This paper studies the popular historiography of digital gaming. By using the Finnish
context as a case example and analyzing hundreds of popular game-history-related
articles, mostly from computer and game hobbyist magazines and newspapers, the
paper presents a categorization of four different waves of historical awareness. All the
waves emphasized different ways of writing and presenting game history, some
focusing more on global issues and some on national and local phenomena. Some of
the material was more oriented to personal or individual experiences and some merely
toward the collective or general characteristics of gaming. The four-wave
categorization and presented topics can be applied to other game historiographical
studies to create a richer picture of how the academic and popular histories of games
and game cultures have been written.