I’m Only Here Because I Was A Forum Poster

“How do I get my start in the gaming press?” is a question that’s difficult to answer. The reasons for this are twofold. First, media is constantly being slowly strangled, so the answer is often, to quote Tim Meadows in Dewey Cox, “you don’t want no part of this shit.” Second, origin stories are often convoluted for journalism and even more convoluted for video games journalism. Getting here can be a mixture of luck, work and privilege that’s impossible to replicate or recommend. But for me, my start was with posting, and in particular the forums for 1up.com.

I did not get hired from the forums, although I know people who did get work that way. I got my job at Kotaku because of a mixture of previous experience and a friend in the industry who had seen an opening at Gawker media. I had been freelancing since I’d gotten out of film school in 2008 (great year to enter the job market!) and accrued a collection of internships and poorly-paying jobs from companies that were interesting at the time and have all uniformly collapsed in one way or another: Gawker, Rocketboom (the then parent company of KnowYourMeme), Pitchfork and Vice, the last of which paid less than when I worked at Trader Joe’s. None of that shit ended up mattering. I met the friend who recommended the gig on Myspace, which is very much an old person's sentence and makes my bones feel like they are losing calcium. Kotaku hired me for the princely starting salary of $38,000 a year, but 1UP is where I was formed, and so bears a healthy degree of blame for me being here.

1UP and its podcast network were unique for the time. Podcasting was still fairly new, and there were not a lot of places to hear people talk about games like normal people. The entire network (including but not limited to 1UP Yours, The 1UP Show, EGM Live, Retronauts and GFW Live) was shockingly intimate, and enabled a kind of parasociality that is often now the norm when it comes to games press. This was both insightful and oftentimes very unhealthy, another very common dynamic in the world of video game personalities. But what was novel to me was the way that people on 1UP talked about the process of reporting on games. The mid-aughts was the era of New Games Journalism – people writing real chin-stroking, up their own ass prose about video games, the way god intended. Listening to the podcasts was how I learned the process of how the game business worked, like game previews and what “being under embargo” meant. It was a preview for what I would end up doing for well over a decade now.

The various 1UP forums themselves existed as weird appendages to the network, various sub-boards devoted to different shows. There was a degree of community involvement that is now not special, particularly with the rise of Twitch and Discord. Your comments or blogs might end up mentioned on one of the shows, although the joke was that much of the staff themselves would post more on GAF than their own forums. There was also a blogging platform, a whole space where you could build out a body of work, something that is kind of rare now. There was something about 1UP that felt tacitly encouraging, as if to say “Hey, you could do this too one day.” 

The forums were also where I ended up meeting a lot of people. I met Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb and GamesBeat’s Mike Minotti there, along with many others including my friends AJ Minotti and Mark, who went by Beige, and created the longest posts I had ever seen. There were too many posters to count, most of whom don’t work in this field at all, but I still see them on Instagram or Facebook from time to time. We even started a little podcast on the 1UP Yours board, called the Squadron of Shame, formed from our forum threads, where we played games in our Pile of Shame and talked robustly and pretentiously. That writing and audio is, mercifully for me at least, now vaporized.

“I was on the forums, but I was actually using the 1UP blogs way more frequently,” Jeff Grubb reminisced. “I would post my blogs and comment on those of others. That was always more my speed than trying to keep up with the forums. But I would hop into the forums and there were a lot of people in my orbit who spent a lot of time on there. And I only really started noticing that when the podcasts started taking off. For one, friends of friends -- like Beige -- would get mentioned on 1UP Yours in the email section. And I knew him from reading his blogs, but I think hearing his name opened me up to the fan podcasts that were happening in the 1UP-sphere. I learned about the Squadron of Shame, which was like this big community initiative and involved all these big names from the 1UP community. And that is when I discovered The Exploding Barrel podcast with Mike and AJ Minotti. And I would dip into the forums and see all these conversations happen and want to be a part of it. But I really wasn't able to make anything concrete happen until 1UP started falling apart.”

The forum-to-journalism pipeline was a robust one, and many of the people who worked at EGM had started that way too. 1UP was not just a forum, it was a place built by people who had gotten their start in forums. My former coworker and Remap Radio host/writer Patrick Klepek also blogged on 1UP, but like many there was primarily a GAF poster.

