Welcome to the relaunch of this fine website. After a pretty long hiatus and working as a QA Tester, my itch to write about the gaming industry has been refueled. So, I want to lay out a few things we will be doing here and talk about an article that was published in the May 2010 issue of Game Informer. Me and a few others will be covering the industry via opinionated editorials and reviews. I want our readers to not only be informed but entertained as well.

In the May 2010 issue of Game Informer Magazine (the Epic Games Bulletstorm cover), there was an opinion article written by former Crispy Gamer Senior Editor Scott Jones. Also, check out his new site Reviewsontherun. The article was about how gaming journalism is seemingly a young man’s game and how he felt like he got pushed down the stairs when Crispy was destroyed as we knew it. After the demise of the website, it wasn’t long before the new heads of Crispy Gamer had replaced each the veteran staff members with a “glasses-wearing student from NYU whose most remarkable feature was a perpetual need for a haircut.”

Mr. Jones was furious at the fact he had been replaced by an intern. It’s understandable, but I want to give him an idea of what it is like to be on the other side. Not the “pencil-neck geeks” side as the late “Classy” Freddy Blassie would say. I want Scott to hear my story.

Bulletstorm

I didn’t discover the press side of video games on the Internet until 2003. At that point I was still subscribing to magazines and buying strategy guides to learn everything about upcoming games. And then one day I was looking for cheat codes, on a PC that had trouble running the original Everquest and came across a gaming site called GameSpot. Of course, 2003 was when this site was at its best with staffers such as Jeff Gerstmann, Ryan Davis, and Brad Shoemaker, Greg Kasavin, Rich Gallop and so on. Long story short is that sites like GameSpot, 1UP, and Crispy Gamer influenced me to write about games for a living.

Right now it is goddamn hard to get in the industry and write about games. I work QA where we hire just about anyone as long as you can conduct yourself in a decent manner. But for some reason, becoming a member of the games press is harder than finding the Holy Grail. I started writing this article in mid-April and have figured out why getting into the press is so difficult.

I was born and raised in a small town outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It’s one of those places where everyone knows everyone and nothing is a secret. Trying to find a better than average job was difficult even if you were qualified for the position. More than likely it would often go to someone who had connections with the employer. This is called the “good ole boy” system, which consists of appointing someone to a position due to a prior relationship over someone who deserves the job. This not only occurs in the games press, but the entire industry. I see it at work and I’ve been on the good and bad side of it in the press. A glass ceiling appears when you aren’t BFF with current industry professionals.

My goal for this site is to figure out why the games press hasn’t expanded along with the popularity of gaming. Of course, alongside the discussion of our industry will be coverage of games, movies, pop culture, and whatever else grinds my gears. And trust me, my gears are about as raw as Lindsey Lohan’s vagina right now.

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