Videogame Websites: The Definitive Review
Apols in advance for the name-dropping
Part of the untold lore1 behind the founding of this (yet to be fully) esteemed organ concerns the rise of videogame websites in the mid-2000s. Back then, a medium under transition saw major print publishers and newly-minted independents launch rafts of gaming websites. Many played a token online counterpart to bigger-brother printed magazines, with a million amateur-cum-pro minnows swimming between the publisher sharks and ‘the big three’ independents. Only the biggies gained sufficient followings to catch the eye of videogame publishers and their associated PR departments and contracted agencies. While the transition was obvious, for many old hands it was inconceivable that print would ever melt away under the white-hot heat of online news, reviews and discourse2. Of course, they were wrong. But then a lot of people were. Over the next twenty years we see such consolidation in the online space, the development of seemingly permanent institutions serving thousands of words a day. Only that permanence was illusory - the new paradigm for the Internet is not eternal access, but a commercially-mandated pro tempore status. Permanence as virtual as the text itself. This was brought into pin-sharp focus for me with the slow decline and now officially-announced death of Vice, a property that felt in a kind of post-90s, hipster agitant, give-no-fucks kindship with Gawker and, by extension, the Crecente-launched OG Kotaku. Between them, they personify the blistering development of online text in the post-web1.0 age. It was a tweet on Vice’s death from Rich Stanton, backed with similar reactions from Keza McDonald3, that caught the resonance for me. Vice’s dissolution (and its earlier loss of Waypoint4) was another outright deletion of good videogame writing from public access. Rich and Keza had already lost portfolio gems from Kotaku UK’s abrupt closure, which recalls the sheer weirdness of Edge Online just dissipating without any fanfare at all. The problem of course is that the writing just ceases to exist - it seems nothing can be done to secure the archives once they are lost. We have to place faith in The Wayback Machine for any hope of revisiting that erased past. In reality, we have to wonder if corporate responsibility requirements like off-site backups also end up lost once provider contracts are cancelled, leaving us with the possibility that the sum total of writing for all of Vice’s online-only content will eventually only exist as drafts in the writers’ personal files.
Edge Online was personal for me as some of my very earliest online writing appeared there, thanks to Alex Wiltshire and my habit of sneaking actual videogame talk onto PR emails. I doubt I have much to be proud of in terms of writing quality, but given that my very first bits of ‘professional’ writing were broadcast as Teletext for Game Central, I have always had a sense of how ephemeral and temporary they are. I likely still have my Game Central writing buried deep in my emails, but those drafts won’t be the same texts that made the screen - much like my Edge Online bits and pieces. This left me considering the stuff I did for Eurogamer. Given its own perilous position we should all know the looming threat that both Eurogamer and RPS face, not to mention the other luminaries in the Reedpop catalogue. And our grim knowledge of what’s likely to happen underlines the fundamental issue at play with online text; it seemingly has no value as a personal commodity.
I’m reminded again of the canny way that piracy swoops in to save the past. Just as the whims and capricious fancies of streaming platforms and international rights holders mean that the canon of great movies is scattered across far too many monthly-subbed accounts, with plenty actually absent from legal channels, the idea of an immutable DVD and Blu-Ray collection has found renewed vigour. Likewise, the splendour of a fabulously-curated xvid/divx/mkv collection on a portable HDD offers far more richness and value than the likes of Netflix or Prime can serve on their very best days5. Of course, videogame writing has its jolly-roger counterpart. If you want any issue of Edge for example, you can get it as either scans or the digital version PDF. That’s the difference a tangible object brings - if there is kudos amongst the pirates to be the first to upload the latest issue, then an archive will grow and its organic, community-led distribution ensures a particular immortality that’s completely free of the constraints and control of commerce. The fact that literally 20 years ago, I was able to acquire complete runs of Zzap 64 and Crash as page-scan JPGs means I don’t have to damage my real copies to read them, and when you consider that the entire back catalogue of nearly every videogame magazine published in the UK has been comprehensively scanned and archived and distributed, you can grasp the sheer force of will for this to happen - this is the degree to which that content is valued. Quite why we haven’t taken on the same idea of value for online writing is perhaps down to that lack of encapsulation into a commodity such as a magazine issue. The notion that online text is a rolling, continuous stream prevents us from commodifying it via quantisation, even if particularly famous and infamous news days in videogame history make for fascinating snapshots - especially if you include reader commentary as a vital part of the overall text. But the anomaly remains - why not just impose that quantisation to create volumes of commercial worth? Do Millennials and Gen-Z not have the same nostalgic pangs for influential and instrumental game website writing they encountered in their formative years? Or is the general urge to preserve affixed more to the notion of immortalising increasingly unobtainable, fragile objects like magazines from decades past, printed on cheap paper, a Gen-X anxiety born from straddling the content-poor 80s and 90s and content-rich 21st Century? But yet we can all commodify online text if we want to. Isn’t it the case that a collection of reviews and post-release features on a single format’s top ten games would make an interesting and valuable document? It’s actually only recently struck me that in the age of on-demand printing, it’s kinda mind-blowing that big gaming websites don’t offer some kind of annual or quarterly printed digest of the best writing they’ve published. I wonder if we should be urging Eurogamer to get on that as quickly as possible, with the Verge and Polygon to be cajoled too. I mean, I’d buy a Donlan and Edwin best-of, right? We have to ask why it’s the audience that’s left to determine the lasting value of these texts, or is the print/online divide still so bitterly oppositional at some primal level that the thought, the belief that value can be created by bringing online ephemera into permanent print is simply beyond consideration?
