"Time was, when there was no need to stop and rearrange it,

Now I've got a memory and I don't want to change it."

Ahoy fellow former and current GameSpotters. Been, ugh, quite a while since I wrote a blog on this site. It's very infrequent that I check GameSpot these days. Its more of a time-capsule for me now, although sadly an incomplete one. The deletion of various forums in 2013/14 including the old GameSpot UK Forum (where I posted the most) means that a lot of my history from that era is irretrievably lost. Now when I visit the forums and I see Off-Topic barely posted in, and many forums not having had posts in months, it saddens me in a way. Things change of course, but it didn't have to be like this. GameSpot in that era throughout the 2000s and into the early 2010s was a hive of activity and discussion for video games. Both it, and Giant Bomb I fear are relics; relics I admire and love, but ones which have not moved with the times.

Forums these days are the domain of Reddit, the "forum of forums". The Steam discussion boards also generate a fair bit of activity for popular or new games. But still, GameSpot is like a grand ocean liner, past her prime, but still plenty of faded glory. And I certainly would be very sad to see the site closed or downgraded. But the constant movement of the site through a variety of corporate owners has hollowed it out. So many things from that "golden era" of GameSpot were not adequately catalogued. Many of the podcasts and videos survive, but others do not. It just goes to show that people think that everything is permanent on the Internet, but actually it can so easily be lost, without anyone taking active steps to preserve it.

When I resigned as a GameSpot Moderator in 2014 I was concerned about the direction of the site, and unfortunately, in the following almost decade I have mostly been proven right. The people who work for GameSpot today are still great people, but without an adequate audience, I fear for the "Waypoint scenario" as we have just seen from Vice. I hope that won't happen and a site like GameSpot can still exist in the modern era of video games journalism and discussion, but my levels of hope are unfortunately low.

Anyway, didn't want to be all doom-and-gloom. To anyone who remembers me: Hello! I hope you're well. I'm good, working, you know what life is. A job I generally enjoy, so can't complain in that regard. Still play video games, still review them over at entertainium.co. Do feel free to check it out! I'm still on Twitter as well (mostly tweeting politics mixed in with some film and video games) and you can find me at gbrading until Elon Musk decides to irretrievably destroy the site for good. Otherwise, find me on Steam! Also gbrading. Always up for chatting with people from the GameSpot heydays. Still watch the Nextlander guys pretty regularly, Jeff Gerstmann occasionally. And follow the former Waypoint guys whom I wish the best of success with their Remap project. That's about it for now; who knows where the time goes? Time just keeps marching resolutely forward and we'd be fools to try and stop it.