Old heads or students of games media might remember a site called GameZone, which while never a titan in the industry had managed to survive in one way or another since 1994, enjoying various periods of success throughout, which is an incredible achievement in such a volatile field. Sadly in recent months it appears to have been all but killed off by its owners, with archives spanning decades wiped in favour of front page content that doesn’t feel like it was written by or for human beings.
Despite appearing long dormant--its featured content for most of 2025, like a PS5 review, was years out of date, its Facebook page hasn't posted since January 2024 and its YouTube channel hadn't been updated since 2019--in the early months of this year users could still visit GameZone and access decades of older features and reviews. One of the oldest articles I could find a link for via the Wayback Machine was a review for Tiberian Sun, which came out in 1999!
This continuity wasn't just a legacy archive for a long-running site and for games media in general, but was also a way for games writers and those who have since moved to other positions in the media and games industries to link back to their old work. If you go searching through the footnotes of Wikipedia, especially for articles on older games, you'll often find GameZone mentioned, whether it's Def Jam: Fight for NY or The Simpsons: Hit & Run.
Luckily those Wikipedia links point to archived copies of those articles, because GameZone's own backlinks are now dead. With the site having been redesigned in the last few months, GameZone has removed the ability to search the site, and its archives now only contain 12 stories, some of which feature AI-generated imagery (like the example below), and many of which are bylined by Javier Lassus, who is a "Solutions Engineer" and web developer at a company called Playwire. Other posts have Louis Barbati's byline, who is also a "Solutions Engineer" at Playwire, and another whose resume has a lot of customer service and web development on it. If someone told me all their posts--with their bullet points, generic text and rambling on about unrelated topics--had also been written by AI, I would not raise either of my eyebrows.
(I contacted Playwire for comment on this but at time of publishing have not heard back.)
I spoke to Gabe Reisinger, a former writer for GameZone, and Cade Onder, its last functional EIC who departed in late 2020, and neither of them say they were given even a courtesy heads-up that years of their work was going to be deleted by the site's owners.
Playwire, the company that has owned GameZone for years, isn't really a traditional media publisher; they're an ad company, and recently celebrated inking a sales deal with the Gamurs network, a group of websites we have covered a few times before. Having left the site (Facebook page aside) long dormant, it’s unclear why Playwire decided to reboot it now, at a time when the prospects for games media websites are as dire as they've ever been, even if the plan is to juice stuff via things like SEO.
The redesigned site still boasts of its 1994 heritage at the foot of the front page, saying:
Founded in 1994, GameZone has been working to bring gamers everything there is to know about the games industry, from reviews on the latest game releases to breaking news and rumors. In addition to gaming, we bring relevant culture and entertainment news.
But when I contacted the email tips line right next to that text to ask about the redesign and its content, the email bounced back with an "Address not found" error.
Look, GameZone wasn't a relevant games media resource in 2025. It hadn't been meaningfully updated in years, and seemed to exist solely to juice some social media accounts with large legacy followings and as an archive for 30 years’ worth of video game journalism. But that last point was important! This is history, of the industry and the medium and of all the work everyone who wrote for GameZone since 1994 had put in, and to have it all just deleted like that without notice doesn't just suck, it should--as I've said before--be something that has some consequences.
