On a Decade of Creating

Today, the day I’m writing this, is November 6, 2023. Ten years ago on this day I published the first post and first podcast episode of what would become ten years of writing, recording, editing, and publishing reviews, essays, videos, and audio podcasts about video games. I did it because my dream was to work at IGN, an outlet I had a lot of love for throughout my adolescence. I never had any real expectation that it would happen, just a hope, and I also just enjoyed the process of creating these things. Running a tumblr account, a podcast, a YouTube channel, was a good excuse to get my friends together to create content but also just to hang out. I got to learn how to record audio and video, how to edit audio and video, and how to think and write about games in different ways from the standard format I had grown up on as my appetite for criticism changed and grew from different sources over the past decade. The episode in question is no longer available online as I no longer pay SoundCloud or Libsyn for the hosting. I have the MP3 file copy, and an incomplete archive of the entire podcast that I will eternally beat myself up for due to not properly archiving my own work, something I know is common in all industries it seems.

Building a portfolio did get me some work within the industry, I freelanced for a few sites in late 2014/early 2015, two of which, B-TEN and Current Digital, are no longer around though the third, LoadTheGame still exists. I remember being “fired” from LoadtheGame due to the owner or editor or whoever somehow misreading a post about the Sons of Anarchy mobile game being a post about the tv show itself? It was dumb and not like I was being paid anyway. At least my author profile still functions. Somehow my Facebook account still has me connected as an owner of the B-TEN.com page on Facebook and I never found a way to completely delete it. I don’t even use Facebook much anyway so I’ve let it be as a relic of the past. Gabe Carey was the founder for B-TEN and Current Digital and a friend who has gone on to have a successful career in the tech industry.

Attending the PlayStation Experience in my hometown of Las Vegas in December 2014 was probably one of the most exciting events of my start. I had reached out to various attendees in order to ask for interviews and also knew that various game industry people would be around to pitch work to. I was able to talk to Harmonix about Amplitude, Behold Studios on Chroma Squad, Greg Kasavin on Transistor, and my partner and friend Trevor Thompson talked to Greg Miller. Little did we know that both Greg and Colin Moriarty, from our favorite podcast, IGN’s Podcast Beyond, had decided behind the scenes to quit IGN at the end of the month to do Kinda Funny full time with Nick Scarpino and Tim Gettys. This meant their live panel at PSX was the last live panel appearance they would do as the Podcast Beyond hosts. While attending the show Trevor and myself met and talked to Vince Ingenito of IGN (the same one Kallie Plagge accused years later of sexual harassment) who gave us some advice on working for IGN and recommended business cards, which I slapped together and printed out that very next morning for the second day of the convention. We also had a friendly interaction with Nick Robinson who would be quietly removed from Polygon after accusations of inappropriate behavior with fans. We were really knocking it out of the park in terms of engaging with people who would later turn out to be not so great! Sadly we also did an interview with Alex Preston of Heart Machine about the then unreleased Hyper Light Drifter that became corrupted and unusable. This is mostly sad as it was a game that would go on to become an all-time favorite of mine and the demo itself was very different from the final game itself.

In March 2015 I would apply and be accepted to do work for Dualshockers, a role I would keep from April 2015 until August 2020, though there would be a break year in 2017 and the last years would be more features than daily news writing. I really enjoyed the time I spent working for Dualshockers. I always described them as a mid-tier site in terms of popularity. We had enough accreditation to attend E3 and be invited to various preview events by publishers, though never PlayStation as they had blacklisted us for almost its entire existence. We were not, however, large enough to really do anything in terms of payments or be recognized as fellow games media by the larger sites such as IGN, Polygon, Giant Bomb, etc. The comradery with fellow writers existing under a difficult (and tyrannical) editor formed bonds that continue to this day in our own private discord group. I got a lot of opportunities I would have never had without them: got to attend the last great E3’s (2015 & 2016), got to attend preview events where I got to shoot the shit with the likes of Jeff Gerstmann and Arthur Gies, and played more games than I probably ever will again in the span of a calendar year.

PSX 2015 was in San Francisco and home to one of the strangest events of my life. After PSX closed a lot of industry people hung out in the bar of the W San Francisco, right across from the Moscone Center. I ended up talking to Nayan Ramachandran of Playism and Alex Rubens of Red Bull. At some point the location was closing up and we ended up joining Adam Boyes of Sony and Dan Ryckert of Giant Bomb and the entire group made its way to Adam’s hotel room nearby where we just drunkenly hung out talking until the early, early morning. Key memories is Adam being insistent that I looked like a younger and more handsome Ted Price, Dan trying to convince Alex to let him pepper spray him in the face in exchange for letting Alex punch Dan in the face once, and me betting Dan a Taco Bell dinner there was no way he was actually going to replay The Last of Us Remastered by the end of the year (a bet that is unresolved to this day). It was wild and I never got into a situation like that again sadly.

Late 2016/early 2017 was one of great personal turmoil and probably the worst depressive episode I’ve had since high school but also yielded the most successful piece I’ve done, a video covering Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, a Toonami favorite, which has reached 203k views as of today. My second most successful video is one titled: “Modern Warfare 2 | 1 Hour of Ambient S.S.D.D. | Basketball, Helicopters, Radio Music, NPC Chatter” and was a byproduct of working on a video version of my essay on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Things have significantly slowed down since these earlier times. Pumping out articles to meet a quota, reviewing, coming up with features, and recording, editing, and publishing videos is long exhaustive work when you want to make it really good, and even what you would think is simple guides work of cutting up a gameplay recording into easy-to-follow segments is tough and time consuming. And IGN will overwrite your contributions to their Wiki Guide anyway with their own official videos so why bother? Just to get that view count higher than usual? Nowadays I’m much more satisfied simply writing and making a video when inspiration hits than to conform to the formula established and required by the sites I once longed to be employed by but are no longer recognizable compared to the versions I daydreamed about.

I’m glad that I stuck with it, even during the off years, when I wasn’t sure that what I was doing was going to be any good. I now have ten years to look back on fondly and continue to contribute to the ever growing body of work, a body that I’ve been slowly compiling into a completed works document to eventually print as a physical book, a collection of my work made physical as a symbol of growth and commitment to doing it for the love of it. Despite my post count wavering over the years I still have boundless ideas popping out of my head all the time in terms of things to do with writing and making videos about video games. Things have changed but thinking about, playing, and making things about video games continues to ceaselessly drive me to create.