I was never broadly a fan of most of the big gaming websites on the internet. It seems quaint to look back now at all of the websites lost – only found on Archive . Org or the ways their old homepages have been enshrined. The internet, is, after all, at the mercy of its benefactors. Eventually the shareholders will pull the money out, teams of writers cast adrift. Dreams crushed, you know – all of the bad movies about saving the orphanage are coming true one day at a time.

1UP.COM started in the early part of the 2000’s. A spin off of a gaming magazine – it was the Online Community counterpart to a mostly offline one. Don’t let me go on the record here, but at some point in time the websites focus became a kind of content farm. As a massive editorial website, writers could run their own blog. Win your own trip to E3! the advertisements would do – this was before a generation of cynics had been ruined by what actually happens to young people at trade shows.

The promise of 1UP.COM was that young writers could get a position on the staff team, or become featured writers. I don’t remember any of the featured blogs on 1UP.com. I definitely don’t remember if any of them went on to continue writing. The world is extravagantly large, and dreams have an altogether strange way of coming true. That all happened so long ago – what I am here for is to review, not the memory of, or the concept of 1UP.COM

But what the 1UP.COM frontpage looks like today and what it can tell us about videogame writing today.

Perpetually frozen on the day of March 14, 2014 – 1UP’s splash page is almost entirely removed from the concept of politics. This homepage might be what The Gamers fucking froth over today, the idea of an objective gamer website. Disgusting. Pathetic. The only saving grace is that The Top Game in the World is inexplicably Metal Gear Solid: Rising. People who read DEEP-HELL DOT COM know that that videogame is canon to this website, but was never the top game in the world.

Rising being #1 covers a, what some writers might call pedestrian, but the actual term is closer to “standard market fair” selection of videogames. Diablo III, Bioshock Infinite, Assassins Creed III. A selection of sequels crafted to Be The Most Popular Games, Ever. A period of time written about extensively that I can only relate with a kind of journalistic “I was there.” we (writers) really did wring our hands over and over again about how many sequels there were. That was Videogames, the conversation, one of escalating numbers of franchises.

What’s changed? Videogames are all about permutation now. There is no new Counter-Strike there is Valorant. There is no new Earthbound there’s Undertale. Creators and artists follow the moods and memories of their child and teenage years, distilling them into new creative works. At long last, we could be about to see the many fingered hand of the market fully unravel. We’re speaking a language, but that language often seems like trying to sell the same routine to an audience that’s already heard it. Nothing is permanent. Bioshock, Infinite.

We’re hand in hand now, in the weeds. 2014 is around the time I stopped reading videogame reviews at all. ironically, it’s also right around the time I started writing them. Luigi’s Mansion, an article I can click on but can’t read about Parasite Eve. These editorials aren’t as interesting as the Reviews column. Castlevania: Mirror of Fate was advertised as “the return to form” only a scant few years after Konami relegated one of their most talented directors to a window seat. I don’t remember anything about Crysis but someone does. Really – if we looked at this space for the most interesting thing, it’s that Metal Gear Rising is a B, but also the most popular game on the website at the time. Review scores sell products, they’re consumer information. Only the thrill of cutting can truly give game players what they need.

In the six years since 1up.com closed its doors and froze its homepage, large websites haven’t really changed the way they write about videogames. There are still a never ending, weekly repetition of articles comparing videogames to movies. In the darker shadows of alt-games-criticism, the nu-nu-new games journalism, now we just compare videogames to theatre and poetry. Our language gets closer and closer to the stage, and maybe closer and closer to the cave.