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Feb 9, 2010, 10:36pm

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A Eulogy to Classicgaming.com
« Thread Started on May 30, 2009, 1:57pm »

This isn't quite game-related, but it is site related, so I'm posting it here. I'll probably post it on the main page too, eventually -
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I guess no one really knows about it because there haven't been any posts on Kotaku about it, but IGN/Gamespy is shutting down all of their public hosting services. For me, I know at the least that means that Classicgaming is going to be gone - I'd imagine that would include Strategyplanet, RPGPlanet, and numerous other genre areas that included hosted fan sites.

I'm not sure of the history behind these, but let's talk about Classicgaming, a bit, along with the history of my own sites. Classicgaming.com was started by Kevin Bown, AKA
Fragmaster, a then-employee of Gamespy, as well as the man behind SomethingAwful's Fireman Comics and co-star of Doom House (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeBjr8Bm_wA) started up a free hosting service for fan sites. I had been running The Castlevania Dungeon for about a year, with most of its files hosted on Geocities. Back in the day, they only allowed for 2 megs (2 megs!) of space, so it was split across multiple accounts donated by friends, along with a few Tripod accounts for music files. Then Deuce, webmaster of the Ninja Gaiden Homepage, pointed me towards the newly formed Classicgaming, and we, along with the Metroid Database, SHMUPS, and a handful of others became some of the first members. Since then, Gamespy's hosting has become more expansive, offering dozens of fan sites on Classicgaming, and scores more on other themed services.

And as of August 31, 2009, they will all be deleted.

That's kind of depressing. I mean, my own sites and several others will be hopping about Kontek.net, which already hosts a few other swell sites like The Mushroom Kingdom and Bonk Zonk Compendium, but how many of us will make the jump? How many will simply vanish, saved only by the rather arbitrary algorithms of Archive.org and the few people who actually save web sites to their hard drives, perhaps to charitably archive them later ala The GIA? I was pretty struck by the fact that Geocities would be deleting all of its sites, although that mostly meant the disappearance of pages that had been inactive (and mostly irrelevant) for ages. But Gamespy hosted a ton of excellent stuff, and to potentially see them disappear would be disheartening.

How are fan sites going to flourish with all of these free hosting services? The fact that it didn't cost any money was the reason most people started these up. I certainly didn't have any cash to pay for domains or hosting back when I started up The Castlevania Dungeon when I was 15. Those that have been around long enough, or are confident in the investment, can still pay for their own domain or webspace, but for newbies? Nowadays, all there are are Livejournals, Facebooks and Blogspots to waste people's times.

I hate blogs. They serve their purpose, but their structure is almost offensive. It seems to say that the only relevent information is whatever is happening at that moment, and then it falls into nothing within a few days. Sure, they have search functions and tags, but hey! Good luck with those, especially if you're looking for information on a specific game. There's a reason that HG101 lists all of its articles right on the front page - so none of them dwindle into irrelevance as time goes on. It does present some problems, since articles tend to age, as site standards change or new games get released or discovered, but I'd rather that than the alternative. To make a parallel, blogs are like magazines, which are relevant for a month and then discarded. Web sites are like books, better cataloged, more permanent.

Or, at least, they were. Now we're still going to have the professional sites forever, or until they go bankrupt (whichever comes first), and they serve their purpose, but the big draw of the Internet is where the general populace can come together to have their voices heard. That's slowly going away, and it really kinda sucks.