Talk:Game Zero magazine
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I will do my best to qualify and locate back-up references to notables lists. The key problem here is that most of the web from 1994/1995 is no longer available. Some of the promotion we did within the newsgroups is still locateable, but none of the IRC based promotion we did is archived. Also, most if any of the early links to the magazine are no longer on the web anymore. Archive.org only has 1996 and on for the most part. I can personally vouch for all of these statements as can the entire staff of the magazine as we were pretty proud to be setting these milestones. Some noteable examples of sites referencing Game Zero were the NCSA What's New page which is now gone, as is Iway Magazine (which was an early Internet spotlight magazine) which ranked Game Zero as one of the top 25 gaming sites/top 500 on the web in 1996 (although, as soon as I find the hardcopy though I will try to scan it in and post for reference). In alot of cases, for dates, I should be able to locate material with time/date stamps which I could make available, it will just take some time to track it all down. bcRIPster 04:33, 19 December 2006 (MST)
Another comment... The way the web version came about was this... In early 1994 we decided that we needed to do something to contain costs with the magazine, and the web looked like it might be just what we needed. Over that summer we looked into various ways to get online including a brief stint on Prodigy. Eventually I figured out that I could get dial-up access through a company called Primenet, and I signed us up for service in September (my first newsgroup post through Primenet seen via Google Alexa page showing date domain was first active, although we sold the domain in 2002 ). Initially I signed up our account reserving the domain name "bomb.com" because previously my MicroVax II based UUCP node had been named BOMB... so I figured this was my new node on the Internet and I should keep the same name. Needless to say the rest of the staff weren't amused.
We then started converting and uploading content to the new site we were building, we first previewed the link that November in the (at the time) high traffic IRC channel #vidgames, in conjunction with our last printed issue of the magazine. We next previewed the site on some select newsgroups in January. We formally began promoting the website on the newsgroups on February 1st of 1995, eventhough we had already been online "officially" two months earlier.
We received alot of good feedback and with the upcoming launch of the new E3 show, we invited some of the other prolific #vidgames members to include their E3 commentaries on our site. One of these was Jer Horwitz who shortly after the E3 show announced he was starting his own web magazine. In response to that I pulled his article from the E3 spread as I didn't feel like giving him free advertising (yes, it was petty, and the worst thing is, the article is now lost as we suffered a major data failure in 1996 were we lost alot of our archived e-mails as well as a good number of unpublished content).
With the realisation that nobody could remember the damn URL "www.primenet.com/~gmezero", we finally then purchased a new Primnet account under the name "team-0". We registered the domain gamezero.com, and had the account configured so that the www domain name resolved the account's web site. And lastly, that April (1995) we went crazy doing new promotion of the new URL everywhere I could find to, to counter IGO's launch.
The only real screw up that came out of this URL restructuring is when Wired magazine gave out a link to our WipeOut FAQ and misprinted the link. Not only was the link type-o'd, but it was constructed using a primenet.com URL structure that made it hard to actually figure out what the correct link was. bcRIPster 05:53, 19 December 2006 (MST)
The notable thing about the magazine's coverage of the N64 launch in Japan was that we beat Nintendo to press on publishing photos from the event by two weeks. It was funny because the day after we had the content up, our Nintendo rep within the company called me to ask where we got the photos from. I told her, from our journalist that we sent to the show using the press passes they gave us (duh)! We had our correspondent overnight the video footage they took of the show as well as the entire press package via priority FedEx to us from the show before the close of business that day. This is how we had it up so fast. The P.R. firm was distressed that we had been able to pull this off as we were told that the Nintendo.com team had been planning a big fanfare of premiering the material themselves. From then on Nintendo would have material on their site the same day of any future announcements. BcRIPster 02:10, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
