Promoting the rich history of video game culture throughout the ages

Hardcore Gaming 101 was founded in 2004 in order to present readers with comprehensive overviews of long running games series, as well as to highlight lesser known cult classics or obscure games. Over the past decade, the site has hosted over 800 articles covering the entire history of video and computer gaming.

Articles for HG101 often require an extraordinary amount of effort - not only is the writer expected to have thorough knowledge of the genre they're writing about, but they need to take screenshots, research sources (often in other languages) and connect it all into one digestible, but thorough, package. For a number of years, this was done purely on a volunteer basis.

Around 2010 or so, we started to stick more advertisements onto the site and ask for donations through Paypal. We receive free hosting thanks to the awesome people at Kontek, so instead the funds go towards compensating the authors for their hard work, since people shouldn't have to work for free. The goal was to hire more contributors and expand the site, both in quality and breadth of content.

And it worked, to an extent! We received many more contributions, even though the payment rate is lower than larger publications.

The problem is, that while the site has increased in traffic and popularity, the ad revenue has not. Anyone can tell you that constant news posts, goofy pictures and listicles are how the big sites bring in revenue, but HG101 specializes instead on longer form pieces that concentrate on history. These take a long time to assemble, so updates are generally only done on a weekly or biweekly basis.

HG101 has hit a point where our contributions have been outstanding, but unfortunately we don't have the constant influx of money in order to pay for them. This is also one of the reasons for infrequent updates - article updates need to be spaced out in order to fit into our monthly budget.

Additionally, I'm getting older and finding my real life responsibilities further encroaching on the site duties. I started the site when I was living at home with my parents at 23. I'm 33 now, work a 9-to-5 job with a three-and-a-half hour daily round trip commute, and have a toddler to help take care of. Finding the time and energy to keep the site updated with content, much less work on other site related projects like the HG101 books, has become extremely difficult.

This is where this Patreon comes in. We have two separate goals.

The first is to increase the monthly budget, both to increase the payments to contributors, and pay the site editors to post more regular updates. We have a large backlog of articles, but not a lot of time to format them, and not always the budget to pay for them. This money would go for paying site administrators to update more regularly - the goal is twice a week - as well as increasing the payments for article submissions. We currently pay $15-$25 per game covered, but that's on the low side, especially for such expansive articles, so we would like to increase that.

The second goal is to fund the production of more books. Although some of the content featured in these books is already available on the site, it still takes a substantial amount of time to expand, revise and update them. Since the site has been around for a decade, we have improved our standards in both content and tone, so everything that goes into a book needs to be heavily revised, and sometimes completely rewritten. Additionally, a lot of time goes into designing the books themselves. Since we don't have the funds to hire a graphic designer, I need to handle this myself. With all of this taken together, it's very time consuming. For example, the adventure game book, all things together, took about three years, and that was with a very straightforward design (with 772 pages). The Sega book took about a year. The Castlevania book has taken about two years.

Although the books sell relatively well for what are niche products, the profits are not high enough to justify full time production. The money from the Patreon would help supplement this, so I could work on them full time, and allow for a much quicker publication schedule.

Some upcoming book projects, which are in various stages of planning:

-Other Konami volumes. We have two currently planned. These would include articles for larger classic series like Contra and Mystical Ninja/Goemon, as well as their expansive library of NES, Famicom, MSX, SNES, Genesis and arcade titles not covered in any other volume. This would include their beat-em-ups, their run-and-guns, and a huge slew of cool Famicom Disk System games. Another third volume focusing on some of the slightly more modern series, like Silent Hill and Metal Gear, is also a possibility.

-Sega Arcade Classics Vol. 2. The second volume in this series covers many of the Sega arcade games that we couldn't fit in the first volume, up until the System 32 era, as well as some of their older titles, including Zaxxon, Pengo, Congo Bongo, and others. We're aiming to make this volume as comprehensive as possible because Sega put out a LOT of titles during this time span which have been pretty much forgotten outside of the dusty archives of MAME.

-Sega Master System and Genesis Vol. 1. As a follow up to the Arcade Classics series, this line would begin to focus on Sega's home consoles. The first volume would include the 8 and 16-bit outings in series like Phantasy Star, Shining Force, Sonic the Hedgehog, the Sega Disney games, and many, many others.

-Ys and Falcom. We're always updating our Ys article, so we would like to build a book around this expansive series, and also include coverage of all of Falcom's other game series, like Popful Mail, Sorcerian, Brandish, Trails in the Sky, Dragon Slayer, Xanadu, Zwei!!, and numerous others. In many cases, our current articles are the only English sources for these games, and we aim to improve them even more.

-Shin Megami Tensei. The SMT article was one of our first ones, but it's extremely outdated since Atlus puts them out pretty regularly. A book would include a complete revamp of the article including the whole series and all of its spinoffs (Persona, Devil Survivor, Devil Summoner, etc.), totaling something like at least 35 games, and growing all of the time.

-Although we haven't begun any solid planning beyond these outlines, future books could also cover the library of 80s and 90s Capcom, Namco and SNK arcade games, since they are also favorites of ours. I'd also like to expand outwards and do something for the 90s era of PC gaming, sort of how we did with our adventure game book, but outwards in different genres.

Additionally, I'd like to experiment with smaller digests that feature a wide variety of content, with a concentration on features. These would be about 75 pages long (compared to the 150-170 of the other books) and be sold for about $15. One of these (Strider/Bionic Commando) was released in May 2015. Some possible ideas for columns and recurring features would be:

-An expansion of our "Dark Age of JRPGs" column, irregularly featured on our blog, which would also be expanded to include adventure games and whatever other games we can dig up.

-An expansion of some of our other occasionally updated columns, like the "Tracing the Influence" piece and the "Japanese Artwork of Western Games" piece.

-"Inventory"-type listicles that bring up recurring themes or obscure genre types. We're currently planning to feature one with as many Space Harrier clones as possible. There's a lot of them!

-More "Total Conversion" articles, like the Ys III/Oath in Felghana one featured on the site and the Dracula X PCE/PSP featured in the Castlevania book, featuring a full breakdown of the many changes between retro titles and their modern remakes.

-Features on the rarest and most expensive games on each platform. Many other articles only look at pricey titles from an American perspective, but these will also feature Japanese titles. Anyone can look at a price list and determine these, but our articles will also feature mini-reviews to give some background to whether these titles can validate their asking price.

-Capsule reviews of import titles. Our goal, each issue, is to feature 80 import games on a given platform, with a cover, screenshot, and 75 word review. There are tons and tons of weird and obscure games on the Famicom, Super Famicom, and (especially) PS1, so we want to be able to fit as much information as possible for some of these overlooked games.

All of this, in addition to our usual reviews of arcade, PC, and console titles, from every genre, ranging from RPGs to shooters to platformers to adventure games. We'll also be using these as testing waters to see if there's any interest in books on companies like Irem and Taito, which may not have the same draw as more popular companies like Sega and Konami.

If worked on full time, the goal would be to publish three books a year, maybe more in the smaller digest format. Also, the books are currently published via print-on-demand, but if we had more money upfront, they could be sent to a standard offset printer, which is technically cheaper in the long run, but also allows for higher quality paper.