I was very close to titling this “Dr. Tracksuit or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Giant Bomb”. Hey, I decided to start a blog! And it took so long to find the time to update this website that Giant Bomb had time to die and to then miraculously get resurrected!
May 11th 2025 was the first time I found myself tuning into a PAX East live stream in, at least, 5 years. Earlier that month, Fandom – then owner of GiantBomb.com – had announced a quieting-down of operations at the website, for, honestly, incomprehensible reasons. Then suddenly, the staff of the site took the stage and announced they managed to buy it out.
I had already held my, like, third eulogy for this website at this point – the first, when some of the old core of the staff left around the RedVentures acquisition, and a second after Jeff Gerstmann got fired.
Most importantly, every time this has happened, it’s triggered a trip down Nostalgia Blvd and I’ve sat down to have a think about my feelings for this website and why I feel so sad. And I think this is what this post is going to be.
For the uninitiated – GiantBomb.com is a website about video games, credited with a highly influential role for our contemporary personality-focussed game media reality. It was founded after one Jeff Gerstmann (then at Gamespot.com) refused to review positively a video game called Kane & Lynch. That same game was, coincidentally, a big advertiser on the website. Jeff stood firm and got fired. He then dodged the bullet of calling his new, competitor website VideoGameMountain.com, and the team settled on calling their peak-gamespot-anthitesis media website GiantBomb.com. In the process of this venture, he also quietly poached various other folks from GameSpot.
And for the most part the heart of the website since its founding have been the personalities, which besides goofing around, could eloquently describe why a certain game triggers a certain kind of emotion – since they were actual journalists. One time The New Yorker called them charmingly garrulous.
In-between all the Big Live Live Shows (Live), and the John Vignocchis leaking Dave Lang’s phone live to the internet, there were tons of in-depth interviews and podcasts with industry people, as well as endless occasions to platform worthwhile voices that had things to say about video games – like the Guest End-of-Year lists (which are still a thing, and I still love).
It was (and still is to a lesser extent than before) also a wikipedia type website, which catalogues everything video games. Before we had tons of those and really any platforms to create those. They also wanted to host weekly variety shows online in the early 2000s so the engineering team developed a video hosting and streaming platform. Before the times of Twitch.tv. More around the times of Justin.tv.
By the time I came around to the website, there was also already a solid community around it, which was quite welcoming and was celebrated in weekly posts.
If it’s not clear until now, everyone at Giant Bomb cared then, and cares now, immensely for the artistic medium, as dumb as it often is in itself. I think the goofy personality bit is probably key in relation to games, specifically because of the dumb-ness of this medium.
Oh, and in the most fitting development – at one point they got acquired by CBSi – the same company that owned GameSpot.com.
So, through different owners it’s definitely become more of that personality-driven media. And I think the current iteration of the website, now resurrected, leans heavier into that. I think growing older, I’ve found it a bit harder to connect with some of it, but this essay is not really about whether or not I think the site should change. For all I’m concerned, it’s already owned by the best possible people for the job and it’s really none of my business. Love you, Jan!
But without having any sort of grasp on the modern discourse around games journalism, when I started thinking about writing this, I started wondering if this is all Giant Bomb is perceived as? A big twitch/youtube channel of fun goofballs?
When the latest Fandom fiasco was happening, there was a wave of podcasts and stories by previously-involved personalities and friends of the site, discussing old grievances and issues with ownership during the years.
The one unanimous point everyone made is that the different owners definitely thought this was the case. That or, in Fandom’s case, they kind of had no idea what they’d acquired.
Regardless of all the wrapping nonsense, Giant Bomb is/was home to really solid journalism. The Giant Bombcast (also something this website started, before the ubiquity of podcasts) was absolutely a cultural trendsetter in its heyday. Patrick Klepek caught a scoop on a bunch of Xbox One stuff that one time!
When the website stopped doing Quick Looks- we now learn they were deemed non-profitable by ownership- it genuinely completely changed the way I discover games and interact with games media.
