History of IGN

The following is from Ryan Geddes' article on the history of IGN.

On Jan. 12, 2008, IGN celebrates its 10-year anniversary. What began as a collection of three console-specific websites in 1996 and officially became IGN in 1998 is now the world's largest destination for gaming-related news information and junk food eating contests. This is the tale of how IGN came to be, how it almost died and where Matt Casamassina used to sleep. Many bottles of alcohol were harmed in the making of this story.

As with so many other cultural milestones in American entertainment, the next big thing in U.S. videogame journalism began with a British invasion.

In 1985, Oxford graduate and computer nut Chris Anderson started Future Publishing with a $25,000 bank loan. The venture had no outside investors, which wasn't surprising considering the first property Future intended to launch was an ultra-niche enthusiast magazine called "Amstrad Action."'

Soon, Future was publishing magazines about not only the Amstrad company's early personal computer, but also about the Amiga, Commodore, Sinclair and eventually every format in the still-congealing British PC and gaming market.

Less than ten years later, Anderson left Future and headed to the United States, buying a troubled Greensboro, N.C.-based gaming magazine publisher called GP Publications.

The GP stood for Game Players, which at one time was publisher Signal Research's flagship magazine. But after a series of financial missteps, Signal lost Game Players and its other properties to creditors, who happily unloaded the company to Anderson.

Anderson closed on the GP deal in 1993, relocated to the United States, moved the entire operation to the San Francisco Bay Area and renamed the company Imagine Media, all within a two-year time span. There was money to be made in the growing gaming industry, and there was no time to waste.

By 1996, Imagine was publishing popular magazines like PC Gamer, Next Generation and CD-ROM Today, quickly leapfrogging then-leader Ziff-Davis for ad revenue in the gaming sector. The company moved its offices to Brisbane, CA, a mix of residential neighborhoods and corporate office parks at the foot of San Bruno Mountain, just south of downtown San Francisco.

Imagine's magazines were popular with gamers, but some members of the company's leadership were also closely watching the explosion of activity on the World Wide Web, a burgeoning media ground so fertile and mysterious that people took to capitalizing it. Some of Imagine's properties already had an online presence. But the sites were more afterthought than initiative, and publishing execs at Imagine and other companies were starting to get nervous about the effect the web might have on circulation at magazines like Next Generation.

There were already a number of well-established gaming magazines in the U.S. by 1996 -- Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Informer and others had been reviewing games and reporting industry news before Anderson even crossed the pond. But Imagine's Next Generation was different. It set a new, irreverent-but-serious tone that managed to inform without pandering or talking down to gamers. It looked different, it read different, and it was a hit.

At that time, Doug Perry was the magazine's managing editor, working under editor-in-chief Chris Charla. According to Perry, that year Imagine exec Jonathan Simpson-Bint pitched Anderson the idea of an online-only division within the company, one that would not be tethered to a print publication but would be free to explore the promise of the Internet on its own. Anderson agreed, and the seeds of what would become IGN were sown.

"In 1996, the Internet was kind of a big deal," says Perry, who moved over to the new division with Charla. "It was like the wild West."

By March of the following year, the company launched the Imagine Games Network, a collection of three platform-specific web sites: N64.com, PSX Power and Saturnworld. The sites' editors were given a small room crammed with desks, Internet connections universally described by former editors as "crappy," and free reign.

Perry hired young writer Matt Casamassina and UC Berkeley grad student Peer Schneider to help start N64.com. A German native educated in Japan, Schneider had been running a small Nintendo-centric web site called Nintendojo in his spare time and cold-called Perry looking for a job.

Schneider had also interviewed with ZDNet's VideoGames.com (later renamed GameSpot), which started in 1995 at the very cusp of the Internet explosion. But the site wasn't ready to pay him full-time, so Schneider joined Casamassina and Perry at N64.com in the summer of 1997.

"I think we were all excited because we were all guys who were active online very early," says Schneider, now IGN's vice president of content publishing. "Matt was posting on Usenet already and I was experimenting online, so we quickly thought, this is eventually the way we are going to read and use information."

