Features · Opinion · Long Reads
Editorials.
Counterfactual history, industry profiles, retro PC culture, game preservation, and re-reviews of our own 1998–2002 verdicts. Long-form, researched, opinionated.
03
The Subsidy, Part Three: What They Kept
The Xbox cuts landed: four studios out, Arkane in limbo, 3,200 jobs gone.
The Xbox cuts landed: four studios out, Arkane in limbo, 3,200 jobs gone, and every announced game spared. Part three is about what Microsoft decided was worth keeping.
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03
The Ten SNES Games That Play Like Summer
Not the ones that shipped in July. The ones that feel like it. Top Loader loads up the season and ranks it by vibe.
Ten Super Nintendo games that actually feel like summer: beaches, islands, backyards, and road trips, ranked by the vibe instead of the release date.
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02
The Box at My Mom’s House
A Zip drive off eBay, a disk labeled Adam's stuff, and everything I thought was gone. Part two of the recovery story.
How POCG came back: the lvl30 years, the pocg.co relaunch, buying pocg.net back in 2026, and the box of Zip disks at my mom's house that held the original archive.
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01
The First Run, and How I Lost It
Playing Out of Control Gaming started at a lunch table in 1998 and ended with a domain I let slip away. Part one of the recovery story.
How POCG began, from a Command and Conquer fan page to a full gaming site founded in 1998, and how the first run ended when a broke college kid let the domain lapse in late 2005.
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03
The Man Who Called It Ancient
Jim Ryan retired from PlayStation in 2024. The disc's end date was signed in 2026. Both facts are true, and the second one is his.
Sony just set a date to stop making game discs for new PlayStation releases. Jim Ryan was not in the building when it was announced, but the road to it is the one he paved. A profile of the man whose defining act was teaching PlayStation to stop looking back.
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02
The Most American Games Ever Made
For the Fourth. Not the most patriotic games, the most American ones. And half of them were built by people who only knew the place from the movies.
A Fourth of July Top Loader: the most gloriously, ridiculously American games ever made, ranked by the vibe, and a look at how many of them were dreamed up somewhere else entirely.
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02
The Subsidy, Part Two: The Bill Comes Due
Two weeks ago Microsoft called Xbox a subsidy. This week we found out who pays for it.
The Xbox cuts landed on the day the brief predicted. Five studios on the block, a Kojima game spared, and 3,500 workers refusing to be a line item. Part two of The Subsidy.
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01
Myst (1993)
The Box That Came With the Computer That Changed Everything
In 1995, my parents bought the family a Packard Bell Legend 130CD Supreme. It was a big deal. Not a hand-me-down, not a machine inherited from someone's office. A real, current, multimedia PC with a CD-ROM drive built in, which at the time was still worth putting in the product name. My stepdad Wayne had always made sure we had technology in the house. He was that kind of person. But the machines we'd had before were Radio Shack Tandys, Color PCs, the kind of hardware that ran what it ran and nothing else. I gamed on my NES because that's where the games were. The Tandy had Pitfall 2. That was about the ceiling.
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01
Player Two: The Games to Play With Your Dad
Father's Day, the Top Loader way. Not games about dads, the games you can actually hand your father a controller for.
Father's Day, the Top Loader way: not games about dads, but the couch classics you can hand your dad a controller for, whether he is a lifelong gamer or has not played since Pong.
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—
The Men Who Handed Me the Controller
A Sega, a Packard Bell, and a PlayStation. Three men, and where I came from.
Adam had three father figures, and every one of them put a console or a keyboard in his hands. One made him a Sega guy for life. One handed him the web software that built POCG. One bought him a PlayStation just so he could keep writing.
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01
The Subsidy
Microsoft is calling Xbox a subsidy it has to fix. Watch what that one word puts up for sale.
In April, Compulsion won a Peabody. Weeks later Microsoft is closing studios and calling Xbox something it has "been subsidizing." That one word covers two things a retro site has to care about: the people who make the games, and the promise that the games you bought keep working. Once your commitments are a subsidy, everything on the cost side is for sale.
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01
A Name to Play By
Before the game loads, you pick who you're going to be. This is a series about the names we play under, and it starts with mine.
Handles, gamertags, clan tags: the names we choose to play under are a second identity. Starting a new series with my own.
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—
The Broken Games Report: Issue #1
The season of the day-one patch: the games that shipped broken in late 2014.
Late 2014 became the season of the broken AAA launch. Issue one of The Broken Games Report rounds up the worst offenders, from Assassin's Creed Unity's bug-fest to Halo MCC's matchmaking and DriveClub's server meltdown.
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Indie Spotlight: Safety: Life is a Maze
Cute, creepy and tense: a grid-based escape where caution is everything.
Indie Spotlight: Safety: Life is a Maze is a cute-but-creepy grid-based escape where every step moves the enemies too, and picking a fight is a real gamble.
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Indie Spotlight: King of Bees in Fantasy Land
No graphics, no download, no problem: a browser game that's all story.
Indie Spotlight: Brendan Patrick Hennessy's free browser game King of Bees in Fantasy Land proves a great story beats great graphics every time.
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Benefits of Gaming: Problem Solving
The problem-solving skills games quietly teach, and how they carry over.
Games are quietly a problem-solving gym: root-cause and means-end analysis, collaboration and trial-and-error, skills that carry over into real life.
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Benefits of Gaming: Bringing Players Together
Far from isolating, gaming is one of the easiest ways to find your people.
The myth that gaming ruins your social life belongs to the past, online multiplayer, friends' couches, tournaments and conventions all bring players together.
