It is my utmost pleasure to announce that almost exactly a year after launching the original GamesWatch website in 2018 I am launching the new and improved version of the game reference website for game creators and game fans. For those of you who aren’t familiar with GamesWatch, I would like to tell you about what it is and how it came to be.

The initial idea of GamesWatch came to me back in 2017 while I was playing Mad Max on PS4. I was enjoying the the game and its small design details so, so much. It made me realise that as an UI designer, I could learn a lot from games. I wished there was a place where I could browse a vast collection of game designs and this motivated me to make a crudely coded HTML prototype of how this page could look like.

Fast forward to January 2018, a year later, to me launching the first version of GamesWatch knowing that I could do a lot more in terms of the user experience, the code base and features.

So much has changed in the past year. During this time I realised GamesWatch could be so much more. I find games amazing, beautiful and fascinating. There’s so much work going into them. There’s so much to know about the stories they tell, the state of the art technologies that are used to make them, the stories of the people making them… I wish there was a place where people could spend their time getting to know the world of games — the trivia, the lingo, the history, the creators. All of it. I want to create this place and I know I need to start with the basics.

This is the reason I spent last year redesigning and rebuilding the whole website from scratch. It’s completely rebuilt in React, with Next.js, a framework for server-rendered React applications, and Sanity — the Norwegian headless CMS. It is now faster, superior to the previous version with lots of technical improvements under the hood but the best of it are the user experience improvements.