I've long wanted to compile a private "timeline" consisting of various video game consoles, peripherals and games which I want to remember and quickly be able to look up when they were released. I also would like to see sales figures for these "releases".
Currently, I use Wikipedia, MobyGames, GameFAQs and VGChartz to manually check these things. It's extremely tiresome in the long run since I very often want to quickly check when this or that video game for SNES was released in Europe, or in the USA, or in Japan. Or how many copies it sold. Or what the exact spelling was for this or that console, and which day it was released in the PAL region. Or see them in relation to other games I care about, which I would only be able to do if I had complete data to construct my "timeline view".
Is there such a public, coherent database with reliable information in a sane format? For example, CSV or JSON.
The sites I've mentioned (except for Wikipedia) do not provide their information in any kind of parsable format, and actively block scraper bots. MobyGames has an "API" page which just tells you to contact them and beg for access, which I'm not interested in.
I'm looking for some resource which provides a list such as .../game_releases.csv:
"official full title","popular title","platform","publisher","EU release","AU release","US release","JP release"
"DOOM II: Hell on Earth","DOOM 2","PC","id Software",1994-05-05","1994-05-05","1994-05-05","1994-05-05"
"Donkey Kong Country","DKC","SNES","Rare","1994-05-05","1994-05-05","1994-05-05",,
...
And then ones called game_console_releases.csv and peripheral_releases.csv. Or maybe all combined into one.
To make it clear: I'm trying to find such a source from which to create my own local database of this data so that I can freely construct my timeline in the way I want it, with accurate and reliable data which I don't have to manually look up.
I'm mostly interested in this data for stuff released before the year 2000, since that's roughly when I feel video games died, but of course it doesn't hurt if it has fresh information as well!