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What Happened to SEGA?
From Sonic-era cool to a string of misfires, how did Sega fall this far?
Sega ruled the early nineties on the back of Sonic, so how did it end up here, with a hyped 'AAA' Aliens game selling barely a million copies?
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Outta Time Units (October 2012)
On deleting 1,000 Facebook friends, and the baggage that went with them.
Outta Time Units: Magic Dave deletes 1,000 Facebook friends and finds that letting go of the online clutter meant letting go of the baggage attached to it.
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SIEGE 2012: Day One Recap
New friends, a wrong turn to Popeyes, and hard-won advice on breaking into games.
Day one at SIEGE 2012: new friends, a misadventure on foot to the wrong fried-chicken joint, and a panel of industry veterans on how to actually break into making games.
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Wii U: Game Changer or Late to the Party?
A two-screen pitch for the living room, innovation, or catching up?
Nintendo's Wii U wants to be the centre of the living room with a two-screen GamePad and Miiverse, but is it a genuine game changer, or just catching up late?
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OUYA: Optimism or Skepticism?
An $8.5 million Kickstarter and a March deadline: can a startup console deliver?
The $99 Android console raised $8.5 million on Kickstarter on a promise to rescue console gaming from the mobile brain drain. Worth the hype, or too good to be true?
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Outta Time Units (June 2012)
Not a lazy generation, a Geek Generation, fixing things one Google search at a time.
Outta Time Units: Magic Dave argues this isn't a lazy generation but a Geek Generation, rediscovering the old roll-up-your-sleeves spirit through Google and a cracked iPhone screen.
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Indie Spotlight: Fray Now Available on Steam
Simultaneous-turn strategy in a corporate dystopia, now on Steam.
Indie Spotlight: Brain Candy's simultaneous turn-based strategy game Fray, set in a corporate-dystopian future, is out now on Steam for $19.99.
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A Trip Into The Secret World. Part 1
A play-diary trip into Funcom's "everything is true" MMO.
A play-diary trip into The Secret World's beta: choosing the Templars, surviving the Crucible, and stepping through the Hollow Earth toward Kingsmouth.
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Indie Corner: MiG Madness Out for Xbox Live
Time Pilot with the dial turned up, now on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.
Indie Corner: MiG Madness, a Time Pilot-inspired jet-fighter arcade game with power-ups, four-player co-op and a day-night cycle, is out on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.
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Indie Corner: Chompy Chomp Chomp Out on Xbox Live
A frantic multiplayer eat-'em-up arrives on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.
Indie Corner: Chompy Chomp Chomp, a frantic local-and-online multiplayer eat-'em-up from Utopian World of Sandwiches, is out now on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.
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Indie Corner: Compromised Now on Xbox Live Indie Marketplace
A 16-bit-flavoured top-down shooter hits the XBLIG marketplace.
Indie Corner: Compromised, a 16-bit-flavoured top-down shooter with 10 levels and four boss stages, is out on the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace for 240 MS Points.
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Are MMO Subscription Plans Changing Forever?
Everyone keeps predicting the death of the subscription MMO. The numbers say otherwise.
With Guild Wars 2 looming and free-to-play on the rise, is the subscription MMO finished? The numbers say the obituaries are premature.
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The Next Generation Console Wars
Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Dolphin, who wins the 128-bit war?
Dreamcast launches, PS2 looms and Nintendo's Dolphin waits in the wings: an in-period call on who wins the coming 128-bit console war (spoiler: I'm backing Nintendo).
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Save State
Series 01
Go back. Run it again.
One changed variable. Realistic outcomes only. No power fantasy timelines. Each entry takes a defining moment in gaming history and asks what happens if one thing goes differently.
Coming soon. No entries published yet.
Makers & Breakers
Series 02
The people who built it.
The people behind gaming's inflection points. One subject, one act, and the consequences that rippled forward. Industry history told through the decisions that actually changed things.
The Man Who Called It Ancient
Jul '26
The Beige Years
Series 03
DOS to XP. No filter.
PC gaming from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. Hardware, software, big boxes, and the culture around all of it. Personal history and object history in equal measure.
Myst (1993)
Jun '26
Last Save
Series 04
The games that refused to die.
The games that died and the people who brought them back. Fan servers, reverse engineering, emulation, and preservation in all its legal grey-area forms.
Coming soon. No entries published yet.
Replay
Series 05
We scored it then. Again now.
A game POCG reviewed in the original 1998–2002 run, re-reviewed today. The in-period verdict and the modern one, side by side: what held up, what didn't, and what we got wrong the first time.
Coming soon. No entries published yet.
From the Zip Disks
Series 06
The restoration log.
Behind the scenes of recovering the original 1998–2002 POCG archive from a stack of Zip disks. What was on each disk, what survived, what's still missing, and the weird artifacts of hand-written 1999 HTML.
The Box at My Mom’s House
Jul '26
The First Run, and How I Lost It
Jul '26
Callsign
Series 07
Who we are online.
Handles, gamertags, clan tags, and the identities we built before our real names followed us everywhere. Gamer identity from GeoCities guestbooks to the persistent profile.
A Name to Play By
Jun '26
Top Loader
Series 08
Top tens with a thesis.
Themed best-of lists with a point of view: the games worth loading up for a season, an occasion, or a system, ranked with a reason. No filler and no shopping lists, just the picks and the argument behind each one.
One-Offs
ARCHIVE
No series. Just opinions.
Standalone editorials that stand on their own: opinion, analysis, and longer-form writing that is not part of an ongoing series.