Even though I was mainly writing walkthroughs for video games, I always tried some other text formats on the side. I did write a few reviews for a no longer existing German video game website, a short event impression and I even did an interview once. But gaming news was rather new for me.
Daily video game news
In 2008 I started to write video game news for the website of a small video game store. The concept was strongly influenced by a German video game news website and I always linked back to the sources. Thanks to RSS feeds and a still available Google Reader it was also more comfortable to follow many outlets and get the latest information fast and uncluttered. Remember those times without badly generated news timelines?
But my role was bigger than just writing the news, the whole website was based on WordPress, so I created the web design using a customized WordPress theme. I also managed some of the social media accounts including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Since it was a shop mainly selling used video games, it was also my idea to tweet all the new games coming in, so customers could check the latest games available to them.
Still writing walkthroughs
Walkthroughs were of course still a significant part of my life. One of the bigger works of my career was probably the massive guide of Grand Theft Auto IV. This walkthrough was so extensive that I had to split it into two parts: One was covering all story and side missions of the game and another one was covering all hidden items including a map showing their exact location.
At the same time, I still followed my habit of writing walkthroughs just for the fun of it, which meant creating a guide for a Nintendo 64 game ten years after it was released. In this case, it was Blast Corps. A game with a hilarious premise: A nuclear missile carrier is out of control and can’t be stopped and no one can get near it because of the radiation. Now the player gets to destroy everything in the way of the carrier, so it can get somewhere without any people to detonate safely. Already a great game back in the 90ies it still holds up (not the graphics of course), offering a great variety of vehicles and even mechs to get the job done and destroy every building on the map.
Some video ideas
Blast Corps was also a game that I covered with a short video with all the missing scientists of the game. YouTube was rather restrictive back then, so I had to use time-lapse to get a video within the allowed maximum length. A style I’m still using today, but mainly to get straight to the point and don’t waste the time of the viewer.
Publishing a video for a 10-year-old game was also no accident. I did try to publish some videos for GTA IV, but copyright was very strict at that time, banning content very quickly. Nowadays I still make short videos from time to time, covering very specific little problems (not yet solved by other videos) I encounter whilst playing video games for fun.
Students life
Video games started to become a bigger part of my life back in those days. It was now not just writing walkthroughs for web and print, but also video game news on a daily basis. This was of course rather time-consuming, mainly possible thanks to the fact that I was still a student. For the last part of this article series, I will go into more depth about why I stopped writing walkthroughs.