The Box at My Mom’s House

This is part two. Last time I told you how I lost Playing Out of Control Gaming: the first run from 1998, and the domain I let slip away when I was a broke college kid. This is the part where it comes back, and where the Zip disks finally earn the name of this series.

A couple of years after I was out of college, at the start of 2012, I really missed POCG. But I did not have the domain, and I did not think I could build a name that fit the way POCG fit. So I tried something different. I was turning 30 the next year, so on January 15, 2012, I launched a site called Level 30, LVL30.com. My next level. It covered everything geek and nerd: mostly video games, because that was always my thing, but also movies, TV, Doctor Who, all of it. I had reconnected with some online friends, and even with Dave a little, after we had drifted during the college years while both our lives were changing and we were both going into IT.

Level 30 did well. Starting a site in the 2010s was a different game than the 90s, when there just were not that many sites. By 2010 there were a lot of them. But month by month I watched the stats climb. It was never really profitable, most sites like this never are, but I was having fun, I had a big team of friends working on it, and I was proud of it.

After a couple of years, some of the team drifted off. They were not getting paid, and I get it. So I started wondering: what if I could get a POCG domain again? Could I bring Playing Out of Control Gaming back by converting Level 30 into it? That is where we went. On June 24, 2013, POCG was reborn. I took everything we had built on Level 30, minus the movie and TV stuff, and made it the foundation. The domain I landed was a good one. The .com was long gone and the .net was still registered to somebody else, but I got POCG.co. Playing Out of Control Gaming was back.

Most of my old writers were gone by then, and I was single, no kids, with a decent job, so I started hiring people to write, twenty to thirty dollars an article, which was a little high for the time. But I wanted good writers, and I got them. Some had PhDs. One of them went on to become a world-renowned scientist, a marine biologist or oceanographer, I would have to check her profile. I am not going to name her here, because I do not want her getting spammed over it. POCG.co did fine. It never took off the way Level 30 had, but that is just how it rolls.

Fast forward to 2023, the 25th anniversary of POCG being founded. By then I had made some big changes. I had gotten married. I had quit my job and started my own company, betting on myself. And I really wanted to rebuild the Playing Out of Control Gaming I had carried in my head since I was a teenager. The real one. So I started working on it: how do I get all the old reviews and news back, everything I could find, and bring the site back as it was? I knew it would not be easy, and honestly it was not.

The main site was still POCG.co, and we had also picked up pocgaming.com for SEO. It was doing okay but it did not get many updates, because I could not afford to pay all the writers again while I was bootstrapping a company. So the public site kind of struggled while I worked in the background on reviving the original POCG.

I started looking for where the old stuff lived. There was a little on Archive.org, enough to get going, maybe forty or fifty reviews from the 90s, but not a ton. So I started downloading them, and in my free time reformatting them, hunting for images, while I worked on the new design. I wanted to launch that year, for the 25th, with retro as the centerpiece, the stuff that reminded me of that late-90s and early-2000s era I came up in. I wanted to remind myself of that era.

It took longer than that. The site finally launched at the start of this year, 2026. The real catalyst was that I was able to buy POCG.net back. It had been held by a French company that let it lapse, I think the company dissolved, and I had a watcher on the domain for years. When it finally came free, that was the sign. We go now. We launched in January with sixty or seventy reviews, most of it the original early-to-mid-90s archive.

So why is this series called From the Zip Disks? Because Archive.org only had a little, and the rest had to come from somewhere. Back in March, I was at my mom’s house looking for old computer equipment and consoles. There is stuff in her attic, and stuff in her two storage buildings, because she is a bit of a hoarder. Do not tell her I told you. I was digging through it and I found a box of disks. Floppy diskettes, and some Zip disks mixed in.

I did not find a Zip drive at her house, and I have not found all the old computers yet, but there is a lot left to go through over there. So I ordered a Zip drive off eBay, because I wanted to know what was on those disks. We used to have two Zip drives back in the day: an internal one in the beige PC I built, and a blue external parallel-cable unit for our old Packard Bell Legend. My stepdad bought the disks because we did not have a CD burner, and Zip was the best way to store a lot of files.

The first disk was my stepdad’s. Photos, old tax documents, and pictures of his first wife and children, who died in a car accident years before. It was bittersweet to find, especially now that he is gone too. That whole family is gone now, and a stack of old files on a Zip disk is one of the few places any of it still exists. Which, if you think about it, is the whole reason this series has a name. Some things are only still here because somebody saved them to a disk and a disk survived. Some memories are worth having.

Then I put in the next one. It just said “Adam’s stuff.” The first thing that happened was Windows throwing a malware warning, a Trojan, on that disk. In reality I probably downloaded something I should not have as a kid and saved it there, and it was probably a keygen, not a real Trojan. Windows quarantined it, and I moved on to the files.

And that is when it hit me. On this disk was a copy of an older edition of POCG. There were news text files, the kind we fed through a little Perl and CGI script that turned them into the news on the site, real old-school stuff. Suddenly I am opening a text file of, say, June 1999 news, all those little blurbs. Then I look closer and there are reviews in here. And I think, holy crap. This has a pile of POCG’s original content on it. Stuff I never found on Archive. Stuff from other versions of the site I did not have. It even had Sega Post material that never showed up on Archive.org because the site was too small, and some GeoCities-era stuff. Sega reviews, Command and Conquer stuff, all of it.

That was the moment it clicked. This is it. This is how we rebuild Playing Out of Control Gaming, with everything I can find, everything we ever wrote, as long as it is gaming, we put it back up.

That is where the last three or four months have gone. The nice part is that there are tools now, and programs that help. I wrote a program to strip the news out of those text files and break it into individual files I could import straight into the site as JSON. That alone recovered thousands of news articles. They might not mean much to anybody, gaming news from 98, 99, 2000, 2001, stuff that did not really matter even then. But I love it. If you watch or listen to the podcast, you know I like to pull articles from what was happening 20 or 30 years ago that same week and see what was going on. Because for all we complain that everything changes, a lot of it looks an awful lot like what already happened.

Since then I found a CD too, pretty badly damaged, but I have pulled some things off it. A lot of emails from the late 90’s early 00’s, correspondence with game companies, reviews that writers had emailed in. I recovered an Animaniacs review off it recently that should be up soon. Hardware reviews. There is a ton of it, and we are going to keep building it back up.

So that is the plan. Over the next five or six months, we are going to go through this together. The site is basically fully operational now, but I am still recovering old data, old reviews, and I will spotlight them as they come back. On top of that there are the editorials I have already written this year, new reviews, the podcast, and the news. It is going to be good, and I hope you are all here to enjoy the ride with me.

I am Maniac / Arcus Maximus / FireBreathingBuddy / Adam Richardson. This is my website, Playing Out of Control Gaming. This is our story.