Back in 2007, a visionary named Kris Johnson had a brilliant idea. Earlier that year, the podcaster Evo Terra was doing daily posts showing his 5-o’clock shadow. Kris thought it would be fun to do the same, but sadly the results were barely visible. Inspired by National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), he decided instead to grow a beard for the entire month of November and record it for posterity on his blog. And given his lack of previous success, he decided to call it How Not To Grow A Beard Month, or HoNoToGroABeMo.

In 2008, he was joined in his quest by other deficiently hirsute individuals on a website built by Bob Voegerl. And in 2009, I joined them (though in truth I can produce a pretty decent and might I say crackling manhedge). That year, Bob decided to put a little more skin into the game, as it were, and turned it into a charity contest where the beard grower who raised the most money would be declared the winner, with all the gloating privileges one would expect — the charity in this case being breast cancer research, in memory of his mother. We continued raising money and making people laugh with our facial hair until 2013, after which it sort of petered out and the site was eventually lost to the mists of the Internet.

“Okay,” you say, “that’s very entertaining and all, but what does any of this have to do with games?” Well, in 2011, in order to encourage more charitable giving I decided to give my posts a theme — namely, vintage games. And since the HoNoGroABeMo site is now defunct, I thought it’d be fun to repost them here (thanks to Bob for helping me recover the old data). So for the month of July, sit back and relax as I return to the time of the Arab Spring, the last flight of the Space Shuttle, and when Mission Impossible, Transformers, and the latest J.K. Rowling opus were all in the theaters (okay, maybe things haven’t changed that much). Hope you enjoy it!