websites/games-games-related/155373/mobygames.
Orland, Kyle. “Report: MobyGames Acquired by GameFly Media.” Game Developer, February 7, 2011. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/report-mobygames-acquired-by-gamefly-media.
Wawro, Alex. “Game Dev Database MobyGames Getting Some TLC under New Owner.” Game Developer, December 31, 2013. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/game-dev-database-mobygames-getting-some-tlc-under-new-owner.
Kraus, Kari, and Rachel Donahue. “Do You Want to Save Your Progress?: The Role of Professional and Player Communities in Preserving Virtual Worlds.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 6, no. 2 (2012). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/2/000129/000129.html.
Anderson, David, Janet Delve, Dan Pinchbeck, and Getaneh Agegn Alemu. Preliminary Document Analyzing and Summarizing Metadata Standards and Issues Across Europe. KEEP Project, 2009. https://pure.port.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/94715/KEEP_D3.1.pdf.
Moss, Richard. “MobyGames.” The Life & Times of Video Games, episode 33, October 2, 2021. https://lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/33.html.
Mühleder, Peter, Florian Rämisch, and Tracy Hoffmann. “Interlinking Dataset of the Video Game Databases MobyGames and MediaArt Database.” Zenodo, 2019. https://zenodo.org/records/3670047.
Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network. Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States. 2023. https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/.
Video Game History Foundation Library. “MobyGames Export Scripts and Data.” 2023. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/18442.
PC Gamer. “Atari Buys Videogame Database MobyGames for $1.5 Million.” March 10, 2022. https://www.pcgamer.com/atari-buys-videogame-database-mobygames-for-dollar15-million/.
Kotaku. “Atari Buys MobyGames for $1.5 Million.” March 10, 2022. https://kotaku.com/mobygames-retro-credits-database-imdb-atari-freyholtz-b-1848638521.
MarketScreener. “Atari SA Acquired MobyGames from Antstream Ltd. for $1.5 Million.” March 2022. https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ATARI-S-A-2168735/news/Atari-SA-acquired-MobyGames-from-Antstream-Ltd-for-1-5-million-39768825/.
Yarwood, Jack. “Video Game Database MobyGames Celebrates 25 Years.” Time Extension, March 1, 2024. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2024/03/anniversary-video-game-database-mobygames-celebrates-25-years.