About POCG.

Christmas 1995, I got my first real computer. A Packard Bell Legend, 100MHz, Windows 95. I was twelve. Within a year I had a GeoCities page about Command and Conquer called The Outpost. That became a Red Alert page, then a Sega page, then a series of Sega pages as I kept renaming the thing every time I thought of something cooler: Sega Game News, Sega Power, Sega Max. We got picked up by Game Post and became Sega Post. One hosting deal fell through when Game Nation shut down a month after we moved there. We landed at Game Stats. It was fine.

It was late 1998, sitting at a lunch table with my best friend Dave Wright, that I decided the site needed to be something bigger. Not a Sega site. Not a platform site. Every game, every system, PC to Nintendo, and we'd cover it ourselves. We called it Playing Out of Control Gaming. We arranged our own hosting. We were done depending on anyone else.

What happened next still surprises me when I think about it. Two teenagers running a game website, and within a year we had hundreds of news articles, reviews and features, contributors writing from across the country, and hardware and software shipping to us from companies who wanted coverage. My mom drove me to the post office so I could ship cartridges out to writers who'd email back their reviews. I was sixteen. I genuinely had no idea what I was doing most of the time. We made it work.

The rule was simple: we reviewed games on how they made us feel. Nobody paid us for a good review. When Sega offered advertising money around the Dreamcast launch, I turned it down. Not because I had anything against revenue. I turned it down because I knew if I took their money, I'd want to cover them easier. I wasn't willing to deal with that.

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. I've never forgotten that morning.

By 2012 I had shifted most of my energy to lvl30.com, a project that expanded into tech, hardware, and broader geek culture. Good years. Different years. In 2013 I folded the gaming content back into POCG and relaunched under pocg.co. I kept building. Kept updating. Not always consistently, but it never fully stopped.

In 2023 I started putting a real emphasis on retro coverage again. And in 2026 we found the original servers. Zip disks, actually. Files from 1998 that I honestly thought were gone. Hundreds of reviews, news articles, and features from the earliest days of the site, recovered and now being restored and republished. We rebuilt everything from the ground up, with a new theme that goes back to the teal design people seemed to remember from around 2000.

That's what this is. Someone who actually played the game tells you what they thought. No bought scores. No filters. Just opinions.

I'm Adam Richardson. I've been doing this since 1998.