CITING THE CODEX
The Mega Drive Codex is built to be cited. Magazine scores carry their publication and issue number, scans are restored from original materials, and soundtracks are recorded from real PAL hardware with the methodology documented. If you use the Codex in an article, video, wiki entry, or research, this page tells you how.
Every game page lives at a permanent address of the formmegadrivecodex.com/games/{game-name}. These URLs are a commitment: they will not change or disappear. Link to them freely.
"Mortal Kombat II." Mega Drive Codex, https://www.megadrivecodex.com/games/mortal-kombat-ii. Accessed [date].
For a specific magazine score, cite the original publication first and the Codex as the source of the compiled data - every score on a game page lists its magazine and issue number for exactly this purpose.
Every magazine score in the archive is published as a single file, so it can be read as data rather than page by page. It holds 5,337 scores, one row per score, and was last built on 4 November 2026. It is rebuilt with the site, so the file you download is always current.
The columns. game_title and slug name the game and its page on this site; publisher and year are its release data; magazine and issue are where the score was printed;score and scale are the score itself.
Scale is the scale the magazine printed on: 100 for a percentage, and otherwise the magazine's own, such as 5 or 10. Nothing has been converted to a percentage, and nothing has been rounded: a Games-X score of 3.5 out of 5 is recorded as 3.5 with a scale of 5. Read every score against its own scale.
A blank issue means the issue is not recorded, not that the review had none. Issue 0 is a real issue number and appears as 0.
The file carries no averages. An average is a calculation made from this data, and the one shown on a game page is the mean of its percentage scores only. Anyone holding the file can work out their own.
Licence. The dataset is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), the licence the archive.org uploads already carry. Use it for anything, including commercially, as long as you credit the source: Mega Drive Codex, https://megadrivecodex.com.
Suggested citation. Mega Drive Codex. Magazine score dataset for the PAL Sega Mega Drive catalogue, version 2026-11-04. https://www.megadrivecodex.com/data/magazine-scores.csv. Accessed [date].
The compiled facts in the Codex - magazine scores, release data, credits - may be reused with attribution to the Mega Drive Codex and a link back. For reuse of restored scans or audio recordings (which represent substantial restoration work on original copyrighted materials), please get in touch first via the Submit page.
The Codex prefers a blank to a guess, and a correction to a blank. If you spot an error - a score, a date, a credit - sourced corrections are always welcome via the Submit page.