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A Quantitative Study of Historical Video Games (1981–2015)

In this chapter, I provide a survey of a large number of historical video games released between 1981 and 2015. For this purpose, I use as proxy a database composed of 1,690 video games released in that interval. It was created—and is still maintained—by an online community called HistoriaGames. I discuss in this chapter the potential biases of working with a database built externally. Eventually, I provide a descriptive analysis of this set of historical video games with a focus on the distribution of video games over release dates, platforms, genres, historical periods, and historical events.