pongman said:

hey wir sind deutsche!!wir ham die bürokratie erfunden!

jens kam schon mit ner excel liste um den hals auf die welt, darauf stand: bub - not boxed - rarity: unique instructions: missing

Hehe...

(But to be really precise, in this case it's a bunch of word documents - the plan is to publish it as a book and not as a free digital document. I've spend thousands of Euros and a couple hundred hours of work on this project so far and I need to have a real product in the end with my name on it.)

Can't say much about how the book will look like, but I can introduce the project.

I'm basically working on three things. First thing is a bibliography which contains (all) the German language articles, magazines, books and catalogs published about computer- and video-games between 1973 and 1985. Second is to have a list were you can find articles about special systems, games, etc. (Basically this is the same list but sorted in a different way.) And finally the third thing is a “who is who” with all the persons who have written articles and all the (German) people from the industry which are mentioned in the articles.

Biggest problem, but also the best source are the magazine articles. I've collected/checked about five thousand magazines from that time so far and found lots and lots of articles. Especially in the early eighties there was a real publishing boom about video games. (Articles can be found in all kind of publications from Der Spiegel to Playboy and most of them are not available as digital copies, so you have to look at them page by page.)

When we started the project, the idea was to do this on an European level, but as things evolved I found out that this is impossible to do as a one-man-hobby-project. Maybe I include video-game magazines and books from other European countries (CVG, Videogiochi, Tilt, etc.), but I'm unsure about that.

In any way it feels like a lifetime project, but when it's done, the door is wide open for further (academic) research about the early history of video games in Germany.