At the beginning of 2009, Kevin Craig and Greg Teuscher, friends of mine and fellow gamers, approached me with an idea for a video game blog. Rather than focus on industry news, the writing would focus on humor and insight into certain games, particularly those of the retro genre. They expressed a lot of distaste with the state of current game journalism (both from a writing and design standpoint) and wanted to do something completely different.

I took the project on for several reasons. One, I always loved writing about games, but never wanted to do it alone. I saw the site as an opportunity for me to write alongside friends and peers who shared a fairly similar view on gaming. Most of all, however, their philosophy on gaming much paralleled my own philosophy on design.

As much as I'm horrified by "the horrible slickness" of Web 2.0, they have no love toward the current genre's obsession with grime colored hallways and armor clad space marines. The modern state of games seems to hold technical marvel over innovation in terms of gameplay. In short: the people making games forgot how to make games. They're making sixty dollar tech demos.

I designed the site with this in mind, hoping to make the actual navigation as simple as possible. One of the main issues with most gaming sites is the amount of navigation choices the user is confronted with before they reach any content. On a site like Destructoid, for example, the user has over thirty navigation choices before they reach the actual content of the site. I decided to do the complete opposite and keep content as close to the top of the page as possible, assuring that nothing would be lost beneath the "fold", wherever it may be.

Another issue I faced was that nearly every game blog I ran into was using shiny textures for the sake of using shiny textures. I soon realized that if modern gaming was represented by the power and sleekness of its visuals, then retro gaming was centered around the concept of a lo-fi, intimate experience with a simpler, perhaps purer concept. I decided that, rather than create a completely vector illustration, I should create every element with pen, ink, and watercolor and create a 3D collage for the main illustration.

Overall, the design is quite simple: tell the user that this is a site about fun and personal experiences with games through the background image, and provide them with a simple, accessible way to view the site's content. Not to toot my own horn but uhh…I love this one.

The site was made using watercolor paper, Micron pens, cheap watercolor paint and brushes, an overworked exacto knife and one dirty old scanner. I developed it in HTML/CSS and integrated it into the Blogger platform.

About three weeks in I realized Blogger sucked and rebuilt the site onto Wordpress.