Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/New article announcements/2001

January 15th through February 28th
The prehistory of video game coverage on Wikipedia begins on 15 January 2001 (19:50:26 GMT) with the encyclopedia's second edit, when a redlink was introduced by office.bomis.com from "HomePage" (precursor to the "Main Page") to "Games" (a subset of "Recreation"). The creation of "Games" by dhcp058.246.lvcm.com on 22 February 2001 (01:05:44 GMT) did not contain any links to video game articles, however an edit by bln2-t6-1.mcbone.net only a half hour later (at 01:37:39 GMT) introduced redlinks to "Roleplaying Games" (today covered by WP:VG) and "Pokemon" (today covered by WP:POKE—a child project of WP:VG's Nintendo Task Force).

No evidence has been uncovered to suggest that any articles falling under the aegis of WP:VG were created between the publication of Wikipedia's first article (15 January 2001) and 1 March 2001.

March
Full list located here. March 2001 marked the publishing of Wikipedia's first video-game related subpage, Dune/Games (1 March 2001). At that time, mainspace subpages were used by some Wikipedians as a means to structure articles hierarchically, however this practice was deprecated in November 2001 and entirely replaced by the current system of Categorization in 2004. Many historical subpages (e.g. subpage lists of in-game items, characters, or geographical settings) would not be considered to meet the modern notability criteria, and because it has been WP:VG/NAA's practice to only provide announcements for full articles, subpages are not presented in this list of announcements.

The earliest record of a full stand-alone video game article at Wikipedia dates to 19 March 2001 (with the article Video games–a split from the earlier Games/video games), however the 16 March 2001 creation of StarCraft/Broodwar suggests that the idea of a StarCraft article arose yet earlier. Unfortunately the records from these earliest days are not readily available today. As a consequence of shifts from Phase I (UseModWiki) to Phase II (PHP script and now MediaWiki) software, many edits were not migrated in full and it is only by reviewing old English Wikipedia dumps (such as that which underpins Nostalgia wiki) that one may trace the origin of WP:VG's oldest articles.

April
Full list located here. April 2001 marks the publication of Wikipedia's earliest video-game related "disambiguation article": Asteroids (11 April 2001). At that time the modern concept of a mainspace but non-article "disambiguation page" had not been developed and so the article with the pagename of "Asteroids" covered both the "small, planet-like bodies that are part of our solar system" as well as the "popular vector based video arcade game from 197? [sic]".

May
Full list located here.

June
Full list located here.

July
Full list located here.

August
Full list located here.

September
Full list located here.

October
Full list located here.

November
Full list located here. November 2001 marks the first AfD nomination for a video game article (Theif–a misspelling of the simplified title for Thief: The Dark Project today serving as an "R from misspelling" redirect to Theft).

December
Full list located here. December 2001 marks the first successful AfD nomination for a video game article (Outstanding Super NES Games–a list of one user's favorite SNES titles).