A 2003 Game Tunnel Introspective (by Russell D. Carroll)

Seeing as how this is the one year anniversary of the site launch, I thought I'd take a moment to consider where Game Tunnel has been, and where it has gone over the last year of running.

Game Tunnel actually was up a bit before the launch on January 3rd, 2003. I've never been a fan of websites that go a long ways on looks, remaking themselves several times, but forgetting entirely to add any content to the website. With the Game Tunnel launch, I wanted to make sure people who came to the site had something to read starting at day one. I actually went to the trouble of doing a Game of the Year award the for 2002, just as we launched to go along with the few reviews that we already had. The game was easy enough to pick. Mutant Storm was easily the best game of all the ones that I played in 2002. Garage Games was also getting into the act at the end of 2002, and the IGF was gaining steam, so it seemed like a perfectly good time to get in and try to create more of a market for independent games.

Perhaps one of the more interesting points of 2002 was that independent games became known more as a collective group in 2002. Early in the year, discussions on www.dexterity.com/forums hedged around whether or not the games should be called shareware or independent or something else. The website Shareware Gaming Monthly was still called that instead of the title it is now known by, Indie Gamer. While certainly there is plenty of room for argument about what the whole group of games calls itself, and there will always be dissenters, I feel comfortable stating that the community as a whole has settled much more on the title "Independent Games" than they had at the beginning of 2003. That change in and of itself is worth more discussion than I'll give it here.

I began the website with high hopes that hit their height at the Independent Games Festival at the Game Developer's Conference in March of 2003. I was a phantom around the IGF booth for the last two days of the show, attempting to meet everyone possible. To my great joy and surprise only 2 people I spoke to had no idea who I was. Many who I had not even been able to reach by email prior to the conference had already been to the site. I was riding my wave of enthusiasm at its peek and loving every minute of it.

Game Tunnel changed significantly during 2003. Initially the website was black based with brick borders, trying convey the feeling of an actual tunnel into the underground. I started off trying to convince developers to share their games with us so that we could review them. I hoped that some developers would pay for advertising despite our small following of visitors, and I figured gamers who would review games and write for the site would be easy to come by.

However, after 7 months of running the site, I was completely burned out. I was dis-satisfied with the sites colors. The number of games being submitted was way beyond what I could handle reviewing, and no developer had bought a dollar of advertising. The reviewers had come in good number, and 80% quit after reviewing one or less games. Seeing the site as a huge sink in both my time and resources I considered shutting down the website and moving on.

I took a vacation from my work, and decided to just let the site sit for a couple of weeks. I ended up getting extremely sick while on vacation, and became unable to even stand up for 10 days. During that period, I wrote a post on the forums at Dexterity.com noting my plight and frustration. The owner of Dexterity, Steve Pavlina, wrote a very well-thought out post that helped me start to put things back into perspective of goals and what I really wanted to accomplish with the website. Other people including Greg Micek from www.diygames.com gave suggestions on improvements to the website that could be made. During the first week of September, the site was re-launched with a completely new look and a new drive towards more news and more chats. I changed reviews so that there was a charge for a full review. This allowed me to focus more on doing short reviews, and doing more of them instead of spending so much time prepping a very long review.

The last piece of 2003 was spent on the Game of the Year awards. I started in October to create a list of games that the reviewers and I would consider for the awards. There was no possible way to do the task completely. Gathering information on Independently creating games is often like running around waiting for a snowflake to land in your mouth in July. However, I decided to put the full effort into doing it anyway.

I put a cut-off date of November 10th on the games. Any game released after that date would not be considered. There just wouldn't be time to add games to the list of more than 50 titles that would already need to be played. By the 10th of November, we had already been playing games and judging them for more than 1 week. I've never been a big fan of end-of-the-year lists that seem to only recognize games that came out in the last few months of the year, or games that wouldn't even be out before the list itself was out. Some people disagreed with the way we did the list, but the sheer immensity of the task made me feel really good about blowing those people off.

Starting December 8th, a new story about the winners in different categories was added every other day up until the 30th. 11 articles in 22 days in addition to the normal updating of reviews and what not. The site became everything I did after getting home from my real job. I didn't get Christmas shopping done, I'm not sure I even noticed it was Christmas. I did catch the Return of the King on the 26th. Overall it is one of those experiences you are glad to have done, but never want to do again. Game Tunnel has caught much more traffic because of it.

Game Tunnel started the year with 3 goals.

1. Complete 100 reviews by the end of the year.

2. Pay for hosting and domain fees for the first year.

3. Create a solid crowd of site visitors by the end of the year.

I'm happy to say that we reached all 3 goals. On December 30th the 100th review was added to the website! I added the 101st review the next day, and the 102 review was added on the following day. What this means is that Game Tunnel added a review roughly every 3 days. Unless you've written reviews I think it is difficult to comprehend the amount of work that went into writing that number of reviews. This would not have been done without the help of two very solid hands Kyle Nau, and Gianfranco Berardi. Each did a good portion of the reviews and has been a big help to the site. Without them, I'm sure I would have shut it down earlier in the year. A couple other reviewers have recently started helping out, which gives me great hope for 2004!

Notrium proved to be a tough act to follow, showing that some of the best independent games can be had for a price of $0.

The website also finally started meeting its financial obligations. Paid reviews and advertising revenue covered the website set-up, hosting and domain fees. It took until the last week of the year for the income to cover those expenses, but better late than never. With a larger crowd of visitors, I'm hopeful that the website will begin to pay back the reviewers for their many hours and also will pay for my trip to the IGF this year.

In December of 2003, Game Tunnel had nearly 70,000 hits. The number is a good solid number for a website that is geared towards independent games. It was good enough that at the end of December, when the game of the year was announced, Game Tunnel made a brief appearance in the alexa.com top 100,000 websites in the world in terms of traffic. Searching for 2003 Game of the Year on google.com returned Game Tunnel in the top 10 websites found, topping out at number 2 in-between Gamespy and GameSpot. There is little more that I could have asked of the website in terms of traffic.

Looking forward to 2004 I'm so worn out that I'm ready to collapse. I've nearly decided against doing a Game of the Year award for 2004 due to the time involved in the project. However, great games lie on the horizon, so who knows what I'll think by the time the end of the year rolls around. The goals for 2004?

1. Complete 200 more reviews by the end of the year, ending with 300.

2. Create enough revenue to pay for hosting, domain fees, all game conference associated fees, pay reviewers for reviews done, start saving for a complete website rebuild sometime in 2005 using a better technology to link and dynamically create pages

3. Increase website traffic to 400,000 hits each month.

The goals are lofty, but I've never believed in setting small goals. Looking back over the year, I started with a lot of dreams and a hope of creating a website where people could go and get a feel for what was going on in the "underground" gaming world. I think we've done a good job of shedding some light on the underground, and I hope to make the light shine brighter, and to help independent games have a face for gamers who are willing to give something different a try. My hat goes off to all the independent developers who struggle to complete their games, and then try to present their idea to the un-knowing public. May we all have great success in 2004.

Happy New Year!