It's official: Next week is my last week at GameSpy. After co-founding the company I spent the next eleven years in various roles from Creative Director to Editor-in-Chief, even including a brief stint as Head of Marketing (I once ended a press release with the announcement that a finger had fallen off. I'm not joking.). Those of you who have been long-time readers may remember my newsletters to all of our hosted sites, the daily updates I used to post on the front page of PlanetQuake.com, and ultimately the creation of this site, ten years ago this year.

I wanted to give a holler and a big thank you to all of my readers. Your goofy and often supportive emails over the years have inspired me. Many of you inspired me to fear for the future of the human race.

If you're curious about what I'm up to and would like to follow my work in the future, I'm pleased to announce that I've accepted a job with Blizzard Entertainment. I'll be creating content for World of Warcraft! I hope to see all of you in Azeroth. Know that next time you interact with the Dwarves in-game, it may have been me on the other end of the keyboard, screaming the quest instructions at you in a very loud, very poor Scottish accent.

Guarding the flag at the old GameSpy HQ, circa 1999.

GameSpy: The Early Years

When we first started the site, myself and one other editor tried to figure out what to actually post on the front page each day. Anything was fair game. Almost immediately, I had started a weekly column, "PlanetFargo." The first couple of columns were wry commentary on the games biz, admittedly not very funny. I struck the winning formula with this column from 1999, "One Week with an Unreal Bot," which mixed fiction and gaming and... it was just strange:

PlanetFargo: One Week with an Unreal Bot

I discovered it was also a lot of fun merely to describe my gaming experiences with my grouchy co-editor, Chris "shaithis" Buecheler. Here you can see where my love of MMOs began as the two of us tore Asheron's Call a new one:

Asheron's Call: How to Make Friends and Influence People

Because nobody was reading GameSpy originally, I had no fear. In this column, written in the style of the Wu-Tang, I suggest that I can't beat the Wu-Tang videogame because my controller is white instead of black. Not one reader got offended, which made me simultaneously relieved and sad. This was one of my favorites:

PlanetFargo: Wu-Tang-Tastic!

The very next week I followed it up with a Soul Calibur soap opera. I had only just met my future wife at this point, and the phrase I used in this column, "I yearn for you tragically," is still in our shared lexicon. Unfortunately, "one-way ticket to a Hwang-bang" didn't stick:

PlanetFargo: As the Soul Turns

As the months went on and GameSpy grew, my column began to create significant traffic for us. I started to pour a lot of time into longer features. This is one of the earliest comics I did for PlanetFargo:

PlanetFargo: Chu-Chu Half-Life!

A few months later I did the same thing.... with NetHack. I may be the only person in the world to make a comic illustrated with ascii art:

PlanetFargo: Adventures of an Ascii Archaeologist

PlanetFargo had some occasional time off in the later years, but otherwise is was consistent for most of the life of the site. There are over ten years of columns here... Enjoy the entire PlanetFargo archives!

Next up: The GameSpy Grudge and the Gaming Gourmet