How gaming has changed in the last five years

GamesRadar is born

I know this article, which is supposedly about the games industry as a whole, has been awfully focused on GamesRadar's own history - but hey, it's our fifth anniversary, and like any self-centered five-year-old, we can't see through any lens but our own. So sit down, or... stay seated, and let us tell you a story about the global launch of GamesRadar.

After the acquisition of CheatPlanet in 2005, GamesRadar was built alongside it to be the "next-generation gaming site," a massive, global database of news, reviews, previews, screenshots, and videos. It was flashy, for sure (meaning that it used a lot of Adobe Flash), but oh my - how very much we've learned, and how very far we've come, since 2006.

That in mind, it's my distressing honor to present you with the very first GamesRadar prototype. Are you ready? Am I stalling because I don't want to show you GR's humble beginnings, or is it because I want this text to break a little further past that left aligned image up there, so it looks nice? Have you stopped reading this paragraph yet?

Above: The logo's pretty much the same...

GamesRadar had no following or community aside from the then (er, and still) displaced and disgruntled CheatPlanet forum users (um, sorry and stuff?), and those still around from before the global launch (also, anyone rememberDailyRadar?). How was it to compete with the likes of IGN?

IGN, by the way, originally stood for 'Imagine Games Network,' Imagine being the publisher which originally created it, sold it to Rupert Murdoch, became Future US, and established GamesRadar. Funny, innit? But I digress - GR made itself known by being different, first and foremost, and we're still different... just, different in a different way. Here's a little sample of GamesRadar's early flavah...

Above: That should be "Talk about games with loads of people who don't look like this," because I doubt it meant to suggest that games don't look like naked women, but whatever

Above: If you click, you can't judge

Above: What's so important about this? It's GamesRadar's very first Top 7 list, and the only one without 'Top 7' in the headline. We've been doing one every week since October of 2006

Above: TalkRadar wasn't GR's first podcast; the very short lived Tokyo Elevator holds that honor

A sampling of the past

OK, enough about us for now, there were other sites around in 2006 which, with the help of Internet Archive, we can also laugh at. Here are a few examples of 2006 website design atits most 2006-ey. Except... they aren't quite as silly as we were. Hum...

Kotaku - Feb 2, 2006 - Gawker keepin' it clean.

Destructoid - Apr 8, 2006 - !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

GameSpot - Jan 11, 2006 - The 'Spot, looking a bit official stationary mixed with spreadsheet.

IGN - Jan 2, 2006 - IGN during its blue period.

Social media, and other buzzwords

Come 2011, and it's hard to believe we're browsing the same web we were back then. Prior to 2006, a tweet was a sound a bird made, Facebook was only for students, and "reddit" was spelled "read it." We were on the cusp of the Web 2.0 boom, which would bring so, so many other awful buzzwords with it, but would also very much change the way we interact on the internet. Why is that relevant? Because you're using the internet right now. I know, it's crazy.

Above: This happened because the internet made it happen

So we made a YouTube account, and a Twitter account, and a Facebook page, and we started talking about analytics and SEO and SMM (but not in an evil way) and Digg and Tumblr and other misspellings, and so did everyone else. Cut to now, and communities of gamers are more tightly-knit than ever.

Above: Our very first, er... second podcast! We were learning, be nice, and now we've got three: The UK followed suit withTalkRadar UK, and most recently,Pokémon Monday launched into the... Poké... sphere.

Whether you like it or not, we're moving toward the point when everything you do is communicated, whether or not you have a podcast, a vodcast, a blog, a vlog, or a glog. I just made that last one up, but it's probably something. All of us - you, me, your neighbor, GamesRadar, Giant Bomb, Kotaku, Joystiq, Gamasutra, you-get-it-a - are becoming more and more connected to each other. Is it good? Is it bad? It's a little of both, with all that gray area and junk, but whatever happens to the web, we look forward to five more years of writing about games, talking about games, and Photoshoping silly things into screenshots of games. Come with us on our journey, and we promise never to close an article by copying and pasting phrases from a graduation speech ever again.

Much more happened in the past five years that could be conveyed in this brief, GR-centric overview. Unofficial PlayStation Magazine became Playstation: The Official Magazine. EGM died and was reborn. Sega quietly slipped bestiality into Sonic the Hedgehog, and many other reboots, some good, some terrible, strutted in. Steam got slutty and started sleeping with Macs, and is now on its way to PS3s. I could list more, but what to we look like, the kind of site which writes list articles all the time? (You know you love them.)

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