Today, the 21st December 2022, is the fifth birthday of this website – thekingofgrabs.com. So happy birthday to us! Here are a few facts and quotes about this website, and some links to our recent favourites…

We hope that you continue to find this site useful and informative. And that it maybe inspires you to discover (or rediscover) great games from the past. Remember: a game is for life, not just for Christmas! 🙂

A few facts about this website:

1. Whenever we see a mistake we always correct it. A website is always editable and mistakes that we notice are always fixed. We are human and occasionally make mistakes, but we do fix them when we see them. This does not happen on many other websites!

2. We are always looking to enhance older entries by upgrading them where we feel is necessary. When we first started this website the sets were sometimes much shorter. We have added more screenshots to those we later thought were too short. You may not have noticed but pages like Fallout: New Vegas, Bruce Lee II, Tempest 2000, We Love Katamari and Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts have all recently been upgraded to give you better screenshots. This is part of our commitment to constantly improve this website.

3. There are no advertisements on this website; no affiliate links, and minimal tracking. WordPress uses cookies to do some basic tracking, which we need to get visitor viewing statistics, but there are no Google Analytics cookies or any other third party tracking used. We believe in not bombarding visitors with ads (in fact: we dislike advertising in all its hideous forms – especially online advertising, which has a bad reputation in our opinion), and we will keep this site free, and without advertising, for as long as is possible. We even pay WordPress to remove their ads from this site. All links to other websites (including those to Steam and GOG.com) are bare links and contain no affiliate tracking, nor are we paid a cut if you buy a game after using our links. They are simply there to provide you with further information.

4. WordPress (unfairly in our opinion) refuses to show many of our blog posts in its Reader app because we often use more then ten tags in our posts. Our tags are meant to be descriptive of each individual game, and they also feature the names of all the people who worked on each title. Sometimes that means a lot of people. Rather than restrict our inclusion of the names of important contributors to a game’s development we take a hit on views because WordPress cannot differentiate between “thorough” usage and “spammy” usage. We wish there was some way around this, but apparently WordPress will not feature posts with more than ten tags in its Reader. So be it. We’d rather include the names of all the principle devs on a post than only feature a few, or remove the dev names entirely. Because we think it’s important to be fair and thorough on the issue of contributors to a video game’s development.

5. Our categories feature only three different types: Systems, Companies, and Top-Level Categories like “Homebrew“, “Modern Retro“, and “Bad Video Games” (ie. important categories that don’t fit into Systems or Companies).

6. It takes a lot of work to make this website. We play all the games ourselves and take our own screenshots, and we process and watermark them all. Every screenshot on this website is watermarked – whether you can see the watermark or not. Some watermarks are obvious, while others are not. A good proportion of the screenshots also require cropping, which we do manually to ensure that they’re consistent and symmetrical. We also take great care to choose the best screenshots to publish; to choose and publish the right amount of screenshots per game, and to write our own reviews. That all takes time, but ultimately it’s worth it because some people enjoy what we’ve created.

7. We try to update the site every day. During 2020 our principle writer and webmaster had a medical emergency which meant having to take a break for a while to allow him to recuperate. Thankfully he got well enough to return and start writing again, eventually getting back to updating every day. At the time of writing we’ve managed to add at least one new update (sometimes multiple updates) every day for the past 469 days.

8. There are currently over 2,430 different games featured on this website and that number is growing every day. Our aim is to create a useful resource for gamers to browse, read and draw inspiration from as they discover new games, or see screenshots of games they might already know about.

9. We love all games and gaming platforms and try to include as wide a variety of titles as possible. We, of course, prefer some systems and genres over others and occasionally write ‘specials’ that highlight certain subjects in depth. These take a lot of time and effort to prepare. Our recent Ultima Special, for example, took weeks of work to prepare, write and publish.

10. Every screenshot on this site can be viewed full-size, by selecting that option in the User Interface. Most screenshots are uploaded in an uncompressed, lossless format – unless the combined size of a set is very large (in which case we compress them down to save disk space). The WordPress CMS automatically creates pages with intermediate-sized images, but if you drill down, you’ll always find the full-size – often uncompressed – version. In some browsers the site automatically shows sets of grabs in a carousel, so that visitors can easily cycle or swipe through them in order. There are multiple ways of viewing our grabs, whether on desktop or mobile.

A few quotes about this website:

“If you want a superbly-curated coffee table book about games delivered in website form, The King of Grabs is it.
Ever expanding, often via the least travelled byways of gaming history, the site is the very best kind of rabbit hole; one you’ll lose hours to and emerge at the end of it enlightened and eager to delve deeper the next time you pass by.
In an age of churning trend-induced, SEO-driven “content”, The King of Grabs is an oasis of singular knowledge, experience and passion, produced by someone who has lived every word and screenshot. All hail the King of Grabs.”
Richie Shoemaker, Editor MCV/Develop

“It’s good to have someone who still champions the art of grabbing, while giving fair coverage and thorough research of all generations of gaming. There’s a whole bunch of games I’d have never discovered without The King. Here’s to five more years!”
Bishmanrock, 43DM Software

“Makes me realise my exhaustive and comprehensive knowledge of the subject is in fact pitiful and pathetic when compared to this most magnum of opuses.”
David Brown, Games Press

A few recent favourites:

Our thirty favourite games added to thekingofgrabs.com over the past twelve months (in chronological order):

Ultima IX: Ascension, PC
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, Atari ST
Fallout: New Vegas: Dead Money, PC
Deux Ex: Mankind Divided, PC
Deus Ex: Human Revolution, PC
Silent Hill 3, PlayStation 2
The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, GameCube
Mad Max, PC
Alien Isolation, PC
South Park: The Stick of Truth, PC
Albert Odyssey: Legend of Eldean, Sega Saturn
Shining Soul II, Game Boy Advance
Stunt Car Racer, Commodore 64
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team, Game Boy Advance
Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord, Sega Master System
Half-Life 2: Episode Two, PC
Half-Life, PC
Rogue Trooper Redux, PC
Spindizzy, Amstrad CPC
Sorcery Plus, Amstrad CPC
King’s Field IV, PlayStation 2
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, GameCube
Doom, PC
Pokémon Black Version 2, Nintendo DS
Pokémon Black Version, Nintendo DS
Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, PC Engine CD
Knight Lore, Commodore 64
Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, GameCube
Pokémon Colosseum, GameCube
Virtua Racing Deluxe, Sega 32X
Pokémon Gold Version, Game Boy Color

Thank you for your support,
The King of Grabs