Happy Birthday, Completionator!

Wow, has it really been 10 years since Completionator first became available to the public? And, looking back, it may have been a little premature, considering how many things were missing. I mean, just look at my original announcement on 5/10/14. We started out without the ability to rate games, edit forum posts, edit completions, etc. And that doesn't even account for all of the things added much later on, such as playthroughs, challenges, bounties, blogs, most reports, and so on.

In the years that followed, our small community began to form and although I'm very much an introvert, I've enjoyed interacting with everyone here. Completionator has and always will be a niche site. My goal has never been to make money off this site. That's why you've never seen a single advertisement on Completionator. My goal was much simpler: create a flexible site for managing video game collections and backlogs.

The site absolutely would not be what it is today without the feedback I've received over the years, the help of the curation team for managing data, and the Patreon backers that help keep the server running. So to that, I say THANK YOU!! I'm proud of the work we've all done here and I hope you all feel the same as far as this being a fun and useful site!

Time sure does fly though. It's pretty wild to think about what my life looked like 10 years ago. On the surface things are pretty much the same since I have the same job and still have the same general interests. But I swapped out basketball for running as my primary source of exercise, went through a serious illness, made adjustments to physical / mental well-being (which remains a work-in-progress), moved to another part of town, said goodbye to several family members, and have witnessed so many major world events. My gosh, think about everything that has happened around the world since 2014.

And what about the gaming industry? Heck, Nintendo was pretty much left for dead with the Wii U in 2014 and now they're crushing it. Then there's all of the studio acquisitions and, sadly, closures. And what a time to be alive when games like Plumbers Don't Wear Ties and PO'ed are making triumphant (?) returns 25-30 years later.

But enough about the past, what about the future of Completionator? Well, I have no idea. I have plenty of improvements I'd like to make, but time is always the limiting factor. When I'm able to work on the site, my time nowadays is primarily used for fulfilling item requests and managing game metadata. I've been working on a different gaming-related project for the past 6 months or so and that's what's been chewing up most of my free time. I'm hoping one day I'll be able to share that with everyone, but we'll see. Right now, for Completionator, I just hope we can keep truckin' along for another 10 years!

Humble Beginnings

Below is a screenshot of the first design we had...and boy is it rough! The template itself was fine, but I was still figuring things out since I had never really developed a public-facing site like this.

The site went through a major redesign relatively early on and below is what it looked like. It's actually not too far off from what we have now, but I will never go back to having a menu on the left!

NOTE: I pulled the images from the Wayback Machine and some of the styles are a little wonky, but they're close enough.

Scavenger Hunt

To celebrate this milestone, I put together a (hopefully) fun little Scavenger Hunt feature. This is something I've wanted to build for years, but since it doesn't really provide any value in terms of managing collections / backlogs, I never put any time towards it. But I used this as an excuse to finally build it

The concept is really simple. I've provided clues for 30 different games and you need to find them all. If you think you've identified one, you just need to visit the "Game Details" page and, if you're correct, you'll see a new orange button.

If you click on the orange button, you'll get a message saying you've unlocked it. Once you've unlocked it, the orange button won't appear again for you. Just so we're clear, this is an example of a Game Details page: https://www.completionator.com/Game/Details/675. And no, the one I linked is not part of the hunt!

You can view your progress and check out the clues here: https://www.completionator.com/ScavengerHunt

I tried to put a few easy ones in there, but some of the clues might be rather cryptic. I suggest trying to figure them out on your own first for funsies, but Google will probably help out for most of them.

I built this feature in such a way that we could have more hunts in the future, so definitely let me know what you think!

Giveaway

I'd rather keep the giveaway isolated in a separate thread, so here's a link: https://www.completionator.com/Forum/PostList/5891

Thank you again for visiting the site and happy gaming!

Got 50% so far, some of them are quite obscure!

Are we allowed to help each other? im at 67%

Ah man, I'm a little late to this one lol. Exciting stuff! Here's to another 10 more!

(Plus, I'm also right at 87% :) Some of these are really hard!)

Edit: Finally reached 100% last night. Thanks to the Discord server for helping with the last couple of hold-outs!

I feel bad that the parking garage hint took me as long as it did to figure out considering the trauma I went through with that game.

Some of these others are pretty darned clever! 60% so far.

I'm sure I'm overthinking a lot of the ones I'm missing and not taking them literally enough.

Glad to see the hunt is on! A few notes:

• I think helping each other out is a great idea and I meant to say something in my post about trying to avoid spoilers for those that want to figure them out on their own. The site doesn't support spoiler tags, but Discord does, so this seems like a good time to share the server we have: https://discord.gg/Dq6ZUnq So yeah, helping out is great, but please try and put everything in spoiler tags!
• You guys are doing really well so far! Collectively, you all have unlocked 28 out of the 30 games. Out of the two remaining, one is what I would consider the hardest, but the other I'm a little surprised nobody has figured out yet.
• I considered having the hunt structured so games would drop in over time, meaning you would've only gotten, say, 15 today. Then in a few days another 5 would drop, then another 5, and so on. But I ran out of time...
• I also considered having additional clues that would show up over time, but again, I ran out of time. I might "unofficially" drop some on the forums, depending on how things go.
• I added a Scavenger Hunt link to the menu at the top for easy access. I'll likely remove it (or move it elsewhere), but you will still be able to access the clue page even after the hunt has concluded to see your results.

oh man this is awesome!!! and I didn't know about the discord server but I am definitely joining!

That was really fun! Got them all eventually, but some were pretty tricky! Congrats to Completionator on its birthday, and thanks y'all for helping to put together such a cool database. <3

"Riskiest battle system" had me stumped for a good bit. The gloves on, oh, I felt SO SILLY when it clicked. I legit searched the game up like 'there is no way it's th- WHAT'

Happy birthday Completionator!! I love your site, and thank you for all you do.

Happy birthday, Completionator!! Thanks for everything you've done for us!