I remember on a rainy morning in April of 1982, I had skipped school and was bored, so I decided to look up some Dark Souls NPC to find out about the questline. I found this new site in beta called videogamefrequentlyaskedquestions (it would later be shortened to gamefaqs), and lo and behold they had the answer I was looking for. And that, as they say, is that.
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Feeling really good. Faceless goofus in a sea of alts
How exactly was GameFAQs started? Like, was it just a project that you did in your spare time that started to grow, or did you actually focus a lot on it in the beginning?
Throughout the early 90's, there were two major sources of video game information you could find on the Internet: Andy Eddy's FTP Archive at Netcom, and the Fighting Game Archive at Brawl. Throughout my college years, I fondly remember gophering to these sites and browsing FAQs for the latest games at the time (like Mortal Kombat 2 and Super Street Fighter II). Unfortunately, by 1995, it was next-to-impossible to access the sites during peak hours due to the sheer number of other users who had found these sites.
In 1995, I was living alone in Houston with two cats and working full-time in Information Technology at a computer company. In the fall, AOL began offering 2MB of web space with their accounts. I decided to make an archive of Andy Eddy's site in web format for easier browsing over a weekend, called it the "Video Game FAQ Archive", and on November 5th, I listed the site on Yahoo and posted the URL on a couple of newsgroups.
Over the next four years, the site slowly grew, updates went from "whenever" to weekly to daily, ad revenue started paying the bills and even supplementing my work salary. In the Summer of 1999, I decided that if I dedicated myself full-time to GameFAQs, I would be able to create an extensive set of message boards for the site, one for each game - something that hadn't been done before, as far as I knew. So, I quit my "real" job, and GameFAQs became my full-time occupation; a 40-hour a week job.
By 2003, GameFAQs was more like an 80-to-100 hour a week job. I was doing the work of a site editor, message board administrator, technical supervisor, server administrator, and all-around troubleshooter. I was on call 24 hours day, and couldn't ever be very far from an Internet connection in case a server decided to go down. Over the years, I had received several offers, but I had never honestly considered selling the site, but by this time, I realized that I could no longer do it alone, and I honestly didn't have the money to hire outside help. Luckily, CNET was interested, and the purchased the site that summer.
Through early 2005, the site went through a long (and sometimes painful) integration, but today, GameFAQs is integrated with GameSpot at a technical level, yet still operates as a separate entity from an editorial standpoint. Aside from having Sailor Bacon as an Associate Editor, there's a dedicated technical staff who work to keep things up and running. I work a standard 40-hour week, I don't carry a pager, and I have much more time to spend with my wife, and the same two cats I had back when it all started.
CJayC also wrote about GameFAQs' initial history during its 10th anniversary. It's similar to post#11 above. Keep in mind that the post I quote below was written 18 years ago.
10 years ago, I was bored. So, I decided to create a web site. 10 years later, here we are. End of story.
Okay, it's not quite that simple.
I first went online, if you could call it that, back in the mid-80s. I was on my Commodore 64, using a top-of-the-line 1200-baud modem, connecting to QuantumLink. It was basically a glorified BBS, but it was a full national network, and at the time, it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. I could download files, send e-mail, read the news... You know, the kind of things you take for granted today.
I never really knew what the Internet was until I was in college. My first experiences were with telnetting to MUDs reading USENET, and browsing Gopher sites.
Yes, Gopher. We lived in primitive times back then, my friend.
And whilst in the Gopher-space, probably sometime in 1993 or so, I stumbled across Andy Eddy's FTP site at Netcom. It was the resource for video game FAQs on the whole of the Internet. It consisted of probably 100 or so USENET FAQs covering mostly arcade fighting games, but a few console games as well. Unfortunately, being on a public FTP server with a limited number of connections, it became harder and harder and harder to get to as time went on.
A few years later, I'm sitting in my apartment in Houston, Texas, bored on a November weekend. The World Wide Web was in its infancy, and the idea of having your own "Home Page" on the Internet was still a very new thing indeed. AOL had just recently started up a new feature where users could get a whopping 2MB of web space on their servers, and since you could have five screen names, that meant 10MB of space.
So, with nothing better to do, I grabbed all of the FAQs on Andy Eddy's site that were allowed to be redistributed, and sorted them out. I taught myself enough HTML to cobble together some index pages in Notepad, and uploaded everything to AOL. I submitted the site to Yahoo!, posted a note about it on USENET a few days later, and waited. By the end of the first week, I was getting around 75 hits a day.
A few months later, I moved the site off of AOL and onto a local ISP's servers. Next came the domain name, then a database back-end so I wouldn't have to upload everything by hand and edit all the pages in Notepad. Then I started running advertising, changed networks a few times, kept expanding the site, bought some servers and began co-locating, quit my "real" job, rode the wave of the Internet boom, created and opened up the boards, added interactive contribution features, and worked myself into the ground.
By early 2003, I was just about to burn out. I was spending upwards of 80 hours a week some weeks just keeping things running. I was the site editor, the board administrator, the contributions manager, the server administrator, the database admin, the network admin, the business contact, the PR manager, and pretty much every other position involved in running a major web site. I realized that I couldn't take it much longer without snapping, so I had a choice: quit and walk away, or share the load. That's where CNET came in, and that's where we are today, give or take a few bumps in the road. I'm the Senior Editor of the site I created 10 years ago, still doing for the most part exactly what I've done since 1995, only with a whole lot of help.
I never imagined when I started this place up that I'd still be running it after 10 years, much less have it be my full-time job. I thought, back two years ago, that maybe I'd just keep going until the 10th anniversary. I'd quit, maybe take a sabbatical, and then, well, I hadn't really thought it out that far. But I couldn't see myself continuing on forever.
Now that the 10th anniversary is actually here, I can't imagine leaving.