For reasons that will never fully be understood, Geoff Keighley’s annual beach-flavored ode to video games is called Summer Game Fest, singular, not Summer Games Fest, plural, even though it includes far more than one game. Because of this, many mistakenly call it Summer Games Fest—and also search for it incorrectly online.
As we at Aftermath sleuthed out last year, one man, Epic Games senior trust and safety investigations manager Bruce Knapik, has been sitting on the summergamesfest.com URL for six years, having it redirect to a variety of causes. At times, that’s meant in-jokes like a picture of a taco shell with a sausage in it, while at others the URL has sent visitors to pages intended to support Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and laid-off games journalists.
This year, Knapik has changed things up again; while the URL was at various points this year marshalled in service of friend of the site Stella Sacco and laid-off game developers more broadly, it now redirects to the Transgender Law Center. For Knapik, this one’s personal.
“Trans rights have been important to me my entire adult life,” Knapik wrote on Bluesky. “My first job after leaving the Army (which no one who knows me will admit happened) was for my mother at the Hippo in Baltimore. The Hippo was, to my knowledge, the largest queer nightclub in Baltimore, maybe the state. … It wasn't my first time among LGBTQ+ communities—my mother is a lesbian, my friends were sometimes queer, and people I had known throughout my time in the Army transitioned immediately afterwards—but my time there did more to shape me into an upstanding person than service ever did.”
Knapik believes that homophobes and transphobes are a dying breed in the grand scheme of things, but they’re not going out quietly.
“I (perhaps naïvely) believe there are fewer of those people these days, but they are inarguably louder and more powerful than ever. They hold office, they own websites,” he wrote. “UFC fucking champions posting AI videos depicting hate crimes. Shit we didn't accept from YouTubers a decade ago has become passé behavior for major public figures. So yeah, the silly typo website redirects to a place that fights as well as anyone can for trans people in this environment. I'm just garden-variety bi, but I've been within the echo radius of trans hate—and trans joy—for decades, and seen how gleefully the former shreds the path to the latter.”
It wouldn’t be Summer Games Fest, plural, (as opposed to Summer Game Fest, singular) without some fraction of tongue planted in cheek, however. Currently, if you post the URL on a site like Bluesky, it auto-populates with “Gamergate Was A Jeff Epstein Joint.”
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Nathan Grayson
