You forgot MobyGames. One of our recent members is a cover artist, who's submitting stuff back from the 1980s!

Researching gaming history has also useful applications (apart from that warm feeling of nostalgia). Old ideas can be remade into successful new games. On the other hand, replacementdocs founder admitted that his website is used by government agency staff... because it's easy to browse game manuals gathered in single place, when one needs to compare technical solutions/creative input, when it comes to issuing patents, legal battles in court etc.

On a side note, history is everything but a boring subject. Brave knights, fallen kingdoms, mad scientists, power-hungry leaders - that's not some fantasy story, it all really happened! Rejecting things solely because they're not new is primitivism!

Many self-proclaimed geeks are knowledge-hungry, novelty is like a drug for them. But that thing they've just learned, "new" to them, doesn't have to be actually new. Finding 100-year-old facts unknown to you (and most people) can be just as exciting as reading about nanotechnology advancements.

Right! MobyGames is kind of obvious, so I didn't mention it :)

Yeah, that's absolutely right :) Recently Boris Akunin published a book of some of the curious historical facts and stories that he had collected (and initially posted in his blog) while doing research for his historical novels. He intended to incorporate these stories in his own works (and indeed his novels are full of references to real historical facts, even minor and not known to general public) but then had to abandon that idea because he felt that some of those true stories were so much "stranger than fiction" no one would ever believe that something like that really happened and he didn't make it up ^_^