The First Run, and How I Lost It

This is the first entry in a new series, and it is a short one by design. From the Zip Disks is not going to run for years. It is about one thing: the recovery of Playing Out of Control Gaming, the site you are reading right now, and how I got it back after losing it once already. To tell you how it came back, I have to tell you how it went away. So that is this first part. The loss.

POCG was founded in 1998, but it did not come from nothing. It grew out of a couple of sites I had been running that kept changing names, the way I changed names back then, like changing clothes. It started as a Command and Conquer site. Then it became a Sega site: Sega News Network, then Sega Power, then Sega Post. Back then I was sub-hosted, a subdomain riding on bigger sites like GamePost and GameNation. Somebody else handled the hosting, and I never had to think about it.

Then one day at lunch, in high school, Dave and I were talking about the Sega site and where it could go, and one of us said: what if we made this a full gaming site? Every game, every system. Dave says I am the one who named it. I honestly do not remember naming it, but apparently I came up with Playing Out of Control Gaming. I think it was even spelled “Outta” at first, O U T T A, but that got dropped somewhere a long way back.

The moment we became a full gaming site, the math changed for the people hosting us. We had been fine as a little Sega subsite. But now we were doing game news, game reviews, and hardware reviews, all the same things they were doing. We were not a niche corner of their network anymore. We were a competitor. So we got booted, fast. The last network we were on gave us about a week to get off. It was awkward, because we had shared content by then. They had run some of our reviews and news, I had written things for them, and some of their guys had written things for us. But that was that. We moved quick. I set up hosting myself, registered the domain, and we were live on POCG.net.

And it worked. Things went swimmingly, to use a British term. The site took off, and it taught me how to actually run a website in a hurry, because the problems I hit here were ones I never had on the Sega site when somebody else carried the load. The good news was that back then a website was just HTML and some graphics. No heavy scripts, no stacks. Hosting went further than it does now, and a smaller host could carry a site doing fifty to a hundred thousand hits a month without much trouble. That is about where we were, and climbing. By the end of that first run we were doing something like a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty thousand hits a month.

We were growing fast enough that the game companies started coming to us. Hey, can you guys review this? Sure. We had been reviewing whatever we rented from Blockbuster or owned ourselves, and now hardware companies were shipping us hardware and game companies were shipping us games. And here I am, a teenager who cannot even drive yet, getting all of this stuff in the mail. We took on writers, too. Some of them came from those old game-site connections. The arrangement was simple: we handed them the game or the hardware, they wrote the review, and getting to keep it for free was the payment. Things were simpler back then in that regard.

Then 2000 comes around. Dave graduates and goes off to college, which was a hard one for me, because Dave carried a lot of the site. Now we were separated by hundreds of miles, and he had his studies to worry about. He could not do what he used to do. Around the same time, I was in a private school, and my parents moved me to a public school with better computer programs, to give me better options for college. So I changed schools too.

The site started slowing down. Not shutting down, just quieter. I used to push out ten or twenty little news blurbs a day. This site has an interview with John Carmack, here is the link, go read it. Somebody reviewed Quake 2, here, go check it out. That is how the early web worked. You pointed people to other places, and you did not feel like you had to cover everything yourself. We still do a bit of that on POCG today. But the daily firehose slowed to a trickle.

Then 9/11 happened while I was at college. I kept updating, but slower still, and most of our writers were gone by then, so the reviews thinned out. For a few weeks I changed the site entirely, into a kind of news aggregator about what was going on in the world, how to help through the Red Cross, all of it, while the country figured out what had just happened. Then we went back to gaming.

By the end of 2002, the site had basically fizzled out. I was heads-down trying to get through college, I did not have a full-time job, and life just got busy. I could not give the site what it needed. It did not all die at once, though. It went quiet first.

The domain actually hung on for a while after the updates dried up. POCG.net stayed mine for another couple of years, lights off but the lease still paid. Then, in late 2005, the part that still stings happened. A renewal came due and there was nothing there to catch it. I must have missed the email. I did not have an active credit card on file. And this stuff was not cheap the way it is now. Back when I registered it, a domain ran something like eighty to a hundred dollars, and hosting was fifteen or twenty a month on top. That does not sound like much today, but for a broke college kid with no job and school to pay for, it was real money. So in late 2005 I lost the domain, and I kicked myself about it every single day after.

Playing Out of Control Gaming died that day. I mean it. The spirit of it stayed on in my head, in my writing, in the journals and notebooks I kept. But the site was gone. POCG was gone.

That is part one. Next time, the part where it comes back, and the box at my mom’s house that made it possible.