Of course, there’s not that much stopping private individuals from snaffling their own portfolios of favourite writing and casting them into print, but as ever it’s case of simply giving enough fucks to do so. But then I’m reminded of arch-archivist Jason Scott’s heroic effort in the face of Geocities’ looming erasure6. Bought by Yahoo in 1999, Geocities was home to a universe of late-90s homepages from those golden years of wild-west Internet, where so many built their own first little homestead amongst the infinite domain of cyberspace. Of course the vast majority were terrible or boring, but many were amazing and as a vast cultural resource, Geocities was a capsule of online culture from the web’s earliest days of popular adoption. Yahoo declared the intention to close Geocities in 2009, prompting Scott to mobilise a team of volunteers to begin a scriptpocalypse downloading spree, given that storage and bandwidth had expanded to the point where downloading Geocities’ 23 million pages was not only possible, but eminently achievable. Pithily dubbed a ‘distributed preservation of service attack’, over 1 terabyte of Geocities content was recovered and along with parallel initiatives from other groups, it seems that the archive is largely complete. It just took enough people to give a shit about stealing the present to protect it for the future. It was a brazen and direct and quite loud defiance of IP law, but it proved the worth and preserved that which Yahoo deemed worthless. We have to remember that for the most part, videogames writing online is merely text and JPGs, and you can probably do without the JPGs. Given the atmosphere across the entire industry, it’s practically begging us to launch that preservation of culture. At the time of writing, Vice is still online. It can be saved, but seemingly only by us, the consumers. And only if we value what we’re going to lose instead of lamenting when it’s too late. We need to really grasp the implication that the collapse of Kotaku UK, Edge Online, Vice is shouting into our faces - if we’re the only ones that care about it, we have to be the ones to save it.
[21]
I fully intend to disclose this lore when I finally get round to releasing a podcast.
I remember us taking a lift with two editors, both Future Publishing, one a print editor and the other an old hand leading one of then-major online brands for Future. Somehow they got to bantering about print vs online, the old hand calling the print editor a dinosaur. The print editor could only laugh in response and insist print would reign for many years, and the sniping had more than a tinge of venom to it. Needless to say, I had been told that the print editor was an unsavoury term for female genitalia by several people, but then I had been told that about nearly everyone in a senior position at Future, by someone, at some point. Except for James Binns. But the issue was clear - the transition was well underway, even if a major print publisher liked it or not. And even then, despite best efforts, they couldn’t match IGN and Gamespot’s figures and as it turns out, never did.
I'm not sure if Keza would even remember but we briefly met while I was on a PR mission to Highbury House's Bournemouth office in the midst of ownership-swapping tumult. I was having a mild natter with Keza and Martin Mathers when none other than Kelvin "the fucking prick's fucking prick" McKenzie arrived to deliver a booming inspirational speech to the entire floor. Full of self-assured confidence and bravado for a new dawn in the Highbury House story, the entire publisher collapsed within a year. What a fucking prick.
There was recently a funny Cyber episode (that I cannot find !?!?) made by some of the ex-Waypoint team and other Vice alumni about the death of the company, its ludicrous internal workings and abysmal CMS. It's well worth a listen. Err, if you can find it
If you knew Cinemageddon, you probably know what I mean.
Jason presents the Archive Team philosophy and projects, including downloading Geocities, here: