Welcome to the all new UK Game Adverts! This site was first started back in 2020 as a pet project to chronicle the weird world of print gaming adverts. From our love of the gaming magazines of old and the various fun, questionable, silly and often problematic adverts than ran in them, we believed a site like this would be a great way to preserve, educate and enjoy these almost-forgotten pieces of media.
We realised around 12 months ago that the site wasn't really fit for purpose. The organisation was a bit chaotic and we were having a hard time tracking adverts and if they had been added to the database or not. With initial oversights like having to add separate adverts per platform and no way of making collections, there was a lot to think through and hopefully we have got one step closer to our ideal site.
With our new version of the site we have launched a brand new set of databases to keep on top of this and provide as much information on the adverts as we can. First off we have split databases for every system that an advert may feature on as well as for the magazines they feature in. This allows us to track each magazine and advert status easier. We have split adverts by various types (games, magazines, shops, books, films and tv, soundtracks, merchandise and catalogues) with space to add more categories if we find them. This means we can filter our advert database by these sections easier allowing for more thorough lists per platform. We have added a databases for Series of games so that we can easily showcase all adverts for Mario or Halo for example and a separate database has been added for all the developers, publishers and stores featured in our adverts. These databases are now all linked to our global adverts dataset which means we can easily link between and filter content to match parameters.
Now we can easily share all of the adverts produced by Sony or easily navigate to the small variety of adverts featuring the 32X. Shop adverts that have huge lists of software and their prices can now be easily linked to each individual game page, meaning we can easily see the fluctuations in software pricing through the years. Variations of the same advert can be easily added to the site and notes can be attached to both versions to show the changes. There are a variety of reasons that we had to get this system reorganised but hopefully you can see that it is worth the change.
The major cost to the site at this time is that we essentially have to rebuild our global advert database from scratch. While this is a pain, it does mean we can see where changes are needed and how to overcome any obstacles. This new system has also made it much quicker and easier to add entire magazines-worth of adverts so we should get back to our same amount of adverts in no time.
I will be back with a look at all the page changes in a few days but for now, happy discovering and please let us know if you find any problems with the site!
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