I started Playing Out of Control Gaming in 1998 with my best friend Dave Wright. We were in high school in South Carolina, sitting at a lunch table, trying to name something we had no real business building. We built it anyway.
It grew fast. Within a year we had hundreds of reviews, contributors writing from across the country, and companies shipping us hardware and software to cover. My mom drove me to the post office so I could ship games out to writers who would email back their reviews. I was sixteen. None of us had a playbook for what we were doing. We just knew we cared about games and we were going to say exactly what we thought about them.
We never let anyone buy a good review. Companies sent us things to cover, and we covered them honestly, good or bad. When Sega offered advertising money around the Dreamcast launch, I turned it down. Not because I had anything against revenue, but because I wasn’t going to let money put its thumb on the scale. That principle hasn’t changed.
In September 2001 I was a freshman at Winthrop University when my mom called and told me to turn on the news. Like a lot of people that day, I didn’t know what to do with what I was watching. I took the game site down and put up a news aggregator instead. It felt like the only thing that made sense. We came back to games in October and never really talked about it much. But I’ve never forgotten that morning.
The site went on hiatus around 2012. I kept going with a project called lvl30.com, which expanded into tech, hardware, and broader geek culture. Good years. Different years. But POCG was always in the back of my head.
In 2023 I brought it back. Merged lvl30 into POCG, returned to the original name, and started rebuilding the archive. Hundreds of reviews from three distinct eras of the site, written by real people with real opinions, being restored and republished. No sponsors. No filters. Just the work.
That’s what this site has always been. A place where someone who actually played the game tells you what they thought. I’m Adam Richardson, and I’ve been doing this since 1998. I’m not stopping.