“My start in games writing is genuinely weird and unrepeatable. It contains no lessons on how to get a job in video game writing,” Patrick told me via DM. “I randomly picked the website Gaming Age as my home, and I can’t tell you why. I just did. Gaming Age was simultaneously home to many early online writers who would fuel magazines like EGM and websites like 1UP. They also had famous/infamous Gaming Age Forums, which later became NeoGAF and even later, ResetERA. Attached to Gaming Age was the IRC channel #ga, which itself was connected to another channel, #vidgames, which housed many active writers for EGM and other magazines made in the same Ziff Davis offices at the time. Maybe I found Gaming Age because I randomly entered into #vidgames? Who can say, I was like 12 years old at the time. Regardless, those channel lurkers went on to become incredibly well known writers, podcasters, you name it, and suddenly they were my first online family. Even more strange, the old offices for EGM were located less than 30 minutes from my parents’ old home, which means I would visit the EGM offices on a semi-regular basis. All those people took me, looked out for me, and helped shape my career at a very early age. Very strange stuff.”

Other people got their start on forums, many via either GAF or NeoGAF. Luke Plunkett mentioned he posted pretty regularly on 1UP and GAF. Nathan mentioned he got his start on Talking Time, the forum of Retronauts host Jeremy Parrish. Some people got their start on Something Awful (either as lurkers or posters), Gamespot’s forums, Insert Credit, and selectbutton. Gene Park told me he started at GameFAQs and Gamecritics, although a full accounting of who posted where is outside of the scope of this post. But if you are in games journalism and older than 30, there is a good chance you had a forum where you got your start and maybe even got your first big break.

1UP started in 2003 and experienced a fair amount of growth until around 2009, when Ziff Davis sold it off to UGO/Hearst and shuttered EGM in the process. It shambled along for a few years, got bought by IGN in 2011 until it got shut down in 2013. Retronauts still exists independently, and many of the people went their separate ways (the video crew of The 1UP Show  went on to form Area5), while others got jobs in the gaming industry. On some level, I can never blame someone for seeing the writing on the wall and wanting to get out of media as fast as humanly possible, but given the sheer scale of carnage in development this year, maybe the grass isn’t that much greener.

Watching the wholesale destruction and dismembering of 1UP ultimately prepared me for what a job in games journalism often is: badly compensated and precarious, where many people are treated like shit and try to get out before some C-Suite shithead who doesn’t play games decides to throw the last 10 years of your work into a blast furnace so he can put an addition on to his shitty-looking house. But some seeds bloomed from the ruins of 1UP.

“You know, it was the recession,” Jeff told me. “And everything felt so fragile. But I had spent so much of my life wanting to be among people who talked about games in the way that I heard on Squadron of Shame, Exploding Barrel, and 1UP Yours, that it really forced me to reckon with that. So I got together with some other people from 1UP, most of whom are no longer in the industry, and we started our own website called Forwards Compatible. And it was formatted much like a forum. We'd have a big topic each week, and we'd follow that up with roundtable discussions and a weekly podcast. And doing that was definitely the start of doing this professionally. I'd eventually go on to volunteer with Shoe's site Bitmob, and I've worked with Mike Minotti for going on 12 or 13 years now.”

I don’t know what forums are like now, I am sure they are still fine. ResetEra looks like it’s going strong and Something Awful seems healthier now that LowTax is dead, although in both cases I’ve always been a lurker. I also wouldn’t even begin to guess how younger people break into games journalism, in part because I don’t know what the media landscape even looks like anymore. I’d guess if you aren’t just a content creator the real secret is a combination of posting, blogging, and who you know. Those things are still more valuable to me than either an undergrad degree or working unpaid for a summer for wildly incompetent people.

For all that 1UP did right, it was just a place online where I hung out, and everyone who ended up doing this for a long period of time had their own place like that. And ultimately, what drew me away from forums was not the gutting of 1UP, although that didn’t hurt; it was the rise of Twitter. Like 1UP, it was another place to hang out – a platform where much of how I write was shaped and where I would meet some of my closest friends, only to watch it slowly die, once again, like the forums did.

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