by Bryn Gelbart

The Giant Bombcast was my first parasocial relationship in video games. Podcasts were my gateway into reading (and writing for) games websites. It actually began with the Bungie Podcast, but uh that is a longer story for some other time. I got into the Bombcast after hearing about it on other gaming podcasts, Joystiq, 1up, and others. I think it was late ‘09 I started to become a regular listener of the Bombcast. By that time the next year I’d consider myself a fan of the site. Within another, I’d have added “work at Giant Bomb” to my dream jobs list.

I spent some years on an off as a Giant Bomb premium member, but remained a pretty fucking dilligent follower for majority of the next decade. E3 and Game of the Year were the things that actually felt like the real event on those holiday weeks off. At least they always lined up with being out of school. It was a shitload of time well spent. I genuinely don’t think I credit that time enough for building up a knowledge base I use for what is now my job.

I remember my first job the summer after high school. I would go to the basement of the local University library and sort sheet music. Down there, I would listen to podcasts, often the Bombcast. I remember being in that basement listening to grown men cry and grieve the day after Ryan Davis died. I cried in the basement. To this day, there is not a celebrity death that has hit me harder or more personally than when Ryan left us.

I met Jeff Gerstmann briefly in 2014 after he gave a talk at the NYU Game Center. I said hello. Later, I had an extremely awkward first interaction with Alex Navarro.The second time I met Alex, it was extremely relaxed and I confirmed the first encounter was not tragically awkward enough to grace his memory. We were both, four years later, much chiller dudes.

Only someone with a fucked up parasocial relationship can write that last paragraph with a straight face. I cared about those guys… but on a very basic level their content was comfort food. I admit as a young cis white guy seeing that unchallenged was likely a subconcious element of the comfort. I never felt threatened by what was so obviously a half assed attempt at diversity. To see a community I had come to hold to a higher standard cave to it, though, is what ultimately broke the fantasy of Giant Bomb for me.

Giant Bomb community hadn’t been good or bad the whole time, but that it had simply been an online community of gamers. At the time I was entering those on the Internet, let’s say 2011, Giant Bomb seemed like an especially safe and good one, even though everyone said fuck every other word. I only ever made a single forum post and commented on a handful of videos in the 8 or so years I was logged in Giant Bomb daily.. On the site, I saw a supportive group of fans in a positive feedback loop. It was a walled fucking garden. Everyone inside Giant Bomb dot com loved Giant Bomb. Even the nasty comments felt fueled by a desire for the content to be the best it could be. Or, at least, as good as it used to be. This is where I first saw this specific rhetoric deployed. Make Giant Bomb something again.When you start going on Reddit you realize the Giant Bomb “community” is a lot larger than what you’re seeing on the site. Controversies you don’t even know about like the very large, vocal pushback to every new voice, including the “feminist” Patrick Klepek. I mean Jesus Christ. I knew Patrick’s face and voice from 1up and G4, and he had a storied history in front of a camera. I knew he’d broken a big news story about the inner workings of the Call of Duty studio. So it was easy to write off this group as a vocal minority of gamergate weirdos. But as the years went on, seeing hate rear its miserable head in all corners of Giant Bomb louder each year. The walls had begun to come down.

There was, I suspect, a collective trauma. There is no way to reconcile losing a core personality of one of the predominant personality driven websites in the industry. After Ryan’s death, new team members were always met at best with cautious optimism, but there was always someone (or someones) singled out as a scapegoat. It was always someone’s fault Giant Bomb wasn’t what it used to be. But when it could be someone with an agenda, well, of course it would be.

Reading the comments on any GOTY video Abby Russell was in is an exercise in futility. Abby got bullied into not even engaging with the Merritt K shit in an honest way. God, Abby, I’m so sorry. I am actually surprised any other woman ever went to work for the site after seeing what she went through. In so many ways, this was the straw that broke my back. The moment the garden walls came down and the vermin began to show themselves. Like the politics of the duders themselves, most everything on the site was implicit. The racism, the sexism. It was all there over the years, but it wasn’t brutal or honest. It wasn’t violent. At least not from where I could see.

I credit a lot of the people who passed through Giant Bomb as the reason I’m where I am today. Austin maybe most of all. Austin Walker was a huge influence on the way I think about art. On a fundamental level, listening to Austin talk about games or whatever taught me how to have fun thinking about art. I had over the years developed critical thinking skills, but I’d never known how to use them for my own enjoyment. It feels like a selfish lens to look at criticism, I suppose, but it helped me cope with the bad times. But it also shaped me and how important the reflection part of the process of playing video games. It’s why FromSoftware games are like candy for my brain. When I’m jacked into Elden Ring I am fully engaged with what’s in front of me. And when I turn it off, the negative remains. In the off hours, my subconscious devizes new strategies while my muscle memory becomes dry concrete. I don’t think I would enjoy them as much if I had never discovered Austin as a critic. It’s just how my brain works now.

And to be fair, a lot of this happened in the early Waypoint days. Austin’s short stint at GB was met with a fair deal of backlash. In retrospect, he thrived in an environment that didn’t allow the man to do his thing. Even after BLM and through the Trump era, it felt like Gerstmann’s project was not supposed to be explicitly political, despite implicit lefty values. Explicit politics only when necessary was very much the status quo at Giant Bomb.

And through all of that there was Gerstmann. He pissed me off as much as any good critic should, in the end, I think. It was his baby, many fans will say harkening back to the infamous Kane and Lynch 2 review that got Jeff fired from Gamespot. The spark that would ignite Giant Bomb. There was no day one Patreon for Jeff Gerstmann. Instead, he got sad, played Burnout Paradise, and started a website. And it was, in retrospect, a remarkable sign of solidarity. Leaving a steady job amid the 2008 financial crisis was a symbol of friendship that made the original GB crew feel more than a group of employees.

I think that is where a lot of the dissent over the years came from. Nothing was ever going to replicate it, but also, nothing was allowed to. As Giant Bomb succeded, it had to become a company. Companies don’t have friends, they have employees.

So much of the fantasy is the “we are just friends making shit” mentality. This was (and still is) what is being sold. The dream of turning your hangouts into your livelihood. I mean, it’s what Twitch sells too, in its own way. It has always been a fantasy I’ve shared in and have quite literally bought into whenever I supported Giant Bomb with my money. But I’ve never lived the dream. I never did it. It doesn’t work out that way.

My friends wanted to do other things with their lives. They had ambitions to make films. To learn languages and travel and teach. And I wanted a website to pay me to write about Nintendo games I don’t have to pay for. And I did. I had to get good at it first and then when I got good, I didn’t have a community. I had to find Deep Hell dot com before I started building on top of it.

I stopped following GB shortly after the Red Ventures deal and the departures it (99% certainty) caused. I’ve been checked out for a bit and wish no ill will on anyone there in any capacity, but Gerstmann’s exit feels like the final ushering of this “end of an era.” And there have been many so-called eras of Giant Bomb. But lately the changes have made it undeniable that I’m getting what I used to get there from other places, in other forms, to appease a new me, a changed self.

Still, old habits die gnarly deaths. It probably will be a couple more months until I stop typing “gi” into my search bar and pressing enter any time I feel sad, alone, and want a comforting dose of video games.

Bryn Gelbart (he/him) is a writer and critic. He knows you won’t pronounce his name right in your head and he forgives you. You can find him earnest posting @FeelTheBryn