It’s a pretty sad day for all of us who call ourselves gamers as 1Up.com, a gaming site I have visited daily for the last couple of years, has decided to change its focus due to its parent company, Ziff Davis, selling off the site.  The proud new owners are UGO, which I had never previously heard of, and as best I can ascertain, is some sort of IGN-type clone.  UGO’s parent company is the Hearst Corporation, a media juggernaut that was started by William Randolph Hearst himself.

There are two unfortunate results from the sale of 1Up.  The first is that Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM), 1Up’s sister magazine, was not purchased by UGO and has therefore been discontinued.  The second being that, as a result of EGM shutting down as well as general downsizing, many of my favourite personalities from the website have been laid off.

I have been an EGM subscriber for the last 13 months and have seen it go through a world of change since I received my first issue.  The writing may have been on the wall a few months back when giant shuffle of employees took place to streamline the redundancies between 1Up and EGM.  The biggest change was Dan “Shoe” Hsu being replaced as Editor-in-Chief of EGM by James Mielke.  This, directly or indirectly, led to Shoe leaving the company.  I can’t say that I was a big fan of the Mielke months, most notably the  decision to replace the majority of three person reviews in favour of one person reviews, with three people still reviewing triple-A releases.  Three person reviews were the only thing that made the magazine stand out from the website, for me anyways, and with that being dismantled I was starting to lose some interest in the magazine.  As it turns out, I’ll have lots of time to catch up on the three back issues I have yet to read.  Still no word on the 11 issues I have paid for and will never receive.  I’ll let you know if anything ever happens on that front.  In all likelyhood, they laid off the person who would have answered my phone call.

The sadder news, of course, is the fact that so many talented games journalists have lost their jobs during an already difficult economic time.  Guys like Shane Bettenhausen and Andrew ‘Skip’ Pfister were very talented and funny and I can only hope that they find new sites to write for.  Shane and Skip, along with the still-employed Garnett Lee, were the hosts of what was arguably the best part of 1Up.com, the 1Up Yours podcast.  Sadly, all podcasts, video and audio, have also been discontinued.  Every week I listened to the podcast on my daily commute to work and many times found myself almost laughing out loud on the bus.  The episodes are still available for the time being, so I would suggest that if you haven’t already, give them a listen.  They won’t be overly relevant anymore but they are still good for a laugh.

I will always think of the good old days of 1Up, to be a complete cliché-o-matic.  The truth is that some things have gone downhill over the past couple of years.  The departure of Luke Smith seems to have set off a chain reaction that lead to other favourites like John Davison and Mark MacDonald leaving.  It also bears mentioning that 1Up’s other sister magazine, Games for Windows Magazine / Computer Gaming World, was wound down earlier this year.  That eventually led to the hilarious duo of Jeff Green and Shawn Elliott leaving 1Up.  As you can tell, maybe this wasn’t such a shock after all.

I suppose it’s not as bad as if the site itself had completely shut down.  Still employed are the aforementioned Garnett Lee, as well as personal favourite Jeremy Parish, but it will never again be what it once was.  A check on the site, now one week after the layoffs, reveals very little difference at first.  The front page is still the same.  Podcasts still appear in the menu.  Egm.1up.com is still a valid URL.  You may not even realize that things have changed unless you look in the editor blogs.  There you’ll find an outpouring of sadness at friends lost and survivor’s remorse.  Will 1Up continue to be listed under our prestigious ‘Sites We Like’ links?  Yes, for the time being, but it will take a lot to keep it there into the future.

I think most of my concern over this affair is due to the obvious sadness that Chris feels.  His attachment to the 1Up crew has always mystified me.  I see 1Up as a news source, and that’s all it’s ever been for me, but not so for Chris.  I almost never read full articles, and only scan headlines, taking in blurbs here and there if a topic interests me, but on the whole, just skimming.  On the other hand,  I would be surprised if there was an article on there anywhere that Chris hadn’t read.  His dedication to that site borders on religious fanatcism.  If it disappeared altogether, I would be annoyed for a short time, until I found another site with adequate reviews and up-to-date industry news, at which point I’d likely forget it ever existed. Meanwhile, Chris sees their layoffs, and management changes as the end of an era.

I’ve mentioned before that podcasts for me are about as interesting as watching paint dry, if that paint was white, on an already white wall, and the sight of it was accompanied by the voices of people I don’t care about expressing their mundane opinions.  Maybe if I wasn’t so anti-podcast, I would be feeling a little less apathetic right now, but I can’t really find it in me, despite Chris’s obvious distress.  Just today I mentioned that I read a review of something on 1Up, and Chris asked me who the reviewer was.  I obviously had no idea, as I don’t find it relevant.

I don’t want to make it seem like I have no sympathy for those who lost their jobs, because I do.  I hope that they all find new jobs, and quickly.  I just can’t tell you who any of them are, and if Chris hadn’t mentioned it to me specifically, I wouldn’t even know anybody had been let go.