The POCG Story.
Thirty years, four domains, two teenagers, one lunch table, and a stack of Zip disks. How an independent gaming site refused to stay dead.
The Packard Bell
Christmas 1995. I'm twelve, and there's a 100MHz Packard Bell Legend running Windows 95 in the house. Everything that follows starts with that beige tower: every site, every review, every server I've run since.
GeoCities
My first site was The Outpost, a Command & Conquer fan page on GeoCities. Then came the Sega sites (Sega Game News, Sega Power, Sega Max, Sega Post), hosted wherever would have us: Game Post, Game Nation, Game Stats. Teaching myself HTML one broken table at a time.
The Lunch Table
Late 1998, at a school lunch table, my best friend Dave Wright and I decided the Sega site should become something bigger: every game, every system, PC to Nintendo. We called it Playing Out of Control Gaming and self-hosted it at pocg.net. I was Maniac, a name Dave gave me. He was TheSaint.
Out of Control
Within a year there were hundreds of articles, contributors across the country, and publishers shipping us hardware and software for coverage. Two teenagers running a games outlet out of their bedrooms. Around the Dreamcast launch, Sega offered advertising money. We said no, not because of the money, but because of what it would pull our coverage toward. That decision is still the site's spine.
September
After 9/11, games coverage felt impossible. We took the site down briefly and replaced it with a news aggregator. By that October we were back to games, because eventually that's what we do here.
Losing the Domain
The first run didn't end with a decision. It ended with a lapsed renewal: pocg.net slipped away in the mid-2000s, and with it, the original site. Hundreds of reviews and features were stranded on old backups I assumed were gone for good.
lvl30
The writing itch never left. With pocg.net gone, the energy went into lvl30.com, a broader tech, hardware, and geek-culture project that ran through about 2013. Different name, same instincts.
pocg.co
Gaming content folded back into POCG on the .co domain, since the .net wasn't mine anymore. I kept building, if not always consistently. The site outlasted every platform trend it lived through, mostly out of stubbornness.
The Revival
The focus turned fully to retro: the games and hardware POCG covered the first time around, now twenty-five years deep. Reviews, restored hardware, The Vault, The Lab. The site stopped chasing the new-release cycle and started owning its own history.
Coming Home
At the start of 2026 I bought pocg.net back. Then came the part I still don't quite believe: a stack of old Zip disks with the original 1998–2002 archive on them: hundreds of reviews, news posts, and features I'd written off as lost. They're being restored and republished, marked with their original dates. The site was rebuilt from the ground up in the teal it wore around 2000. POCG.net, pocg.co, pocgaming.com, lvl30.com: the whole set is home. No sponsors. No filters. Just opinions. Since 1998.