“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

There’s lots of things that have disappeared from the world in the 35 years the internet’s been around, and very few of them ever come back. Anyone remember Happy Puppy? Midway Games? GameSetWatch?

One of those dead properties was Game Informer, a long-time video game publication that got its start as an official organ of the used game chain FuncoLand, whose ads used to be ever-present in other game mags. When they merged with Babbages to form GameStop, Game Informer went with them. In recent years you could get issues of Game Informer for free from GameStop stores.

Then, I assume as a cost-cutting measure, GameStop shut it down last year. Despite its status as a store giveaway, the publication was pretty slick, and wasn’t without its fans. And lo, it seems they are back! Not just their website but a print magazine too! The new incarnation of Game Informer is unconnected to GameStop, it having been sold to an outside group. According to the company, its entire staff returned to work on the new publication. It seems too much to ask that it be free again, but maybe it won’t be too expensive.

I will admit that I wasn’t a huge fan of GI while they were owned by GameStop. Its focus was solidly on the AAA market that we mostly steer clear of. But it’s good when people working in media get their jobs back, and we wish the staff of the resurrected company well. They’ve even kept up with their reviews, on their first day back they posted 29 reviews of games released during their absence. (It includes Echoes of Wisdom, but no sign of Balatro.) It may be worth following their Youtube channel, which continues on from their GameStop days.

Here is the announcement from the channel (3 ½ minutes):

rodneylives

It’s a grievous blow to the game editing community, but Nightcrawler, the maintainer of the 19-year-old hack repository and community site romhacking.net, is shutting its doors. The reasons why are the top news item on the site, probably the last new news item that will ever be posted there.

They mention several reasons, but say a collection of users who had offered to take up the site for disingenuous reasons. The details were not mentioned, but they mentioned by way of comparison what happened to emulator author Near, creator of higan, and that can be easily taken as a bad sign.

However, Gideon Zhi on Bluesky offers a different take, that suggests comparison to Near is greatly inappropriate, and that Nightcrawler was severely burnt out and refused offers to help. I don’t know which is more accurate, but the details are offered suggest there may be something to his version of events. Gideon Zhi isn’t one, I think, to cover something like that up. Ah well, drama.

Maintaining a hugely popular website for 19 years is a huge drain on your time, energy and finances. It’s possible that ultimately Nightcrawler needed, or even just wanted, to retire, and that’s okay.

I’ve made frequent use of romhacking.net over the years, both in researching two romhack ebooks and the Romhack Thursday feature on this site. While what the maintainer of romhacking.net says in their news post, that there isn’t as much of a need of a centralized site for collecting and presenting romhacks as there was back in 2005, I still found their site extremely useful, and I think it served a vital role. I will greatly miss it, but I understand their wishing to move on. They took the step of uploading the whole site contents to the Internet Archive, which is a forward-thinking move that I applaud.

Will they ever return to updating the site? Anything is possible, but I expect not. Will another site arise to take its place? Who knows, there’s definitely demand for it. I wish Nightcrawler well in any event, and thank them for their service.

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Second:

Kotaku reports that Game Informer, the oldest game magazine still in print in the US (dating back to 1991) is shutting down. It was originally a production of the classic game retailer FuncoLand, who would advertise, in turn, in classic 90s gaming magazines, and the publication changed ownership to GameStop when they bought FuncoLand out in 2000.

Since then, GameStop has kept the magazine going as a house publication, at times distributing issues for free to customers. It seems the announcement was sudden, with management sending out a tweet about the publication’s closure while staff was being notified of the ending of their positions.

There are older game magazines in Japan, of course, and US game magazines lately have had things pretty tough with competition from the internet. It’s surprising that they’ve managed to keep going for this long.

rodneylives