epic fail. I spent like three hours on the prowl today, and no one is hiring! It's discouraging, cuz this cat has got to pay the bills. And i'm hungry, a can opener is the key to my stomach.
man this wasn't interesting at all.
arial is coming soon! that's about all i got that's exciting me right now haha.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
Seeya...
I know i'm sort of late to the party on this, but EGM, I'm gonna miss you. But it's nice to see that All the guy's that have been there forever aren't going on to keep writing about games. They're gonna help make them. When I first saw the official release of the names of everyone that got fired from the 1up network, and subsequently EGM, I got a little sad. Me and EGM, we go way back. I've been reading that magazine since I was 10. Back in 1998, the months leading up to the release of ocarina of time i snatched up every magazine i could find with info on the game. I still wasn't satisfied. But then, one October afternoon at Barnes and Noble or something, there it was, on the news stand. The thing had to be at least 200 pages thick, and on the cover, a beacon shining beside which every mortal kombat game was on the cover of gamepro, was Link, the mother fucking hero of time pulling the mother fucking sword of evil's bane out of it's pedestal in the Temple of Time. I picked it up, and being the probably bratty little ten year old i was, got my mom to buy it for me.
That epic volume opened my brain up to a wealth of gaming knowledge until then not even with in the realm of imagining for my feeble little mind. And that was it, and I've been a subscriber since then. Naturally it's the ocarina write up i remember most vividly. It was weird, I thought. There were side bars on every page, with fasion commentary from a gay hyrulean couple. Sure, maybe it played on stereo types, but it was cheeky and funny, not pathetic and mean. Definatley nothing like what I'd been reading in Nintendo Power. That spirit of irreverence met with the impecable class (haha,) the writing staff has, for the ten year's i've been reading it, maintained is why It managed to stay ahead of the pack for so long. It's sad that in the ever shifting and ever fucked up state of today's video game industry, even a rag like EGM couldn't stand up to the might of the almighty corporate bottom line. Once the wave of nostalgia washed over me, I kinda of realized that everything was probably going to be ok, and in a really backwards way, this could actually be good for the industry, if the gaming press doesn't squash it into oblivion. Alot of the editors from EGM and the 1up network in general have ended up landing jobs on the production side of things. For years editors have been doing the same thing, From old EGM alumni like Che Chou, to those who first peeked their heads out at 1up like Luke Smith. But now, the offices of EGM in San Francisco have closed, and the good poeple working there have been let out into the world. Everyone that got the boot seems to have found and job, and those that haven't won't have a problem getting new one's, they're to best and the brightest of the gaming press. But it's hard, thinking about the legacy those guys created with that magazine, and In the 5 or so years since the Inception of 1up, and how all the guys and girls that built it are now scattered and left to cope with the loss of jobs and friends they won't be working with anymore.
Was what they were doing dependant entirely on the momentum they all built working together? The enviroment in which they wrote about video games, and the standars they set when it came to talking about them, and the sense of unspoken reverance they had towards their task of immortalizing these games and what they meant to the video gamer, and to our culture at large. Will that spirit continue even after 1up.com is left battered, and the industry's bleeding edge of gaming literature's publication shut down a month before it's twentieth year? I think so. Not only are most of these poeple still writing about games, they're still going to shape the gaming landscape as we know it by helping make the games we play. 1up still exists, and probably won't change in an editorial sense, as far as those left there are concerned, and in time, there will be oppurtunities to rebuild and for that site to keep growing. But, by that time, all those cats will be working again, and life will go on. They'll make games, write about games and keep playing games. I'll keep playing games, and so will your grandma. Video games have changed, and are gonna keep changing. No one in the games industry could have stopped the economic down turn that led investors to yank all of the money out from underneath Ziff Davis that it needed to keep publishing that content at the rate that it was. It's a cold hard reality, but one that is more easily faced knowing that even though The 1up network will never ever be the same, and that alot of those popele are probably facing emotional hardship through out all of this we'll never be privy too, they'll all have 1up in their veins for as long as they live, and we'll always have it too.
That epic volume opened my brain up to a wealth of gaming knowledge until then not even with in the realm of imagining for my feeble little mind. And that was it, and I've been a subscriber since then. Naturally it's the ocarina write up i remember most vividly. It was weird, I thought. There were side bars on every page, with fasion commentary from a gay hyrulean couple. Sure, maybe it played on stereo types, but it was cheeky and funny, not pathetic and mean. Definatley nothing like what I'd been reading in Nintendo Power. That spirit of irreverence met with the impecable class (haha,) the writing staff has, for the ten year's i've been reading it, maintained is why It managed to stay ahead of the pack for so long. It's sad that in the ever shifting and ever fucked up state of today's video game industry, even a rag like EGM couldn't stand up to the might of the almighty corporate bottom line. Once the wave of nostalgia washed over me, I kinda of realized that everything was probably going to be ok, and in a really backwards way, this could actually be good for the industry, if the gaming press doesn't squash it into oblivion. Alot of the editors from EGM and the 1up network in general have ended up landing jobs on the production side of things. For years editors have been doing the same thing, From old EGM alumni like Che Chou, to those who first peeked their heads out at 1up like Luke Smith. But now, the offices of EGM in San Francisco have closed, and the good poeple working there have been let out into the world. Everyone that got the boot seems to have found and job, and those that haven't won't have a problem getting new one's, they're to best and the brightest of the gaming press. But it's hard, thinking about the legacy those guys created with that magazine, and In the 5 or so years since the Inception of 1up, and how all the guys and girls that built it are now scattered and left to cope with the loss of jobs and friends they won't be working with anymore.
Was what they were doing dependant entirely on the momentum they all built working together? The enviroment in which they wrote about video games, and the standars they set when it came to talking about them, and the sense of unspoken reverance they had towards their task of immortalizing these games and what they meant to the video gamer, and to our culture at large. Will that spirit continue even after 1up.com is left battered, and the industry's bleeding edge of gaming literature's publication shut down a month before it's twentieth year? I think so. Not only are most of these poeple still writing about games, they're still going to shape the gaming landscape as we know it by helping make the games we play. 1up still exists, and probably won't change in an editorial sense, as far as those left there are concerned, and in time, there will be oppurtunities to rebuild and for that site to keep growing. But, by that time, all those cats will be working again, and life will go on. They'll make games, write about games and keep playing games. I'll keep playing games, and so will your grandma. Video games have changed, and are gonna keep changing. No one in the games industry could have stopped the economic down turn that led investors to yank all of the money out from underneath Ziff Davis that it needed to keep publishing that content at the rate that it was. It's a cold hard reality, but one that is more easily faced knowing that even though The 1up network will never ever be the same, and that alot of those popele are probably facing emotional hardship through out all of this we'll never be privy too, they'll all have 1up in their veins for as long as they live, and we'll always have it too.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)