NeoGAF

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NeoGAF

URL	http://www.neogaf.com/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Gaming
Registration	Free
Available language(s)	English
Owner	Tyler Malka^[1]
Created by	Jim Cordeira
Launched	2000
Current status	Active

NeoGAF (formerly named the Gaming Age Forums, is called GAF, and hereafter will be referred to as any of the three) is a popular video game internet discussion forum, originally founded as an adjunct to Gaming-Age, a game news site. It is now independently hosted and administered. As of April 4, 2006, the break with its founding entity Gaming Age was made clean and has been relaunched at NeoGAF.com, forming with it a new LLC.

In accordance with this greater focus on the industry rather than its products, its posters include David Jaffe (creator of the Twisted Metal series and God of War), Vic Ireland (founder of Working Designs), Andy McNamara (editor-in-chief of Game Informer), Jeff Green (former editor-in-chief of Games for Windows: The Official Magazine and current editor for 1up PC), Gary Whitta, former editor-in-chief of PC Gamer, Shawn Elliot (former editor of Games for Windows: The Official Magazine and current editor for 1up PC) and Greg Kasavin (former editor-in-chief of GameSpot), as well as developers at Bungie , Bethesda, Monolith Productions, Relic Entertainment, Krome Studios, and Sidhe Interactive.

However, it can be difficult to start posting, since it can take months before a new account is verified.

[edit] History

The Gaming-Age Forums began, as their name might imply, as an adjunct to Gaming Age, a video game news/reviews site, running the UBB forum software and hosted on the Gaming Age servers. As Gaming Age outgrew its hosting, IGN took over hosting of Gaming Age's forums.

After IGN ceased hosting of GAF in the summer of 2001, GAF moved to ezboards, and the administration of GAF became more estranged from Gaming Age. It was during the time at ezboards when a poster named Opa-Opa was banned, and founded Opa Ages. Some time later, spin-off boards such as Evilbore were also founded by similarly expatriated forum regulars.

The rivalry with Opa Ages and some misbehavior on the part of the two boards' regulars brought GAF to the attention of the ezboards administrators. This attention was rather undesirable from the perspective of the Gaming Age Forums' administrators, as they had been taking advantage of a loophole in ezboards' pricing scheme up to that point, and GAF was moved to Gamesquad's hosting in winter of 2002.

As the Gaming Age staff became gradually more divorced from the day-to-day operation of GAF, problems with the Gamesquad hosting cropped up. Jim Cordeira, the editor of Gaming Age, was the only person with administrative access on the Gaming Age Forums, but he was becoming less and less involved with the day-to-day moderation of GAF. As software bugs in vBulletin 2, the version GAF was using at the time, continued to worsen, the Gamesquad hosting became increasingly more impractical, until the forums' database became corrupted, forcing a move to new hosting in order to change software and salvage what was left of the forums' database.

In the spring of 2004, a fundraiser was held to move GAF to new hosting. On June 6, 2004, GAF took its current form (known as "NeoGAF" to long-time posters) and moved to new hosting and new software, vBulletin 3. Along with this move to new hosting and new software, the bulk of the few remaining links to Gaming Age were severed: most of the moderators were not Gaming Age staff, and as of September 2005, none of the GAF administrators are on the Gaming Age staff.

As of April 4, 2006, the forums were relaunched as "NeoGAF", the former in-moniker, by its administrators. NeoGAF also features its own front page, an upfront admission that the forum's audience had drifted from that of its birthing news site, but yet mandated a single portal to represent the forum's members. Initial plans are to use the front page to highlight the individual accomplishments and biographies of GAF's publicly industry-relevant members, as well as to offer a more visible home to any extraordinary information that would otherwise have to be housed in an ordinary thread of conversation. More details can be gleaned (if sparsely) from this official thread declaring the changeover. In July of 2007 Microsofts Corporate Vice President of Global Marketing, Interactive Entertainment Business sent a PM to user "a Master Ninja" asking him what his contribution to society is.^[2]