The early-to-mid 00s were just such a great time for GameSpot, and it was really due to the staff of writers & editors it had. People like Greg Kasavin, Brad Shoemaker, Alex Navarro, Ryan Davis (RIP), Ryan MacDonald, Joe Fielder, Andrew Seyoon Park (who single-handedly made GameSpot the only major outlet still covering the Neo Geo in its last years), & Jeff Gertsmann just all had this knack for writing reviews that hooked me, and the on-screen presence of them for video productions was undeniable. Eventually, as I grew older & entered high school, I decided to move away from my game show host dream & go for something more reasonable by becoming a journalist, and it wouldn't be too much of a leap to say that the people at GameStop were a notable influence towards that change in life direction for me. Still, what really made me want to stick with journalism, at least enough to get an actual bachelor's degree in it from Rutgers University, was one opportunity that came about 15 years ago which allowed me to be published on GameSpot... And it all started because of a happy little accident, as the late Bob Ross would put it.
During this 00s era, the people at GameSpot tried a bunch of wild ideas; for example, remember when they had a game show? One of those ideas was GameSpotting, which was effectively a weekly blog that some of the writers would contribute to, giving their own personal feelings about some sort of gaming-related subject. It was a really cool idea, essentially predating the actual rise of blogging by a few years, and wound up running for 149 weeks, from August 8, 2001 to June 29, 2005. What was easily the most interesting part of GameSpotting, though, was GuestSpotting, which was a contribution from a fan that the GameSpot editors liked & wanted to put up on the site; sometimes, they even dedicated entire editions to nothing but fan contributions. Yes, after one year, GameSpot actually solicited fans to submit their own articles, and one day I had a thought:
"I wonder if I could write something like that?"
So come the start of 2004, I was 17 & in the second half of my senior year of high school. I had already determined that I was going to Rutgers to study journalism by this point, so I looked at GameSpot's open call for articles & started thinking. As a challenge to myself, & simply for the fun of it, I decided to start typing up a small little article of my own, deciding to focus on the Sega 32X, since I felt that there wasn't anything out there about it at the time; see, even back then I was about representing the forgotten & ignored. Originally, I just did it to waste a few minutes, as I was planning to just stop writing at some point & simply close Microsoft Word without saving; this was seriously just meant to be nothing more than a spur-of-the-moment thing. Before I realized it, though, I wound up coming to a proper end, and I realized that I had just made a ~1,200 word article in one go, over the course of about an hour or two. I honestly can't recall exactly what happened immediately next, as I may have decided to simply save it & come back to it a day or two later, or I foolhardily went straight on, but at any point I decided that, since I had actually written something that kind-of-sort-of vaguely resembled what the people at GameSpot were doing, I'd proofread it & grab some images from online, just to see how it'd look. So, after looking it over & getting some screenshots from VGMuseum & The 32X Memorial, I was starting to feel good about it, & I decided to get that e-mail address & submit it to GameSpot, just for the hell of it. I figured that my done-in-a-single-go faux article would never actually get picked, and it'd at least make for an amusing joke, if nothing else. Yeah, right, like some no name high school senior from Central Jersey would write something worth publishing, on a literal whim & in one go, on a high-profile gaming website like GameSpot.
*beat*
A few days later I got an e-mail from GameSpot, saying that my article was chosen for inclusion in an upcoming GameSpotting.
I've generally attributed the e-mail as having come from Jeff Gertsmann whenever I think about it, but I honestly don't actually recall who really did respond to me, because I have long deleted that e-mail; stupid, I know, but I was 17 at the time & didn't think that I'd be looking back at this moment. Anyway, the e-mail was actually both an acceptance letter as well as a request for a fix. Turns out that embedding the images I used into the word document itself made it next to impossible for the guys at GameSpot to extract & use in whatever program they used to post their articles online, so I was asked to send them a separate e-mail that included just the images. Since I never thought anything like this would happen, I did the natural thing: Freaked the hell out. I scrambled back to VGMuseum & The 32X Memorial to find the same images I used, saved & compressed them into a zip file, and sent a response back. This kind of just didn't feel real to me, and I had absolutely no idea how to fully comprehend what was happening. At this point, though, all I could do was wait for the day when I "appeared" (via a Mighty the Armadillo avatar) alongside the GameSpot writers, & for the first time effectively put myself out into the open world of the internet like that.
So, on February 23, 2004, my article "32X: Short Name, Short Life, Big Fun" went live on GameSpotting: Shareware Edition, the 112th edition. This was alongside articles about the benefits of playable demos (Kasavin), the need for game criticism to evolve (Curt Feldman), how utterly amazing the shareware PC game Soldat is (Gertsmann), the practice of re-releasing older games for newer consoles at a slightly reduced price point but with next to nothing added to compensate (Bethany Massimilla), & how being able to keep a beat with drums doesn't mean that you'll automatically be good at rhythm games (Navarro). As for my article, it was a basic explanation about what the 32X was, how it initially saw some short retail success before falling down hard, what games for the add-on were worthy of attention, and mentioning some of the nearly 50 games that had been either worked on or simply announced before being cancelled. Compared to the (overly) verbose write-ups I tend to do today, this article was very short & to the point, pretty much acting like a basic history lesson for the add-on. Coincidentally enough, 2004 was the 10th Anniversary of the launch of the 32X, and by that point "retro gaming" had yet to really become a notable thing; in fact, this article predated the original two Angry Video Game Nerd episodes by four months. Who knows, maybe it was the simple idea of someone writing about the 32X in a time where everyone else was writing about the PS2, GameCube, Xbox, PC, Game Boy Advance, & the then-upcoming Nintendo DS & PlayStation Portable that made the people at GameSpot want to publish my article.
