Sweatworks

A few months ago, after spending about 70 hours working my day job that week, I looked at myself in the mirror (figuratively) and realized something fairly obvious: work sucks. It had been a long 10 years of climbing the ladder and enjoying the fruits of my career - but it was only at the tail end that I realized how much life it had taken out of me. It was the first time in years that I considered my own happiness to be important. To that end, I took some time to figure out which direction to take in order to get there.

I’ve always loved video games. When I was 4 or 5 years old, I played Donkey Kong Country on SNES for the first time and fell in love with it immediately. I still remember sitting in front of my grandma’s ancient box TV and playing that game, among others, until I was blue in the face. Ever since, in some way or another, I’ve been around video games. Some of my best memories are moments alone or with friends, just enjoying a good game.

A lot has changed since then. Gaming is far more mainstream now than it was back in the 1990s, and gaming news which used to be relegated to monthly print magazines is now all over the internet. Something was lost along the way, though. Print magazines were limited in scope and slow to report - but there was a lot of love, sweat, and artistic endeavor that went into publishing them. I had a massive collection of these monthly magazines, from Game Informer, PSN, Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, among others, which are still sitting in a dusty box somewhere in my parents’ garage.

Gaming news has become somewhat stale these days. Priorities have changed from selling magazines to amassing clicks and earning ad revenue. What used to be a trusted panel of reviewers, well known by their readers, has become an endless army of writers looking to earn a few cents for every 1000 clicks. There’s something of a credibility crisis with the written medium when it comes to gaming as a result. Audiences instead flock to places like YouTube, where the familiarity and credibility of individual YouTubers most closely mimics the old way of delivering gaming news.

Fan Fugue was conceived as a solution to this problem. What if there was a gaming news publication which didn’t rely on ads or industry influence to operate? What if its goal was to deliver high-quality reviews and honest news without resorting to clickbait and misinformation? What happens if it cares more about its long-term reputation than short-term monetary gain?

Fan Fugue isn’t even a day old at the time of this writing, so time has yet to tell whether we can accomplish these goals, or even whether there is sufficient interest to sustain it. We’re giving it a good try, though, because we’re passionate about bringing the same level of care to readers which we were fortunate enough to experience back in the day. Delivering that experience, I think, is something to be truly happy about.

Thanks for checking out Fan Fugue. We hope you enjoy reading.

Jared Elliott
Founder of Fan Fugue