Interactive History
Interactive History, also called The Archive, lives inside the Library. It puts the machines and games in your collection into context: curated timelines, eras and events, long-form articles, and quizzes with leaderboards.
:::note Members-only Interactive History is for signed-in members, on every plan including the free one. Sign in to open the History tab in the Library.
Signed-out visitors browsing the Library will see cards pointing at published timelines, but opening one asks you to sign in first. :::
Three ways in
The History tab opens on a choice of routes into the archive:
| Way in | What it does |
|---|---|
| Browse by platform | Start from a machine (a console, computer or handheld) and follow its story. |
| Browse by manufacturer | Start from a maker and follow everything they built. |
| Random discovery | Drop into a timeline you weren't looking for. |
Whichever you pick, you land on that subject's timeline.
Timelines, eras and events
A timeline walks you through the story of one platform or one manufacturer, from early releases to the machines people collect today. Timelines are organised into eras, and each event marks a key moment: a launch, a milestone, a turning point.
Open a timeline to scroll through its events in order. Each event can link off to a fuller article when you want the detail behind the date.
Articles
Articles go deeper than a timeline entry, covering the people, hardware and games that shaped retro tech, split into sections with images and cited sources. Read them on their own, or follow through from a timeline event to the article that explains it.
Quizzes and leaderboards
Quizzes let you test what you know across retro computing and gaming. They're attached to a timeline, so they ask about the story you've just read.
Questions come in several forms: multiple choice, true or false, identifying a machine from an image, putting events in chronological order, and matching something to its year. Each quiz has its own difficulty, its own pass mark, and may carry a time limit; some are also locked until you've reached a particular event or year in the timeline they belong to.
- Open a quiz from the History tab.
- Answer each question in turn.
- Submit to see your score, review the answers, and check where you land on the leaderboard.
Each timeline has its own leaderboard, pooling the best attempts across all of that timeline's quizzes. It ranks on percentage score first, then on how fast you finished, so a tie is broken by time, not by who got there first. It shows the top ten by default.
Only usernames appear on a leaderboard. If you haven't set one, your entry reads Anonymous. No other detail from your account is shown.
Your own past attempts are kept, so you can see what you've taken and come back to beat your best.
When an article or timeline covers a machine you own, it's a handy companion to its entry in the Library: same platform, fuller story.