Evan Amos was reading a Wikipedia article about the Nintendo Wii console when he noticed something peculiar.
"The picture they used was awful — really low-quality," he recalls.
Amos, a freelance photographer, was sitting at home in his Brooklyn, N.Y. apartment. He had a Wii system of his own, in the next room, and therefore, decided to replace it with a new, more professional-looking photo. Using his DSLR and a pair of strobe lights, he snapped a picture and uploaded it to the site:

Feeling satisfied, and now curious, he pulled up Wikipedia pages for other gaming systems. Again, the same low-resolution photos for thumbnails. "So I replaced those, too," he says.
He'd soon photographed and uploaded images of all the systems he owned — a Nintendo Gamecube and Xbox 360, on top of the Wii — until he realized he couldn't shoot any more. But he felt addicted; he knew he could continue producing better photos for the pages, but he needed the actual pieces of hardware to do so.
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That was three years ago. In the time since, Amos has created a massively diverse Wikimedia library of video game hardware photos, ranging from the PS3 to 1972's Magnavox Odyssey. You've probably seen a few of his photos without realizing it.
Last week, Amos raised more than $17,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, which he'll use to purchase more hardware and continue building what he says is the largest free archive of video game photos in the world.

"The first thing I did back then was make a giant list of every console I could think of."
Amos, lounging on a couch at Mashable HQ and reflecting on his project's earlier days, brushes the brown bangs out of his eyes and shrugs. "Once I had that, I thought, 'OK, this is great ... but now what do I do?'"
He decided to go with the practical route: Craigslist.
"I put an ad up that asked if anybody was a console collector and, if so, if they'd let me come over to their house to photograph."
He soon heard back from a young guy in Huntington, Long Island, who ran an eBay store out of his house. (Think Catherine Keener's character from The 40-Year-Old Virgin.) The man said he collected rare video game consoles in bulk, and invited Amos over to his home to take a look. Amos wasn't disappointed.
"I was there for hours. Hours," he says. "He had a roomful of consoles — every Sega system imaginable, different Ataris, the NES Top Loader. I just kept going from one to the other."
It was a good start to his journey, but if he was to complete his goal of photographing every piece of hardware produced, there was still a lot of ground to cover.
The next Craigslist response was from a small, independent game store in Manhattan called 8-Bit and Up. Again, Amos was thrilled by what he found: "The owners let me set up shop and take as many photos as I wanted. I spent the entire day there."
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He got in touch with a few more collectors, through Craigslist and Reddit, who were willing to let him photograph their consoles. At a certain point, though, Amos felt like he had reached a plateau.
"It got to where it didn't make sense to keep reaching out to people. I still wanted to do the project, of course, but the systems I still needed were rare and almost impossible to find," he says. "The only option was to buy them, but I didn't have the money."
So he took a break. He had just moved into a new apartment anyway, so he stayed busy renovating the loft and working on side projects. But the video game project, the unfinished one, the one the meant the most, never left his mind.
During the course of the hiatus, he noticed something else peculiar: The photos he had taken and uploaded to Wikipedia were being used by different media outlets. A lot of different media outlets.
"When you put something on Wikipedia, you have to put it into a free license and make it available for anyone to use," he says. "When you clear it for commercial use, then, you're basically putting it up for free."
His photos showed up in newspapers, magazines and blogs, like this one, that one and others, without crediting Amos as the photographer. It didn't bother him — this began as, and still was, a passion project. Income was never his target, but it was clear just how large of a reach his pictures had attained.
"So I knew I needed to find a way to get back into it," he says. "I just needed the money."
Here are a few of his photos you may have seen floating around the web:

Nintendo 64, Evan Amos

Sega Genesis, Evan Amos

PSP 1000, Evan Amos

Coleco Vision, Evan Amos

3DO FZ-1, Evan Amos
In early October, Amos launched the Kickstarter project to raise funds to purchase hardware. He asked for $8,000 in total. The project picked up some steam, but by the third week was still sitting shy of its goal. He got in touch with gaming blog Gamasutra and wrote an op-ed, called "The Power of Wikipedia: How I Became Gaming's Most Popular and Anonymous Photographer." It explained, in detail, what he was doing and why.
The article exploded. Readers shared it across gaming blogs, Facebook and Reddit, and as the final days ticked away on the project's timeline, donations poured in, more than doubling Amos' goal by the time the campaign ended.
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Image: Kickstarter, Evan Amos
"I couldn't believe it. I never expected this to get so much attention," he says.
And that's where he's at now. He currently has a list of what he needs; it's just a matter of tracking down and buying rare systems to shoot.
And Amos isn't planning to keep the consoles after he buys them, either. He currently has two partnerships, with the New York University Game Center and the National Museum of Play (in Rochester, N.Y.), where he'll donate the hardware after he's done photographing. Having the systems on display will let him access them at any time, if he wants to re-shoot something, photograph the insides or maybe film a short video clip. It also preserves the systems for generations to come, both IRL and in pictures.
"If I can make photos that help people, that can be used for years and years to come, that's good enough for me," he says. "Fifty years from now, a lot of these old consoles will be long-forgotten, but we'll still have these high-resolution photos to remember them by."
And what a thing to remember. Because, come on, who doesn't love video games?
You can access any of Amos' photos or donate your own hardware through his Wikimedia page.
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Images: Evan Amos ... we promise