One Man Spent Three Years Documenting Every Namco Museum Ever Made

Andrew Elmore has finished a project that sounds simple and is anything but: a complete accounting of every Namco Museum release ever put out, across every platform and region, with no exceptions.

His own description is blunt about the scope. Every single port of every collection of old games that Namco ever released, across all platforms and regions, without exception. The Namco Museum series started on the original PlayStation in the early 32-bit days and never really stopped, jumping from console to console for decades, each version reshuffling and recontextualizing the same core of arcade classics. Pinning all of it down took Elmore around three years, and the result is a roughly two-hour video walking through the lot. Elmore is not a tourist here either: he is a designer and composer who has worked at Epic and Bungie and made the Ridge Racer Type 4 tribute album Real Racing Roots.

Why does this matter? Because the Namco Museum series is itself one of the more important preservation efforts the industry ever ran, even if it was never branded that way. For a lot of people, those collections were the only legal way to play Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Galaga, and the rest for years, and each release is a snapshot of what Namco at that moment thought its own history was worth keeping. Documenting the collections is documenting the act of preservation, which is a level most people never think about.

This is the unglamorous backbone of retro culture, the cataloguing nobody is paid to do. One person decided the record should exist and spent three years making sure it does. I have a lot of respect for that, and it is a reminder that a huge amount of what we know about gaming history survives only because some obsessive decided it should. Go watch it, and maybe go thank the people who keep the lists.