Regardless, the article was now up for all to see, I felt really honored & happy to see it happen, and I continued on with my life, with nothing else ever coming to be from this moment in my life... At least, that's what I was expecting to happen.
 |
| "Go ahead, kid... Spin the wheel, make the deal." |
You see, part of being included in GameSpotting was having your e-mail address be linked to in the author's info at the top. Being a (still fairly) introverted high school student, not to mention not expecting the article to even get published in the first place, I didn't take the fact that my e-mail was now available into consideration... So you can imagine my surprise when I started getting e-mails from various gaming sites that were offering to let me write for them! Similar to not really remembering who exactly sent the response that confirmed that I'd be published, I honestly can't recall which sites actually sent me offers; all I can recall is that it was around five or so, & I bet most (if not all) of them aren't even around anymore. Suddenly, it felt like I was in some sort of demand, and I had no idea how to handle this kind of attention, all over an article that, again, I literally did on a whim & in one go. Naturally, I did the only thing I could think of...
I never responded to a single one of them, & actually deleted all of them, because I was scared like hell over this.
I fully admit that this wasn't the smartest thing to do & that I really should have simply sent every one of them a "Thanks, but no thanks" response, but in my defense I was 17 years old, with my only previous work experience being a summer job the year prior. At the same time, though, there's also the possibility that some, if not all, of these offers were either bogus or made with the intent to take advantage of someone who didn't know better, so I don't exactly feel remorse over simply deleting the e-mails & ignoring the offers. Could I have had an opportunity to potentially enter the world of gaming journalism, something that I honestly had an interest in at the time? Possibly, but there's no use thinking about "What if" scenarios 15 years after the fact. Maybe there's a parallel universe out there where I actually took up one of those offers, and instead of running a niche-within-a-niche-within-a-niche blog & being an infinite dreamer, I'd be in the gaming journalism industry, eking out a solid career; if that possibility exists, then I hope my parallel self has had a good life, so far.
Anyway, after that entire moment with GameSpotting came to an end, life pretty much returned to normal. I graduated from high school, went to Rutgers, graduated after five years, tried making zero-budget YouTube videos for a year (look forward to a 10th Anniversary article about THAT this October), & then started up an obscure anime/manga/gaming/etc. blog that I've continued running (against all natural logic) for over eight years. Meanwhile, I kind of stopped going to gaming websites on a regular basis in general following 2006, after the whole Kane & Lynch debacle that resulted in Jeff Gertsmann being fired from GameStop, which in turn resulted in the mass exodus of writers who then formed Giant Bomb. Admittedly, I haven't really checked out Giant Bomb that often, though I am happy to see that the people who inspired me in the first place are succeeding on their own, doing the kinds of gaming coverage that they want to do. Do I have any regrets about not trying to move ahead with actually entering gaming journalism? Sure, I guess (& I fully admit that it's all due to my own habitual hesitation), but at the same time my education in journalism kind of showed me that, while I love writing, I might possibly wind up hating it if I was actually do it for a living. I'd rather have a "standard" job that allows me to make a living, even if it annoys me at times, and do what I enjoy simply because I want to do it, rather than have one of my passions become my job and risk me eventually hating it. This is also partially why I choose not to start up a Patreon for the blog, or anything like that, instead choosing to do it out of my own pocket, if need be. Hell, I wasn't even paid for the GuestSpotting endeavor, which is something I'm sure would be more frowned upon nowadays, especially from a major site like GameSpot.
As for the 32X article that started it all, I've actually kind of hesitated actually reading it all the way through for a good while. While I'm not the kind of person who hates looking back at his old work (in fact, I have a bad habit of doing just that too much & finding all the little mistakes I made), it has been 15 years since I wrote it, and I know that I've improved as a writer by any definition of the word. If anything, I've worried that reading it would make me wonder just what everyone at GameSpot was smoking by choosing such an amateurishly written article. To be honest, though, after reading it in full again for this piece, I don't think it's really that bad. It's basic, sure, but it's straight to the point, welcoming, lighthearted, not cynical in the slightest, & maybe (just maybe) even charmingly positive. In that regard, I guess I can see why Jeff Gertsmann, Greg Kasavin, or whoever actually sent me that e-mail felt that it was worth publishing on the site, and I guess I can be proud of that. The decision to publish that mini-article is honestly what really solidified the idea of going to Rutgers for journalism, because it made me feel like I had some talent in that field. Sure, it was already what I chose to do by that point, but this entire ordeal definitely helped make me feel more confident in my decision.
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So, 15 years later, I want to say "Thank you so much" to Jeff, Greg, Alex, Ryan, Ryan, Brad, Joe, Andrew, & everyone else who worked at GameSpot during that time. Thank you for inspiring a shy teenager to want to seriously take up writing about video games, for giving him the feeling that he had something in him that was worth refining & learning more about, & for allowing him to share the rhetorical stage with all of you for just one day, because if I was never given that opportunity, who knows if I'd still be writing to this very day. I'll probably never meet any of you in person, but should any of you ever come across this, know that you all were a big reason for why there's some bohemian-esque guy on the internet writing long-winded rhapsodies about obscure & forgotten anime, manga, video games, and anything else that he finds interesting... Kind of just like this article, in fact.
I know that might sound really weird to you, and I'm okay with that. I'm just a weirdo, and I can't change that.
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