Summer Geoff Fest is less than a month away, and you know what that means: It is once again time to turn our attention to summergamesfest.com, a URL of a common typo – the event is for some reason called Summer Game Fest, not Summer Games Fest – with a mysterious owner and a half-decade-long history of activism and cheese puffs. This year, it’s looking a little different than last year.
As of this publishing, the URL redirects to a Neocities page that pays respects to Polygon and implores visitors to support both independent media – including Aftermath dot site – and laid-off Polygon writers, linking to their profiles as well as the Vox Media Union’s GoFundMe for them.
“I don't work in the games industry and don't even really play video games (aside from neopets),” the Polygon support page’s creator, a comic illustrator named Kaylee Rowena, wrote in a disclaimer on the page. “I've just enjoyed the work of folks at Polygon for many years & want to give them some support and solidarity where I can. Workers of the world unite.”
But what has the mysterious owner of the summergamesfest.com URL, who did not make the Polygon support page, been up to for the past year? That’s where things get a little weirder. When we last checked in on summergamesfest.com during June of 2024, it redirected to a donation page from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Based on a scant few Wayback Machine snapshots, it appears to have stayed this way for the whole summer.
Then, in September 2024, for at least a couple days, the summergamesfest.com URL began redirecting to a Bluesky post from Epic Games senior trust and safety investigations manager Bruce Knapik that reads “Bet you thought I was joking.” There is no further context for this comment; it follows a seemingly unrelated post about pro wrestling and precedes another about Bluesky informing Knapik that he was the platform’s 850,339th user. They are all days apart.
Aftermath reached out to Knapik to ask the obvious question: Are you the person who owns the URL?
“[If I remember correctly] I linked to that post as an accompaniment to a bullet point of ‘webmaster of summergamesfest.com’ on an introduce-yourself-to-the-team presentation at work,” Knapik told Aftermath. “But yeah, that’s me.”
Knapik explained that he snapped up the URL in 2020, around an hour after Keighley went live with the name of his now-ubiquitous E3 replacement.
"At that time, I was on a spree of registering goofy domains,” Knapik said, “and it just happened I was prescient enough to think '[the name of the event] should maybe be games.'"
(He’s right! It should be “games!” I’ve spoken to high-profile industry figures who still accidentally call it Summer Games Fest! Because there is more than one game!)
Occasional pre-orchestrated bits such as a short-lived collaboration with Giant Bomb last year aside, Knapik has mostly just enjoyed causing random online passersby to stumble into oddball humor and, at the other end of the spectrum, legitimately important causes.
"Overall, it’s just been a sounding board for silliness or things I think it would be nice if people stumbled onto/knew about,” he said. “It’s nice to have that kind of… megaphone? When you feel strongly about, and have a high degree of confidence in, your convictions.”
Despite the joy summergamesfest.com has brought Knapik, he would sell it to Geoff Keighley if approached with a “reasonable” offer.
"I think I’ve managed to keep the jokes in good fun – and avoid any actual brand confusion – so I don’t think he’d feel a heavy desire to go out of his way to make [an offer],” said Knapik. “No one’s ever attempted to actually contact me about it, to my knowledge.”
But if the right wealthy and/or evil benefactor came along, he would at least consider it.
"I’d probably never sell it to anyone but Geoff,” said Knapik, “but who knows what I’d say if a dipshit loser offered me $44 billion to let him kill it and use its corpse for fascist ventriloquism."
Many assumed that the original images on the summergamesfest.com page, variations on a plate of cheese puffs and a Dorito-orange taco shell with what appeared to be a hotdog in it, were a veiled reference to Keighley’s pre-Game Awards “Dorito Pope” legacy. But that is, in fact, not the case.
"The original images were part of a triptych I made for an extremely narrow joke, where I pre-empted the weekly 'Friday Food Facts!' local food news email that Epic’s office manager would send and sent one with an identical subject line just to [another Epic employee],” Knapik said.
Also, it’s not a hot dog.
"The taco shell contains a Beddar With Cheddar sausage," Knapik said. "I expect a retraction of last year’s – to be frank (ugh), libelous – assertion it was a 'hot dog.'"
We regret the error.
