Launching GamesIndustry.biz: 20 years ago
Rob Fahey
Contributing Editor
Friday 10th June 2022
Gamer Network
The following article was originally published on Friday, June 9, 2017 -- a day ahead of our 15th anniversary. Since the story still stands, we'd like to share it with you again as today marks 20 years of GamesIndustry.biz.
You can join us for our 20th birthday party at Develop:Brighton on Wednesday, July 13. Details can be found here.
The site you're reading today was born, 15 years ago, from sheer frustration.
I'd just spent an exhausting, albeit fascinating, 16 months working on CTW (Computer Trade Weekly), a venerable weekly trade newspaper for the games business edited, at the time, by Kristan Reed, who would later become editor of GI.biz' sister site, Eurogamer. CTW was bought out by a rival publisher in early 2002, and the publication's small but very hard-working staff were told that we'd be offered jobs at the new owner. To this day, I don't know where this bare-faced lie originated; we were all made redundant.
That, in itself, was frustrating, but really, it didn't compare to the week-in, week-out frustration of working on CTW; of sending a paper to print on a Wednesday, knowing that it would land on subscribers' desks across the industry on Friday morning... and dreading the inevitability of seeing the front-page scoop appear on some other website by lunchtime on Thursday. CTW was a print publication in an age when the Internet was already firmly established as the way people got their news, and with the best will in the world, expecting something that you knew on a Wednesday to remain secret, fresh and surprising until Friday was less realistic with each passing month.
"If a publication was to build its reputation around news, and analysis of news,
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