Giant Bomb @ Nite disappearing for a bit, alongside the death of E3 – also suddenly left me without a hub for the yearly discourse around video games. Suddenly there was a big hole in my calendar year, where I’d used to catch up on a bunch of interviews around what’s exciting this year.
So now that the second coming of GiantBomb is upon us, why am I struggling to get back into it? Okay fine, this essay is a bit about aging and growing up, and becoming busier. With this website, specifically, it’s for sure an issue within me.
Having to sit down and digest my thoughts on modern media kind of surfaced that I think my struggles come from the general death of written form, where now everything is either super easy to engage with on social media, or is a podcast. Obviously a shallow generalisation, by a lay-man who’s no media scholar, relating to a website that kind of never really did written reviews properly.
But I’ve found myself gravitating to written reviews and features on Kotaku and RockPaperShotgun, since GiantBomb last changed. And in some mental-gymnastics kind of way, that’s what Quick Looks were in their heyday. They were never really quick, but absolutely gave one a solid understanding of a given game, whilst also including some well-put analysis of what some well-informed people think of it.
And quite an obvious point, but critique and culture writing becoming content or solely something that has to make an impression in 30-odd seconds, absolutely affects the overall industry – how things sell, what is talked about etc. In the land of games, I don’t know how one organically ever finds anything on the Steam store.
I guess our democratised stream-clip-way of digesting culture nowadays leaves us primarily with short clips of shallow reactions. And yet where culture outlets need to go to stay relevant is the same social media that mostly creates short clips of shallow reactions. I miss any sort of in-depth analysis so much. I guess this is my old-man frustration for all modern culture writing really. But I guess that’s not a revelatory point either.
We’ve had a long-running conversation with my family in Bulgaria about what the country’s filmic cultural identity is – usually alongside some new movie coming out. And it’s kind of an unanswerable conundrum. Essentially, I am finding it impossible to find any critique or culture writing about what happened in Bulgaria, for most of the 20th century. Archived, online, anything.
Without being an expert, I attribute this to both the country’s regime- and rule changes, and also the lack of technological savvy-ness. Modern Bulgarian movies kind of come out to cinema and then either appear on TV at some point or just kind of disappear.
Not having much of a critique over the 20th century has me completely lost of what the trends have been, before I was born. The only actual reliable source of figuring out what was influential and culturally/societally noteworthy is word of mouth. And that’s quite unreliable, because everyone carries their own different brand of nostalgia. I was in awe, when I watched my, probably favourite, Bulgarian movie called The Swimming Pool, by a rarely-spoken-of-in-the-motherland director, who was being celebrated by the Barbican. The one in London!
One can gauge a lot about a society from the discourse around a piece of culture and the way it is received and interpreted. And, at least, from my anecdotal experience with my own folk, the Bulgarians, this is extremely valid.
So maybe I’m scared of growing old in a reality, where we’ve lost most of the in-depth readings of culture and are left with only the infinitely transient reality of whatever-sells-now as our culture. This is kind of how I feel about contemporary Bulgarian cinema, for the record.
Obviously, would love to be wrong. And absolutely would love to have a conversation about modern media with anyone that is courageous enough to reach out. The actual reason for me starting to use this website as a blog peaks out from behind the curtain.
Regardless, whatever shape it may take – I truly hope the latest iteration of Giant Bomb thrives and fosters a newer generation community.
Thank you for reading so far into this ramble. As a reward, here’s a list of Giant Bomb’s noteworthy achievements from my formative years – none of these are journalistic, really, but all are formative:
- Gave us #WEED3
- Explained the LMB System
- Tried to guess a number that one time
- Sparked my love for the Hitman series
- Bought the domain BatmanBatmanBatman.com
- Saved me from the dangers of the internet
- Started some Australian Beef
- Showed me that even St. Vincent plays Fortnite
- Austin Walker schooled the internet at how to construct a game pitch
- Alex Navarro raised over $100,000 for children’s hospitals by drumming for over 24 hours straight
- Introduced me to the parasocial experience we live and breathe today (but in a good way)
- Taught me it’s cool to be inclusive
Lachezar Hubanov 