Websites We've Known and Loved - Drop A Bomb On It
(Written during October 2024 for the Eggbug Memorial Rotator)
It might be gauche to talk of Giant Bomb as if it no longer exists. The fact of the matter is that it no longer exists as I once knew and loved it, all those years ago.
What is Giant Bomb? It's a website about video games. The backstory: in the late 00s, noted game journalist and podcaster Jeff Gerstmann was fired from noted game website Gamespot for giving a poor review to Kane & Lynch: Dead Men whilst the site was plastered up and down with advertisements for it. Several other staff members quit in solidarity over the next few months, and eventually they congregated at a new website about video games. The crew already had a strong rapport from the Gamespot days, and this let them experiment with wild and wacky skits and ideas for videos.
Giant Bomb was a comforting constant in my late teens and early 20s. With the main Giant Bombcast on Tuesdays, regular Quick Looks of releases both new and not-so-new, weekly livestreams like Thursday Night Throwdown and the Whiskey Media Happy Hour, and smattering of other one-off videos and reviews, there was a constant stream of - as the kids say - content.
I didn't actually listen to the Giant Bombcast for quite a while; it wasn't what drew me to the site. I've spoken in the past about I played Persona 4, Planescape: Torment, and Fate/Stay Night effectively at the same time, and I'd consider them all formative works (for better or worse). If someone notable had something to say about any of them, I was at least curious what they thought. What Giant Bomb thought was that they would never find the time to play a 100-hour JRPG like Persona 4 normally. The only recourse was to make it part of the job, filming fresh gameplay of it every workday.
Thus began the ever-infamous Endurance Run. In modern parlance, a Blind Video Let's Play.
I was never an actual user of Something Awful or its infamous forums (I did not want to pay the $10 entry fee, and I'd heard plenty of horror stories about the simultaneous arbitrary severity and lack of moderation therein), but what I did and sometimes still do use is the Let's Play archive that pulled almost entirely from SA. I'm absolutely a Let's Play elitist as a result.
I largely want my video LPs to be informative, curated, and produced; that usually means post-commentary, not live commentary. For me to tune into a blind playthrough or a live commentary series, the hosts need to have enough personality to compensate, and even back then I could only listen to so many 20-something white guys quip on mic. 30-something white guys, though? Novel!
At the time, Youtube still had a 10-15 minute upload limit, so most video LPs on the Archive had links that pointed to various now-dead video platforms like Blip.tv or Viddler. The P4 Endurance Run (and really, all of Giant Bomb's content) had the advantage of being hosted on the website itself, allowing the videos to range wildly in length.
In the depths of my own depression and inability to focus, years before I had any idea I had ADHD, Giant Bomb and the Endurance Run were there for me. I would just lay down on the couch with my laptop and binge watch, often falling asleep. The voices of Jeff Gerstmann, Vinny Caravella, Brad Shoemaker, and Ryan Davis became relaxing.
Even to this day, I don't really watch "streamers". I still don't know who Jerma even is. I want something I can pace out (or binge) at my leisure. That's why I like screenshot LPs, because I can blast through them as I will. Sometimes you just need something you can read at a computer screen for three hours by simply mashing spacebar. That's why I'm doing my own silly screenshot LP.
Some people point to the Endurance Run as popularizing the format of the video Let's Play. While I'm not sure I'd quite make that claim myself, Giant Bomb as a whole undeniably has a long shadow. Others can and have spoken on more detail about the site's historical importance to the evolution of the internet, their rise and fall as the original crew splintered off towards their own ventures. But that broad overview wasn't how I knew and loved it.
I did not post on the forums, I barely ever typed anything into stream chats. I was part of the Giant Bomb audience, not its actual community. But most of my other friends were also watching and listening to Giant Bomb at the time. It was a common point of contact that served as proverbial water cooler talk. I think stuff like this is much harder to come by these days without some kind of dedicated effort towards cultivating it. How many Discord friend servers started up a movie night or a party game night during lockdown, if only to maintain contact?
After a friendship breakup, I was once advised that people become friends based on mutual interests but stay friends based on mutual values. For years, Giant Bomb served an important role as a mutual interest. While their videos and podcasts thrived on the parasociality of Hanging With The Boys, they also facilitated some actual Hanging With The Boys. It's not like we did watch parties for any random Quick Look, but tuning in to Unprofessional Fridays, a Mario Party Party, or (my favorite by far) the E3 night-time interviews was a communal experience. I don't even mean in the stream chat, but just on Skype or Discord with my friends.
We still make references and call backs to some of those now ancient bits. Giant Bomb informed my sense of humor, the cadence of my speech, the way I riff on movies or handle being on a podcast myself. When should or shouldn't I speak up with a quip? There are entire genres of dumb bits I make that are inspired by banter on Giant Bomb's Quick Looks.
Giant Bomb has been fully Ship-of-Theseus'd at this point, and while it doesn't invalidate anything the site once did or anything its current incarnation is doing, it does mean the things I went there for aren't there anymore. The decline was slow, inevitable. We all mourned when Ryan Davis passed away. Not to be overly dramatic, but I mourned when Austin Walker left the site to form Waypoint, I mourned when Drew "Blinking White Guy" Scanlon left the site to pursue Cloth Map, I mourned when Red Ventures bought the site and signaled the true beginning of the end.
I knew it and loved it, and now I do neither. I suppose like anybody, I yearn for the simpler days of my youth. At least I'd say I learned a few lessons from those nightmare people and their silly videos across the years:
- Companies do not make the things you like; people make the things you like. If you must express some kind of brand loyalty, save it for them.
- Unless it's mutually recognized, people you follow on the internet can be friendly with you, but they are not your friends. They do not have your best interests at heart.
- Don't announce you're doing something big until you're ready to actually follow through on it in some form.
- If putting out consistent regular updates is french fries, then having a back catalog is a sack of potatoes in the pantry. People won't cheer for it, but they'll appreciate it in the lean times.
- Let the bit evolve ("yes, and"), but be willing to drop it instantly. Sometimes it's just not funny. Sometimes it will be way funnier when left to cook for a few weeks.
- Be a hater, but make the hate a whetstone for your mind rather than a bludgeon wielded against others. It's a wastrel's maneuver to simply declare that something sucks. Learn to articulate how and why you're disappointed with something and acknowledge that not everything is for you.
- Nothing lasts forever and nothing is perfect. It's not fair to remember the good times or the bad selectively.