Craig Harris While the traditional print magazines down the hall continued to meet with game publishers and discuss long-term deadlines and page-space issues, Perry, Schneider, Casamassina, Saturnworld editor Craig Harris and the rest of the fledgling Imagine Games Network made things up as they went along.

"No one [at Imagine] really knew what we were doing in there," says Perry, who is now editorial director of Time Warner's GameTap.com. "We would try to get in on the meetings but none of the [game] publishers wanted us there."

Because they were so cut off from the print side of the organization, the group grew close quickly. They worked together, partied together and saw each other, increasingly, as family. Eager to make the new venture succeed, they all worked painfully long hours and kept odd schedules.

IGN's early editors took their jobs seriously, but they took other things seriously - like drinking alcohol. There were drunken adventures in Tokyo involving underwear and subway trains. There were liquor-soaked late-night gaming sessions. There are tales of editors passing out in impossible places.

Matt Casamassina "When we first started out, we were kind of rogue in a way. There was no structure - things changed by the day," says Casamassina, who now works as editor-in-chief of IGN's Nintendo channels. "We'd put up five stories a day and that was considered a huge success. I remember sometimes coming into work drunk and sleeping under my desk until my boss came in."

Not only were the two sides - print and online - developing radically different cultures, but they were also gathering, processing and reacting to information differently. By 1997, it had become apparent to Imagine leadership that they were no longer in the magazine business - they were in the information business. In March, the Imagine Games Network officially launched. In October, the company changed its name from Imagine Publishing to Imagine Media. Two months later, it split into two internal divisions - games and digital, each incorporating both print and online publications.

In today's web-savvy climate, one of the first orders of business for any new company is to acquire the online domains associated with its name. In the late 1990s, however, the Internet dust hadn't quite settled yet.

Nintendo's new 64-bit game console was called, fittingly, the Nintendo 64. But lazy gamers had taken to calling it the N64, so Imagine Media did, too. Imagine's N64.com site was so popular, and its content updates were so much more frequent than at Nintendo's own Nintendo Power web site, that some gamers assumed N64.com was an official Nintendo web site.

The folks at Nintendo of America weren't happy about Imagine's infringement on their brand name. After some back-and-forth and an uncomfortable visit to Nintendo headquarters in Redmond, WA, by Perry, an agreement was reached, and the site changed its name to IGN64.com on Jan. 12, 1998. It was the first time the IGN name was used in an Imagine Games Network domain, resulting in the unwieldy but history-making url construction http://ign64.ign.com.

It was the official beginning of IGN as a branded media property, and it happened just as the Internet craze was becoming white-hot. What online pioneers had suspected since the middle of the decade - that the web was the future of media - was now taken as indelible fact by Wall Street, venture capitalists and your nightly news-watching grandma. Investors were throwing money at any company with a domain name, and Imagine was no exception.

Not content to remain solely gaming-focused, Imagine started the female-centric Chick Click site (whose offices were quickly moved away from those of the IGN editors for reasons too numerous to mention) and started publishing entertainment content from its Den (Daily Entertainment Network) online property. The Internet was where the money flowed, and the motto of the day among young online companies was "get big fast." To keep its web division nimble, and to maximize its attractiveness to web-hungry investors, Imagine decided to set its online people free.

In February of 1999, Imagine spun its online division off into an entirely new company headed by Mark Jung, who had previously founded and lead an Internet security firm called Worldtalk Corp. At first, the new company was branded with the apt (if uninspired) name Affiliation Networks. Within a matter of months, the name was changed to the more evocative - and eerily prescient - Snowball.com. The new name was meant to communicate momentum, dynamism and aggregation. The company's young, media-saturated employees groaned.

Tal Blevins "I was home sick that day, and I called Mark Jung at the office to ask him if he knew what that word meant in the vernacular," says Tal Blevins, now IGN's vice president of games content. "I played the clip from 'Clerks' onto his voicemail."

