Wow, quite the blast from the past, right? We've had some pretty passionate words floated our way from long time readers like sliverstorm and Kijan. The truth is, if you've been on the internet and even remotely interested in gaming in the past 15 years. You've probably visited GameRevolution at least once. Take a look at that screenshot above. That was the homepage circa 1999. Those days weren't even the beginning. In fact the site was started all the way back in 1996.
I was eight years old then. I'm 23 now and I work for GameRevolution full-time. I write news, previews, reviews, opinions. I manage our Twitter account, I'm always in the forums and the comments, and I interact with the community as a staff liaison. We don't have a massive workforce like some of our peers. Did you know that IGN, certainly the BIGGEST video game outlet on the internet, was started in 1996 too?
In those days, there wasn't a lot of competition. If you were a video game website with even a smattering of coverage, you probably got a ton of hits. GameRevolution and IGN ballooned along with the other few gaming websites in those early days of online games reporting. Of course, we're no where near IGN's size now. No, we're leaner, meaner, and our critical judgment is still intact, unlike Gamespot and IGN, sites which have unlimited budgets and even bigger staffs. But enough about them! Here's a bit more about me:
To be perfectly honest with you. I lied in my interview. When Duke Ferris and Blake Morse asked me questions about my experience, my writing ability, my attention to detail, I replied honestly. I told them about my blog which I'd been running for about two years. I told them about how much I loved video games and I repeated the Konami code for them. Before that, they asked me if I had heard of GameRevolution before. I lied. I said that I'd visited the site semi-frequently as I lurked about the internet reading about video games. I told them that I'd clicked on to the site from social media outlets like Digg. In reality, I'd never heard of GR and the staff were just as unknown to me.
I'd never listened to The Inner Party. I'd never read the Mailbag. I didn't even have an account on the site. My first day as an intern was spent creating a log in. I failed at that too. Had I been paying attention or reading the site before getting hired, I would be writing to you as Daniel_Bischoff right now. I played it cool, entered press releases and completed reviews on time. I was only able to visit the office once a week because of the two hour commute and my full-time student status. The lie my relationship with GameRevolution was based on lay behind me until a few weeks ago.
Sliverstorms blog jogged my memory when he posted the screenshot above. I had visited GameRevolution, and on a very frequent basis in fact! Way back when, before my family had a computer in the home, I spent most of my library visits at the internet station, looking up cheat codes for my favorite games. I strayed from CheatCodeCentral and IGN and the other sites that existed at the time. Their databases were too hard to navigate. No, I was a frequent visitor of GameRevolution's.
Pencil and paper in hand, I jotted down cheat codes every week and took them home to aid my way through games I was struggling with. In fact, GameRevolution's cheat pages still perform very well today, helping people unlock all of the weapons in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or assisting them with their iPhone games. How insane was it that I had actually been a diehard Revolutionary for so long?
How much did my situation say about the nature of GameRevolution on the internet?
I loved GR in those days, and I love GR today. No other website will bring you the attitude, information, and culture of video games like GameRevolution can. While we do our damnest to be the best, we're made better by YOU! If you've got a GR memory, drop it in the comments. If this is your first time here, register on the site, say hello below, or in the forums, or drop me a line at daniel@gamerevolution.com.
The normal, angry Revolutionary Rant will be back next week.
