PSX PAL Database

Creator, Developer & Maintainer

PSX PAL Database is a specialist catalogue I built and maintain documenting every PlayStation 1 game released in PAL regions — currently 1,477 games across 4,379 variants, from over 160 publishers and 560 developers, spanning 22 PAL countries.

PAL PlayStation 1 game collection — the database is built from real PAL releases

Why it exists

The PAL region is a genuinely fascinating corner of PS1 collecting — the same game shipped in countless variations across pressings, labels and national markets — yet there was never a central place to document it properly. As original copies are lost, damaged or modified, the knowledge of how these games actually looked and what they came with at launch disappears with them. The database exists to preserve that physical history before it’s gone.

PAL PlayStation 1 consoles — the hardware behind a generation of releases

The wealth of information collected

This isn’t a list of titles — it’s a deep record of the physical artefact. For every variant the database captures:

Physical specifications — case type (Full Jewel PAL, Mini Jewel, Multiway, Cardboard, Rental), hologram variation, serial number (SCES/SLES), and EAN barcode
Release information — release date, publisher(s), developer(s), languages, country of release, and release category across 29 distinct types (launch, Platinum, budget labels, reprints, special editions)
Contents & documentation — loose paperwork, case stickers, bundled demo discs and included languages
Visual documentation — front and back cover scans, disc art, manual covers, barcode images and insert paperwork

Three copies of Spider-Man 2 — different PAL pressings of the same game, exactly the variants the database distinguishes

How it’s built

The whole thing is a data pipeline with a static front end. A SQLite database is the single source of truth, populated from Google Sheets via Python, which generates roughly 7,000 pages of Hugo markdown. The site is intentionally lightweight — vanilla CSS/JS with no frameworks, full-text search via Pagefind, and selectable themes (including a 90s throwback). A companion Android app lets me scan barcodes in the wild to catalogue releases on the spot, and visitors can submit corrections or missing data directly from any variant page.

PAL PlayStation jewel cases — case type and spine are recorded for every variant

It’s an ongoing labour of love, built with and for the wider PS1 collecting community.