Games added to IFDB by year

I thought it’d be interesting to see how many games were added to IFDB in different years, and it really was fun. These aren’t years that games were published, just the year that they were added, so it can include people going back and finding older stuff to include. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t put publication dates on IFDB entries, so searching by publication year often misses things.

Here are how many games were added during each year of IFDB’s existence so far:
2007: 3009 (This is 1/4th of all entries on IFDB!)
2008: 266
2009: 282
2010: 161
2011: 235
2012: 235 (again)
2013: 2508 (what happened this year???)
2014: 505
2015: 549
2016: 573
2017: 538
2018: 489
2019: 596
2020: 796
2021: 705
2022: 528

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never mind! I have my dates all wrong

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Looking into it further, it seems almost all the games in 2013 are older games added by a user named eq, whose account is currently listed as ‘closed’. Using archive.org, you can see that starting in April 2013 he spent weeks uploading thousands of old games. Really interesting stuff!

Edit: Some more archive stuff. Here was the state of the website in early 2008 (it started late 2007):

image

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Yes, I believe that was Paul Equinox Collins who is a well-known member of the ZX Spectrum community (as well as an author of z-machine IF), so I imagine that at least a chunk of those additions were 8-bit tiles.

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Is that possibly around the time all Quest projects created on textadventures.co.uk were systematically generating IFDB entries - whether completed or not? I don’t remember when that happened exactly.

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