#oneaday Day 710: Bringing It Back

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Those of you active on social media recently may have seen that all of USgamer's staff has been laid off, presumably with the intention of either closing the site altogether or leaving it as some sort of click farm in the long term. Either way, I'm not shedding any tears over it; while working at that place was literally a dream come true when I first started, the way I was treated by former editor-in-chief Jeremy Parish in particular — culminating with me being made redundant on my birthday so he could hire his friends instead of that British twat who liked anime games — has left me with a sour taste in my mouth ever since.

However, that's not to say that I achieved nothing of note at USgamer. I feel like my time there really helped me establish both my voice as a writer, and my specialist knowledge. It helped me understand the things I wanted to pursue and learn more about — and ultimately, although the circumstances were unpleasant, it led me to create MoeGamer, and that is why some of you are here reading this right now.

I looked over the archives of USgamer today (side note: their site navigation is completely broken and it appears no-one has noticed for the last six years) and discovered that I posted well over a thousand articles during my time there. Most of those were news stories and, as such, probably aren't worth preserving, but there were a significant number of reviews and feature articles that I had written. I spent a bit of time earlier today downloading and preserving all of these, because with the future of the site completely unknown, there's every chance that they will just disappear one day.

So I'm going to preserve some of them myself. Some things aren't particularly relevant any more, as they were written in response to particular happenings or periods in the games industry, but others are timeless — and it's those articles that I'm going to republish on MoeGamer over the course of the coming weeks and months.

There's a bunch of these articles that I'd completely forgotten I'd written. I'll leave some as a surprise for you for when I republish them, but one of the ones I was most pleased to discover was a detailed breakdown of my whole "find the good" philosophy that I've always adopted on MoeGamer. I had totally forgotten that this was actually based on an established theory of criticism — specifically, John Updike's personal rules of literary criticism, which he published in his 1975 collection of prose Picked-Up Pieces. They (still) make a lot of sense, and are broadly applicable to any form of creative media.

Anyway, keep an eye out for these republished articles in the coming weeks; they'll likely be tagged in their own section of the site under the "From the Archives" heading, which also includes articles from MoeGamer's less focused "1.0" incarnation (2014-2016) as well as a number of columns I wrote for a defunct site known as Games Are Evil.

I may have been completely ghosted by all of USgamer's former staff — reviews editor Mike Williams, who helped launch the site alongside me back in 2013, name-checked literally everyone who had ever worked on the site except me in his farewell piece — but I'll be damned if the blood, sweat and tears I poured into that site over my time there is going to go to waste. Our creations in the digital realm are all too fragile, and all too easily lost to things that are nothing to do with you. So I can at least ensure that some of the work I'm proud of lives on!