We’re Back… Sort of

A bit of a homecoming.

Let’s take a travel through time back to the year 2012, in which my home was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy. I was shell shocked and I had lost a majority of my possessions and was absolutely devastated. I had retreated to the second floor and was showing signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Cut to January of 2013 where I went to a job listing site for freelance video game writing. I had been working for sites like GamerZitch, ScorePhoria, and JustPushStart previously. Little did I know that I would find bliss after.

I saw a listing for a site called VGU and sent in a writing sample and surprisingly heard back and attended an e-meeting on Skype (before Microsoft bought it) with the two co-founders Josh Mobley and James Pungello who before starting VGU broke off from an older site called GamerGaia which I would then be told horror stories of by both James and Josh. But to get back on track, I joined the site in late January of 2013 and saw the struggle and reality of people who would want to write about games. The mainstays over time would leave to go to brighter pastures while the rest would either write one thing and leave or simply join and ghost us. Frankly, it got disheartening as time went on.

However, there were times when I would be recording with the gang and it was like family. I remember doing a 5 man podcast and one person got dropped from the call and when the person got back and tried to do an intro Josh jokingly yelled “Shut the FUCK up!” Then there was the bizarre podcast spin-off known as Lunchtime Adventures where we would talk about various topics ranging from politics and things like the Mothman documentary which still scares the hell out of me to this date because of the creepy acting by one of the MIB guys, then eerie stuff talked about on Coast-to-Coast AM. (Ancient Alien malarky) Then as the next console was nearing, things would get… interesting.

In 2013-2014 VGU would change its focus/direction/aim which looked really good with the site layout Josh worked on. We went from writing about video games to trying to cover “nerd culture” so things like comic books, certain tv shows, and movies. While I didn’t think it was a good idea at the time, when looking back on it I can see why James and Josh would pivot the focus of the site. Fast forward a year or more and VGU was no more. Arcane was no more. ToasterChimp, which had been a new site founded by Josh had absorbed Arcane which had been the new name for VGU. It was mainly myself, Josh Miller, and James who for a short time operated the written side of ToasterChimp. But eventually James would depart and that’s where the story of VGU ended. But nothing is gone forever.

With a project I had worked on being a success that I wanted to see succeed further brought me back “home” in a way. This is not VGU.tv as the domain was taken, this isn’t even VGUTV.com as that was also taken. But to quote Susan from the first episode of Doctor Who well over 55 years ago, “I got the name from the initials.” You see, the VGU stood for VideoGameUtopia and if I’m going to bring back VGU I figured I should stretch it out and give the name some meaning again. My goal with VGUTV is to do what I did when I was at VGU all those years ago and that is to work with my team to bring you wonderful people news, reviews, previews, and more of games, music, comics, anime, and more. Just… give us a little time to get settled back into the swing of things.

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