GemuBaka turns 14!

Put 14 candles on the birthday cake, because GemuBaka just turned 14 years old!

The GemuBaka timeline has been something that never really crossed my mind until all of the frequent updating I did in 2020. In that year, I had the thought, “GemuBaka might be hitting its 10th anniversary.” Silly me. I had to track down the old BlogSpot site, but the very first mention of the launching of GemuBaka was posted on May 19, 2008. It had already hit 12 years before the site’s legacy had even remotely crossed my mind!

With the date now on my radar, I should probably take the occasional moment to pat myself on the back in keeping something going online for 14 years. This means 2023 will be the site’s 15th anniversary, and it seems like there is some sort of rule that you have to really honor something every five years. I’ll have to start thinking now, huh?

When it comes to the history of GemuBaka, there really is a lot to unpack, and some of it involves a couple of lows that I don’t feel the need to bring up and revisit. However, it involves a number of highs. Back in 2008, I don’t think I ever believed I would toss aside video game news coverage and new game reviews and instead be creating full-fledged videos and archiving information about a couple of games that have been nearly lost to time.

GemuBaka has served as something I’ve nurtured over the years, and, again, if you would have told 2008 D.J. that GemuBaka would eventually a have certified mascot, logo and theme song, he probably would have thought you were crazy … No, really, GemuBaka has a theme song – it plays in my channel trailers on YouTube and Twitch, and I’m pretty sure that maybe five people have ever heard it.

What hasn’t changed over the years, though, is my love for arcades. In doing something small for the 14th anniversary of GemuBaka, I remembered I still had an archive of videos taken during the mid- to late aughts. These were taken on the first digital camera I ever owned, and it had this feature that recorded very, very low-quality videos with no sound whatsoever.

These were originally posted at other site locations, but with those no longer in use, the videos have become a sort of “lost” lot tucked away inside the GemuBaka vaults. The videos are nothing extravagant, but they serve as looks at games such as Dinosaur King and Ghost Squad when they were still “current” products in the arcade scene:

Once again, thanks to everybody who has ever visited or contributed to GemuBaka in any way. If I have it my way, I’ll keep at this for another 50 years!