Thirteen advertisement image slots. That number is the first signal that this database was built by someone who documents game ephemera with the same seriousness a numismatist applies to coin provenance — and who understands that for certain collector communities, the magazine advertisement for a 1985 NES title is as historically significant as the cartridge itself.
The Archive Problem in Physical Game Collecting
Physical game collections that grow past a few hundred titles without documentation become functionally unmanageable within a few years. You stop knowing what you have. You stop knowing what condition things are in. You buy duplicates at a swap meet because you can't remember if you already own a particular title. You sell something and lose track of what you paid for it.
More seriously, for a collection with genuine market value — complete-in-box Atari 2600 titles, CIB NES cartridges, factory-sealed SNES variants — the absence of documentation creates estate valuation problems and insurance claim problems that are expensive to resolve after the fact.
A database with 44 fields per entry is not casual inventory management. It's an archive.
Physical Documentation: The 22 Image Fields
The structure separates physical item documentation from marketing ephemera from gameplay content.
Front Cover, Back Cover, and three Media slots document the physical cartridge or disc itself. Inside Cover 1 and 2 handle the instruction booklet and any included inserts — for collectors, the booklet condition is often as important as the cartridge or case condition in determining CIB grade. The Other through Other 4 slots capture anything outside the standard documentation structure: registration cards, poster inserts, foam padding in premium boxes, the overlay card that sat on top of an Atari 2600 cartridge.
The four Screenshot slots document the actual game content — useful both for verification (does the game play as described, is this the correct revision) and for the kind of visual catalogue entries that make a database shareable.
The thirteen Advertisement fields are the most unusual element in any game collection template. Serious collectors of certain era games — specifically pre-crash Atari era, mid-1980s NES period, and 16-bit era titles — track contemporary advertising both because it establishes historical pricing and marketing context and because complete documentation of a game's commercial history is part of the archival record. A 1983 Activision print advertisement from Electronic Games magazine is a primary source document. Thirteen slots allows for a complete national advertising campaign documentation across different magazines and years.
Platform and Genre Classification
The Platform dropdown and Platforms multichoice field work together: Platform captures the primary system the entry is catalogued under, Platforms captures every system a title was released on. A multiplatform release catalogued under Sega Genesis can still show its NES, SNES, and PC releases in the Platforms multichoice — which drives completionist decisions about which platform's version to prioritize.
Genre as multichoice and the Sport/Non-Sport theme split is the classification layer that enables browsing a collection by play style rather than just by title or platform. The dual theme field structure accommodates sports game sub-classification — a football game and a basketball game are both Sports but have completely different collector demographics and value curves.
Developer and Publisher are separate fields because they're often different entities, and that distinction matters for certain collector focuses — studio-completionist collectors (everything published by a particular developer) need both fields accurate to build filtered views of their target acquisitions.
Released and Year appear to be redundant, but they're not: the date field captures the specific release date where known; the year integer allows rapid sorting and filtering without full date precision for titles where only the release year is documented.
The Acquisition and Completion Layer
Buy Price in currency creates the cost basis record that makes collection valuation possible. Combined with current market values (tracked externally through VGPC or eBay sold listings), the delta shows which parts of the collection have appreciated and by how much — relevant for insurance, relevant for sell decisions, and relevant for understanding which acquisition strategy has been most effective.
Completed as a boolean is the playing status flag — separate from owning, which is the whole database. You can own 600 games and have completed twelve of them. That's also data.
Notes and Description split narrative content: Description carries the title's published summary and historical context; Notes carries personal observations — "bought at Pink Elephant in Rotterdam 2019, cartridge only, missing dust sleeve, plays perfectly" — the kind of detail that makes a personal archive different from a commercial catalogue.
Two URL fields link out to MobyGames entries, GameFAQs, or other reference sources — the external documentation layer that the database cross-references without needing to replicate.