POLL: Unseen64 book updates and future projects / improvements! (Patreon)

Spring is arrived in full here in Italy and while outside the sun is hot and people start to eat ice-cream, we are still working hard on our computers to write articles for the Unseen64 book! Even if at the moment we don’t reach the needed goal for the book, as many of you already know we decided to put all of our free time and love into this project and kept working on it anyway.

The main section of the Unseen64 book is almost complete (we have wrote 226 articles of about 240 lost games featured), related insights and essays are done and 30+ interviews with developers that worked on lost games are ready, but we are trying to organize even more interviews and to get exclusive info on previously unknown cancelled games to make the book even better. After all the content will be completed, we’ll have to create the design layout and put everything in there, with screenshots, photos and concept arts.

As always we are working on the book as volunteer work in our spare-time, it’s not easy but all our energies and efforts are focused to be able to publish the Unseen64 book this summer or autumn! As 2016 is the 15° anniversary of Unseen64, it would be the best gift to celebrate :)

After the book will be completed and we’ll know how much of the donations will be needed to ship copies to those volunteers that wrote great articles for the project, and to cover possible editing / layout costs, we’ll update our goals on Patreon to be sure to invest future donations in the best way. We will probably propose an upgrade of our Google Drive account to have a dedicated, single online backup of all Unseen64 files, videos and screenshots, and be sure to not lose anything among different cloud storages.

There are also other improvements and new projects that we would like to work in the future. These are the ones we have in our list and as always we’d like to ask to YOU which ones you think should have the priority and be started as soon as the book will be done:

- Major features upgrades to the online archive: the current Unseen64 website is not perfect, and we want to create a more organized list of beta / cancelled games, developers and genres, so that it would be easier to navigate through all the thousands of titles preserved and to find what you are looking for. For example, it should be easier to find something like “all cancelled RPG by a Japanese company for 16 bit consoles”.

- 2+ weekly articles for the website: the looong queue of beta / cancelled games still to be added to the site is really huge, at the moment we can only add 1 new article every week but as we discussed in the past we’ll do some tests to write more than 1 article a week. This will help to share and save lots of info, images and videos for lost games that still don’t have any proper article anywhere else online.

- More video articles: we know that today most people don’t read gaming reviews on websites anymore and just rely on video reviews from Youtube. For “historical” websites like Unseen64 is just the same, there are many more people that would watch a 10 minutes video about a cancelled game, rather than to fully read a 1.000 words article on the topic. That’s why Unseen64 video articles by Tamaki or similar videos by other gaming channels like Yuriofwind, Beta64, the Gaming Historian or DYKG are so successful: they are full of interesting info, they are quick to consume and entertain more than a wall of text. Just like in the past gaming magazines have been replaced by gaming websites, now youtubers are taking the mass-market lead for videogames reviews, news and historical researches. While it would require more time to create a good video article (especially as the main Unseen64 is italian and we have to find other people for voice-overs), it would reach many more users than 3 or 4 written articles. This would mean less lost games revealed every month, but an easier / more enjoyable learning experience and lots more people that will know about it.

- A serialized monthly (or even bi-weekly) Podcast (first for Patrons, then public for everyone else): right now Tamaki does not have the time to record an Unseen64 podcast every month, but we know that people enjoy to listen to people that talk about games we’ll never play. As we wrote before the main Unseen64 staff is italian so we cannot do an english podcast ourselves, but if there’s enough interest we can find a way to organize a new english staff focused on making great podcasts with insights and curiosities on the unseen world.

What do you think? Please, leave your feedback below, we’ll be happy to know what you think about these possible improvements of your Unseen64 experience :) Thanks for your support!