Despite its pop-cultural double entendre, the Snowball name stuck like a dollop of Elmer's glue, and the company continued to gobble up web properties and expand its Internet reach. Before the year was out, Snowball owned IGN, Chick Click, Power Students Network, The Den, Vault Network, Scoops Wrestling and a handful of other properties.

Along the way, investors had been pumping money into the new company to help it fund its acquisitions. In November, New Line Cinema invested $5 million in Snowball. In December the company announced it had secured $35 million in additional financing, adding it to the roughly $30 million in private equity funding it had lined up throughout the year. As 1999 drew to a close, Snowball announced it planned to go public in an initial public offering, hoping to raise $86 million in the first half of 2000.

On March 21, 2000, Snowball.com went public, raising $75 million in its IPO and slipping onto the NASDAQ just as the door was beginning to slam on the Internet party. Just 11 days earlier, the NASDAQ Composite index had reached a high of 5,048.62, more than double its value just a year earlier. The next day began a two-year slide that eventually saw the market lose almost 80 percent of its peak value.

What had been a high-flying race toward Internet wealth turned into a reality check. Like other Bay Area Internet startups, Snowball had been thinking big about its future -so big that it had plans in the works for new offices that would be sumptuously furnished, following the inflated fashion of the time. While working out of a temporary, Spartan location near what was then Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the company was designing its next space on Bayshore Boulevard back in Brisbane: a collection of three brand-new buildings.

"These new offices were typical dot-com at the time - wacky colors, exposed beams and ducts," says Blevins. "We were supposed to have a full-service bar, a 2,000 square-foot gym, an arcade, a juice bar and a coffee shop."

Cel-shaded Dan Adams Looking back, former IGN employees say, the plans for the new buildings were extravagant, over-the-top and wildly optimistic. But irrational exuberance was the mood of the day in the booming Bay Area, and offices outfitted with sno-cone machines seemed par for the course.

"It was the crazy dot-com, let's-waste-some-money dream," recalls IGN PC editor-in-chief Dan Adams, who joined the company in February 2000, just a month before the IPO. "That's kind of what IGN's business model was from the beginning."

But as the market began its downward spiral in the spring of 2000, many dot-com darlings were beginning to cut back and, in some cases, disappear altogether. Advertising revenue began to dry up across the web, and Snowball started to tighten the purse strings.

In September, the company laid off 100 employees, nearly a third of its workforce. In early 2001, 50 more people lost their jobs. Although the company was still sitting on a pile of IPO money, Snowball was rolling downhill at an alarming rate. It needed to staunch the bleeding from sites like Chick Click and Power Students Network that weren't pulling the ad revenue necessary to keep them alive.

Unlike the gaming industry, whose leaders recognized quickly that its market was migrating online, larger general consumer products companies were still on the fence about throwing their money at the Internet. IGN was scraping by, but the rest of the network was hurting. In April 2001, IGN launched its Insider subscription service as a way to create a non-advertising-based revenue stream from its gaming properties.

The move was controversial both inside and outside the company. Some Snowball execs suggested making IGN completely subscription-based, an idea editorial managers strongly disagreed with. In the end, they compromised, time-locking some content and offering some game reviews early to Insiders. Some readers balked at the change, which they viewed as a betrayal. IGN's popular message boards, acquired when Snowball bought the Vault Network role-playing game community site in 1999, were also changed to Insider-only status.

Peer Schneider "In hindsight, we could have done things a little differently, but things were pretty hectic," says Schneider. "Putting our message boards behind subscription was a pretty desperate move that, in hindsight, we probably shouldn't have made."

On the boards, many readers were vocal about their rage at the company for suddenly charging them for what had been free for years. But others grudgingly supported the move, saying they understood that the company had its back against a financial wall.

"It's never nice to have the door slammed in your face and hear, 'OK, you have to find the green key now,'" says Schneider. "But we were completely honest with readers and said, 'It's either this or we go under.'"

