1130: Pour One Out for 1up.com

The “digital age” brings with it many benefits — most of which relate somehow to the concept of “convenience” — but an unfortunate side-effect of it is that things aren’t as permanent as they once were. Sites grow, change and relaunch, and occasionally die altogether.

Today it emerged that Ziff Davis, former owners of 1up.com until it was sold to IGN, and now the company that owns IGN (and consequently 1up.com again… yes, it’s confusing) would be shuttering three sites, including 1up.com.

This is immensely sad news for a number of reasons. Today I will primarily be outlining my own personal feelings about that site; I’m sure a number of people reading this will have their own opinions and thoughts about the site and the changes it’s gone through over the years, so feel free to share them in the comments.

I first became aware of 1up.com while my brother was working at Ziff Davis on Electronic Gaming Monthly and the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine (I think I’ve got that chronology right). He played an important role in shaping the site and its content, and it became a regular hangout for me not just because of me supporting my bro, but also because I really liked what it was doing. It was my first real contact with what was to become “social networking”, and I found myself really enjoying making use of all the site features — the ability to blog, the forums, the ability for users to create clubs and communities as part of the main site. My 1up blog was one of the first places where I wrote about games regularly, primarily for myself but also in an attempt to keep myself in “practice” should I ever find myself in a situation where I’d be able to do so professionally.

My main reason for thinking so fondly of 1up.com is the Squadron of Shame. I’ve told this story before, but it doesn’t hurt to tell it again.

The Squadron of Shame was a group of people who came together as the result of a fairly throwaway feature on one of 1up’s podcasts. The podcast participants had got talking about their “Pile of Shame” — all the games they owned but had never got around to finishing (or even playing in some cases) — and discussion had turned to Tim Schafer’s cult classic Psychonauts. The intention was for the Pile of Shame to become a regular feature on the podcast as the participants played through the games together and gave their thoughts on more obscure titles that people might have missed out on.

It was a short-lived feature, and quickly abandoned on the show — but a bunch of people on the 1up forums really liked the idea and thus decided to come together and finish the job they’d started. We checked out Psychonauts and had a blast playing through it together. Then we started talking about other games that people might have missed — System Shock 2, Psi Ops, Odin Sphere and all manner of other titles. For each one, we made a thread on the forums for discussion, played through it together and got to know each other a bit better in the process. It was a fantastic experience, and I made a lot of very good friends in the process — friends who I still “talk” to on a daily basis even today.

Trouble was on the horizon, though. The once-sprawling 1up.com forums, which used to be split into a wide variety of distinct sections, were merged into simple “Games” and “Not Games” categories. The Squadron of Shame’s threads used to call the “1up Radio” forum home — this forum primarily related to the site’s podcasts and the features therein, and was generally a home of more mature, respectful discussion than other parts of the forums as a whole. Suddenly, though, our thoughtful threads — which often included long posts with members writing mini-essays on their experiences with the games we were playing — were lumped in with all the “wot iz ur favorit wepon in halo” threads from the hoi polloi of the site. Consequently, on at least one occasion we found ourselves being rather unpleasantly trolled by users who, for some inexplicable reason, took great umbrage to our writing of posts that included more than five words, knew how to use paragraphs and punctuated properly, and discussion wasn’t quite so easy any more.

Around that time, the “club” pages on 1up got an overhaul; there used to be a “communal blog” where individual members could post in a linear fashion, but this was replaced by a dedicated forum just for that club. We made use of that for a while, but further trouble was on the horizon with the event which became known as the Great Upheaval, when a huge proportion of the talent from the site was laid off as part of the transition to new owners UGO. The site wasn’t the same after that, so a lot of people drifted away from the community, mostly to places such as Twitter.

It was around this time that we started producing the Squadron of Shame SquadCast, an irregularly-occurring podcast that continues the Squad’s original mission in earnest. To this day, we still have a small but dedicated following keen to tune in and hear our thoughtful, mature (and lengthy!) discussions on obscure games and gaming-related topics. It’s something I’m really happy to be a part of, and something that still feels me with great pride any time I hear someone from outside my core friendship group talking about — people like Garnett Lee, one of the original 1up podcasters who gave us the idea in the first place.

Today, the Squad primarily lives on Google+, which seems to be a good home for our discussions. You can check out and join our community here. Prior to that, a healthy amount of discussion also took place on the “Squawkbox”, a WordPress site we set up to emulate the old-school “club journal” format from the original 1up.com club, but which is now primarily used as a site linking to the SquadCast’s archives. There have been plans on and off to make a “proper” Squad site for many years now (including a nice-looking mockup), but they’re yet to come to fruition. One day…?

Anyway, I’m drifting off the point somewhat. The main thing I wanted to say is that none of this would have happened without 1up.com. Without 1up.com, I never would have met this disparate group of people from all over the world and made a group of friends with whom I really feel that I can be “myself”. Without 1up.com, I wouldn’t have as solid a “support network” as I feel I do today. Without 1up.com, there’s every chance that I’d be a lot more lonely than I am today. I feel privileged and honoured to have met everyone who came together as a result of the Squad, and am glad that we’re still attracting new members a few at a time every so often, many of whom are fast becoming just as good friends as those who I have known since those early days of the group. I now have a solid group of international friends that I trust and depend on, and without 1up.com I simply wouldn’t have that. (Of course, there’s every chance that I would have made a similar group of friends on a different website, but, you know.)

So it’s for this reason I’m sorry to see 1up.com go. The loss of the articles and writing talent on the site is sad too, of course, but for me it will always be the community side of things that captured my heart and imagination, and showed me that my passion for video games was not something to be embarrassed or ashamed about, but instead celebrated and explored.

So thanks for the memories, 1up. You’ll be sorely missed.