It's a big year for gaming anniversaries, and there's one I didn't want to let go without a mention: Game|Life is five years old today.
We put up the first Game|Life posts on October 25, 2005. At that time, the Wired Blogs initiative was very new – the first few blogs, like Sex Drive and Autopia, had only begun a month prior. The primary content on what was then known as Wired News was published on the front page. The blogs were not edited nor was there any real style guide – it was just a place for the site's editors and writers to churn out quick content.
If you go back through some of the very first Game|Life entries, you can see the seeds of a lot of the content that defines us today – there's a post about the latest Japanese weirdness from Nintendo, libertarian takes on First Amendment issues, a "director's cut" of a Wired magazine story on controversial videogame sequels and a story about how I bought my first high-definition television, blending personal stories in with analysis of the future direction of videogames.
The original Game|Life logo (shown right) is still my favorite of all the headers that have adorned our pages. I worked with our then-art director Jay Patrikios on the concept – an extra-life mushroom on the left, a real-life green mushroom on the right, separated by the line. Jay also had the idea of putting the pipe in the Game|Life name, which we thought was exceedingly clever but mostly just resulted in nobody being able to remember how to style the name of the blog.
Since then, Game|Life has undergone all kinds of changes. Gradually, the blogs came to be the primary and eventually the only space where Wired.com content was hosted. I'd always get the same question from public relations reps setting up a story – "This isn't for the blog, is it?" That eventually stopped.
The ubiquitous Joel Johnson did a stint as Wired's blogs editor back in the early days, and was instrumental in ramping Game|Life up fast and furious. At the height of the volume-obsessed blog era we had 3 writers cranking out a total of 30 posts a day. That didn't last too long, though, and quality over quantity won the day. (Trivia: Had Joel not resigned his position, he would have renamed Game|Life to Offworld, a name he later used at Boing Boing.)
Over those 5 years, Game|Life has featured the work of some of the most talented writers on the games beat, like Susan Arendt, Tracey John and Gus Mastrapa. In every case, it's been a springboard to bigger and better things. We even got a Webby nomination at one point!
Game|Life missed being one of the very first wave of Wired blogs by one month, but I'm pretty sure it's the only one that's had the same name and the same editor for 5 years. Go us! Thanks for all of your support. Having created it from scratch, there's nothing I've been more thankful for over the last 5 years than meeting people who say they enjoy Game|Life.
