Thunderbolt (website)

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Thunderbolt

URL	http://www.thunderboltgames.com
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Gaming
Registration	Free, forum only
Owner	Philip Morton
Created by	Philip Morton
Launched	November 20, 2000

Thunderbolt is an independent videogames website that was launched on November 20, 2000 by Philip Morton ^[1]. Thunderbolt publishes reviews, previews and features covering the major gaming platforms, particularly consoles. The site is run by volunteers who reside in the UK, North America and New Zealand ^[2], who have written over 1,800 news stories ^[3] and 1,000 reviews ^[4].

1 History
2 Scoring and aggregation
3 Community
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History

Thunderbolt was originally a personal web design experiment and first launched on November 20, 2000 ^[1]. The first two versions of the website included sections which were subsequently dropped, such as humourous pictures, cheats and hints. The third and first serious incarnation of Thunderbolt was launched in 2001, sporting a green design. Two writers joined the site on the same day, which gave the website's creator the confidence to further improve it.

On October 1, 2002, the orange and white themed fourth version of Thunderbolt was launched. New staff members joined and the site's creator became more and more committed towards it. The site was still built on static pages though and in the spring of 2003, the fifth database-driven version was launched. However, the design was not visually strong and a professional graphics design firm was hired to work on the sixth version, which launched on July 29, 2004. It featured a new retro section, the addition of support for new consoles and a new managements system for staff.

From October 2005 to August 2006, the site's owner was away and so the site did not see any further development during that time. However, on his return, work began on the seventh and current version of Thunderbolt, which launched on April 6, 2007. Its key features are a clean and uncluttered design, with a mimimal amount of advertising and a focus on the presentation of articles.

[edit] Scoring and aggregation

Thunderbolt rates games with an integer out of ten, which is spelt out at the bottom of each review in a fashion similar to how Edge Magazine used to. As of January 19, 2008, the average score given to games is 70.9%, which is 3.7% lower than the industry average for the games reviewed ^[4]. Issues surrounding the scoring of games were addressed by Philip Morton in an article entitled Videogames by numbers ^[5], in which he explains Thunderbolt's choice of scoring system and the reasons why 7 is the site average.

Thunderbolt's review scores are aggregated at Metacritic ^[6], Rotten Tomatoes ^[7], GameTab ^[8], MobyGames ^[9] and Game Rankings ^[4], where it is amongst the sites that are used to calculate average scores ^[10]. The site is also referenced by game publishers such as Atari ^[11] and 2K Games ^[12]^[13].

[edit] Community

Thunderbolt's community of staff members and readers centers around the site's forum. The number of active users is small and typically conversations are lead by the site's authors. There is a notable lack of unwanted advertising and trolling, though. The forum is also home to Thunderbolt's Article of the Month awards, where forum members vote for their favourite written piece from the previous month.