An independent archive of video game history before 1990
Bosnan is a free, independent, non-commercial reference archive for the first three decades of video games — the mainframe experiments of the 1960s, the arcade boom, the 8-bit home consoles and the home-computer scenes that grew up beside them.
The archive currently holds 427 game entries and 205 long-form essays, organised into 76 reference sections. Alongside the games themselves it documents the things around them that are usually lost first: the arcade boards and sound chips the games ran on, the developers, composers and pixel artists who made them, the magazines that reviewed them, and the cancelled projects, prototypes and lost games that never reached anyone at all.
The cut-off is roughly 1990. A title qualifies if it was released, announced or credibly documented before then; hardware, people and publications qualify if their significant work falls in the same window. Later material appears only where it is directly about that era — a revival, a re-release, or a ROM hack of a game the archive already covers.
Every entry is written for this site rather than syndicated. Entries are cross-referenced: a game links to its developer, platform, genre and franchise, and those pages link back, so the archive can be read as a network rather than a list. Where an entry draws on a specific published source, that source is named on the entry itself.
Corrections are welcome and wanted. Retro gaming history is full of figures that get copied between sites without anyone checking them, and this archive is not immune to that.
Bosnan is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any game publisher, hardware manufacturer or rights holder mentioned in the archive. Company names, game titles and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here for identification and commentary. The archive does not host or distribute game ROMs.
There is no advertising, no paywall, no tracking beyond what the host records, and nothing for sale.
New readers usually start with the game index, the platform histories, or the essays. A random game works too.