User:Gakon5/Giant Bomb

Giant Bomb

Type of site	Gaming wiki and video game journalism
Created by	Jeff Gerstmann Ryan Davis
URL	GiantBomb.com
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Optional (free and paid)
Launched	March 6, 2008 (blog) July 21, 2008 (full website)
Current status	Active

Giant Bomb is an American video game website and wiki that includes gaming news, reviews, commentary, and video, created by former GameSpot editors Jeff Gerstmann and Ryan Davis in collaboration with Whiskey Media. After being fired from his position as Editorial Director of GameSpot, Gerstmann began working with a team of web engineers in Sausalito, California to create a new video game website. His intent was to create "a fun video game website" that would not heavily cover the business side of the game industry. The site's core editorial staff includes Gerstmann and Davis, as well as Brad Shoemaker and Vinny Caravella, both former GameSpot staff as well. Giant Bomb was initially launched on March 6, 2008 as a blog; the full site launched on July 20, 2008. The Giant Bomb office was originally located in Sausalito and is, as of July 6, 2010, located in San Francisco.

The Giant Bomb staff reports on video game news and reviews new releases. Their weekly podcast, the Giant Bombcast, is posted on Tuesdays and covers recent news and releases in the video game industry. Registered users are able to post on the site's message boards and maintain a blog, as well as contribute to the site's video game wiki. Giant Bomb produces a number of regular video series, the longest-running being the Endurance Run, which ran for 155 episodes over eight months. Released on weekdays, the series covered editors Gerstmann and Caravella's progress in the role-playing game Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, which they played and recorded in real-time, accompanied by their own running commentary.

History

Jeff Gerstmann was terminated from his position as the Editorial Director of GameSpot on November 28, 2007. Immediately after his termination, rumors began to circulate around the Internet that his dismissal was a result of external pressure from Eidos Interactive, the studio behind the video game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, a game Gerstmann had recently given a negative review. Both GameSpot and their parent company CNET Networks stated that his dismissal was unrelated to the review. Ryan Davis announced his departure from GameSpot in February 2008, citing Gerstmann's firing as one of his reasons for leaving.

Gerstmann considered his options after his dismissal, eventually deciding he did not wish to work in game development or public relations. He began to work with a team of engineers he knew and trusted to begin developing a new site. In the process of deciding on the name for the website, over seventy different domain names were considered. Gerstmann wanted the website name to be catchy and original, saying there were too many video game websites with the word "game" in them. In addition to Davis, who recorded early episodes of the site's podcast, the Giant Bombcast with Gerstmann, former GameSpot editors Brad Shoemaker and Vinny Caravella joined the site in June 2008. Giant Bomb started as a Wordpress blog, which opened on March 5, 2008. The full site launched on July 20, 2008.

Site features

News and reviews

Unlike most video game websites, Giant Bomb does not heavily cover industry news from a business perspective. During an interview on X-Play, Gerstmann said that he thought video game websites had become too focused on the business side of games, and that game news had become "stale" in the process. "We want to get out there and talk about games, because we like games…and it seems like there's an audience out there, and they like games…and their needs aren't being met by what's out there right now." Talking with Tyler Wilde of GamesRadar, Gerstmann said that their intent was not to make a site that would compete with GameSpot, but rather create "a really great and fun video game website…that we like and that we would use, and that users will have a blast using as well."

Video games on Giant Bomb are rated on a scale of one to five stars, with five stars being the highest rating a game can receive and one star the lowest. There are no half stars on the official rating scale, though user reviews can have half star increments, with the lowest score being one half star out of five. Video reviews were first introduced on Giant Bomb on June 20, 2008. Shoemaker's review of the PlayStation 3 title Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots served as the feature's inaugural inductee, and has since been followed by many more video reviews for a wide range of titles.

Video

Giant Bomb has a heavy focus on video content as opposed to written content. Staff members post several new videos a day, which includes demos of new and upcoming video games, video reviews of games, trailers, and coverage of industry events such as E3 and the Penny Arcade Expo. The site's first recurring feature was titled How to Build a Bomb, and followed the staff during the pre-launch phase of Giant Bomb. A regular video feature on Giant Bomb are "Quick Looks", in which one or more staff members play a video game while providing their own commentary, which is played over the game footage. The staff will also occasionally invite developers to demo their own games on video; these videos are posted with the title "Quick Look EX". Other running video series include This Ain't No Game, in which editor Ryan Davis reviews films based on video games, and Set Phasers to Fun, which explored the beta release of the MMORPG Star Trek Online.

The most popular and longest-running special feature on Giant Bomb was the Persona 4 Endurance Run, which ran from February 2009 to September 2009 for 155 episodes. During the series's run, Jeff Gerstmann and Vinny Caravella played the PlayStation 2 role-playing game Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 to completion, while providing their own running commentary. Whiskey Media developer Mike Tatum compared the concept to Mystery Science Theater 3000. The popularity of the series caused Giant Bomb to focus content more heavily on video as a means to attract visitors. The Persona 4 Endurance Run was followed up in early 2010 by an Endurance Run of the Xbox 360 survival horror game Deadly Premonition.

Podcast

The Giant Bombcast (or the Bombcast) is Giant Bomb's weekly podcast, released on Tuesdays and recorded on Mondays. The show is hosted by Davis, and regularly features Gerstmann, Caravella, and Shoemaker. Prior to the announcement of Giant Bomb, Davis and Gerstmann produced the Arrow Pointing Down Podcast, which ran for three episodes during February and March 2008. The first episode of the Giant Bombcast was released on March 11, 2008. The show's weekly format includes discussion of games played over the weekend, industry news, recently-released games, and e-mails sent in by listeners. The site's staff have also recorded shows in Tokyo, Japan for the Tokyo Game Show, as well as during the Electronic Entertainment Expo and the Penny Arcade Expo.

Wiki

The Giant Bomb wiki, which opened with the full site launched in July 2008, is editable by registered users of the site. New users must first have their submissions approved by a moderator; approved changes grant the editor "wiki points". Users with more than 1000 points may submit page changes without moderator approval, and users with more than 5000 points are able to create new pages without moderator approval. There are eight types of wiki pages: games, franchises, characters, locations, objects, concepts, people, and companies.

Technology

Giant Bomb was designed by Whiskey Media, a small group of web designers based in Sausalito, California. The technology that runs Giant Bomb, as well its sister sites ComicVine and AnimeVice, includes the web framework Django, the database management system PostgreSQL, Solr, and MooTools, a Javascript framework. To track site metrics on video-viewing, or wiki and trivia submissions, the Whiskey Media developers created a set of analytical tools known as "Metrimatics". It allows the staff to track daily "how well [the] publishing platform and content is resonating with each brand’s audience." An API is available to developers, granting access to the databases of Whiskey Media's websites The Giant Bomb iPhone application, made available on the App Store in July 2009, allows users to access various features of Giant Bomb through an iPhone or iPod Touch, including news, reviews, videos, and the wiki