While Snowball pared back its personnel and experimented with new ways to keep itself alive, the remaining employees moved into one of the three new buildings, sans juice bar and gym.

"Within a year [after the IPO], we realized our stock was dropping and we started getting worried," says Perry. "We used to have quarterly meetings where we'd see 50 people get cut. There just wasn't the same type of excitement in the company -- the exuberant, unrestrained joy."

By 2002, Snowball had sold or shut down Chick Click, IGN Sci-Fi, IGN Wrestling and other properties, retreating to its core gaming site, which, compared to the company's other departments, had seen few staff cutbacks. In May, Snowball changed its name to IGN Entertainment and changed its stock symbol from SNOW to IGNX, reflecting the company's renewed focus on its gaming roots.

IGN editors had always been hard workers, routinely putting in double-digit hours at the office. The late nights and passionate, unrestrained love of gaming had become part of the company's core culture. But after the dot-com crash and subsequent lean times, the team hunkered down even more.

"It made the guys here -- and a lot of people who have been here since then -- a lot closer and a lot like family. I think you see a lot of guys here at the office who went through a lot together," says Adams. "It shaped how much s--t we were willing to take."

In August 2003, after crashing hard, staying alive and slowly dragging itself back from the brink, IGN Entertainment's savior appeared in the form of a private equity firm called Great Hill Partners. The group bought IGN's stock from its shareholders -- including employees -- and took the company private.

"Mark Jung told us we had to come in for this meeting. There were only 14 or 15 people in the room. They said, 'You're the only people left who own stock in the company, and you need to decide if you want to sell. But you're not going to have jobs if you don't," says Hilary Goldstein, now editor-in-chief of IGN's Xbox 360 channel. "So we agreed to go to Great Hill, and we started hiring people like crazy."

Over the next two years, Great Hill funded a series of expansions at the company and moved IGN to its current location on Marina Boulevard in Brisbane. From 2003 to 2005, IGN acquired or arranged mergers with Voodoo Extreme, TeamXbox, Rotten Tomatoes, 3D Gamers and AskMen.com. Internally, the company launched IGN Downloads, IGN Wireless, IGN Sports, IGN Comics, GameStats, Direct2Drive and next-generation console channels for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii.

Compared to the panicked, survival-minded sell-offs and cutbacks of the 2000-2003 years, the new acquisitions and initiatives represented a forward shift for the company as Great Hill prepared it for the next phase of its evolution.

In July 2005, less than two years after taking IGN private, Great Hill filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission announcing its intention to take the company public again. But things -- intentionally or unintentionally -- never got that far. Potential buyers came calling, and in September Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation announce that it intended to buy IGN for $650 million in cash. The deal closed the following month.

Fresh off recent acquisitions of other hot web properties like Intermix (MySpace) and college sports site Scout Media, News Corp. added IGN to its Fox Interactive Media lineup. The following year, the newly-global IGN launched offices in the UK and Australia.

Ten years after its founding as a collection of three small game console web sites, IGN is closer in staff size to its dot-com days than its whittled-down lean years. Having weathered the dot-com storm and emerged bigger and stronger than before, IGN has passed through survival mode and entered a forward-looking phase.

Although the frenetic pace of the go-go 1990s is behind it, IGN has retained many of the core traits that lead it to the top and sustained it through tough times, current and former employees say.

"One of the reasons IGN stayed solvent is we always worked ten hours a day, but we also really liked and spent time with each other. We used to all go out to lunch -- 12 of us at a time -- every day," says Perry.

"One thing that's stayed pretty consistent is the work ethic. That's why it can be pretty hard for editors to survive here, working so hard...from home, having their families mad at them," says Adams.

Despite the lean times and panicky crash days, readers stuck with the site and continue to make it the No. 1 source for online videogame information, with tens of millions of unique users and some of the most active message boards on the Internet.

"We're in a position now where we're the largest destination for gamers anywhere, and we're not going to go anywhere but up," says Schneider.

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