1640: Not Quite Dead Yet

There was a horrible moment earlier where it looked like 1up.com had disappeared off the face of the planet.

For the uninitiated, 1up.com was a video games website that was originally born as a spinoff of Ziff Davis’ multiformat magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly. It was one of the first community-driven video games sites, with as much of a focus on its community-generated content as on the professionally produced material from the site’s full-time team (which, at one point, included my own brother).

For me, 1up was a site that had some good, talented writers and regularly put out interesting features, but it was that community that kept me coming back for more. It was one of my first encounters with the concept of “blogging”, too — I wrote semi-regularly on the subject of what I’d been playing and it provoked some interesting conversations with others in the comments. This was in the days before social media dominated everything — and even the days before “don’t read the comments” became a piece of accepted, common sense, popular wisdom.

The highlight, for me, though, was the forums. Specifically, the 1up Radio forums, which were the birthplace of the Squadron of Shame. Threads in this forum tended to follow the subjects of the 1up podcasts — 1up was also something of a pioneer in the then-fledgling podcast format — but often spun off in interesting and unexpected directions. One such example was the abortive attempt by the 1up Yours podcasters to tackle their “pile of shame” — games they’d owned for ages but had never gotten around to playing. The original intention of the segment on the show was for the hosts to play some of the same game that they had on their Pile, then discuss it the next week. Unfortunately, it didn’t really take off as part of the show, but fortunately for the format — “gaming book club” seemed like a good idea — the community decided to take the idea and run with it.

The first couple of threads we did this for were simply branded “The Boardmembers’ Pile of Shame” and explored games like System Shock 2 and Freespace 2. After a while, it became clear that it was the same group of people participating each time, and so the Squadron of Shame Club was born using 1up.com’s Club feature — itself an interesting take on social media that I haven’t quite seen the likes of since; in many ways, it pioneered microblogging long before Twitter became popular, though there was no character limitation, simply an ongoing, reverse-chronological order feed of conversation that we’ve tried several times to recreate with varying amounts of success.

1up has been dying for some time, though. The beginning of the end of that site for the Squadron of Shame was when the forums were merged into “Games”, “Not Games” and something else that escapes me right now. Various disparate communities were pushed together; tempers flares; cultures clashed. An attempt at a Squad thread in these new digs was quickly derailed by some asshole with the attention span of a gnat yelling about “massive fucking walls of text” when, in fact, that had been our bread and butter for a long time by that point.

The Squad has kind of floated around the Internet ever since, eventually settling on our most recent digs, that will hopefully be “home” for some time to come. 1up, meanwhile, continued to tick along for a while before eventually being swallowed up by IGN and pretty much left to rot. The site was still there, though, with all its archives visible for all to see whenever they wanted.

Which is why so many people were surprised and upset today when going to 1up.com’s front page simply gave what appeared to be an empty directory. Thankfully, at the time of writing, the front page at least appears to have come back, and if you can remember the not-very-friendly link, you can even get to the Squadron of Shame’s original home.

How much longer will it be there, though? This is a sad and unfortunate aspect of the digital age — things that are the source of great memories are becoming increasingly impermanent. One day 1up.com will simply cease to be, and those memories will be nothing but that — memories. We’ve already lost a lot of things, such as our original mission threads on the old forums — it’d be a real shame to lose what’s left of our community in its original form, though thankfully most of the Old Guard have followed each other around as digital nomads ever since.

So 1up.com may not be dead just yet, then, but today was a potent reminder that nothing lasts forever.