Absolute Games

» see ag.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 8 May 1998 a website called AG.ru published its first game review. Two people had bought the domain about a month before that, Vyacheslav Golovanov and Andrey Shevchenko, and neither of them came out of anything a newspaper recognized as a newsroom. Absolute Games ran on handles from the beginning. Golovanov signed as SLY, Shevchenko as Zombiek, and the reviewers who came later kept the convention, so a generation of Russian readers knew the critics they trusted by nickname and had no particular reason to learn their surnames.

The product was narrow and it stayed narrow for a long time. Reviews of PC games in Russian, scored and archived, with a news feed running alongside. In April 2000 the site became part of Golden Telecom, which was the first sign that somebody with a balance sheet had noticed what two people had built. Golovanov left the project in 2001. By the middle of the decade the masthead had settled: Mikhail Kalinchenkov edited, Vladimir Goryachev ran news and the GEO database, and a dozen regular reviewers filled the rest.

In December 2008 the site stopped covering PC exclusives only and added the consoles, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and Wii. That was less a strategy than an admission about where games were going, and it was close to the last substantial change the original Absolute Games ever made to itself.

~ the record ~

~ the sale ~

On 15 December 2011 Rambler bought AG.ru. The detail that matters is what Rambler already owned: Kanobu, another Russian games site, which had spent years competing with Absolute Games for the same readers. Rambler put AG under Kanobu's management. A publication that had built its authority on being independent of the other guys was now administered by the other guys.

In November 2012 the entire editorial team left, publicly, over the new owner's editorial policy. That is the death that the eventual dates do not capture. Everything after November 2012 is a site with the right name at the right address and none of the people whose judgment readers had been coming for.

~ what I was reading instead ~

My own PC gaming years in Turkey line up almost exactly with AG's best ones, 1998 through the internet cafe stretch from 2002 to 2005, but the overlap is a coincidence of calendar rather than of audience. AG published in Russian for people who read Russian. What I had was Turkish hardware forums and whatever English-language reviews were reachable on a connection that made every page load a decision.

The thing worth noticing across that language wall is how similar the shape was. Every national internet of that era grew one or two game sites that people actually believed, staffed by amateurs who got good, and those sites carried more weight with buyers than any magazine did. Russia's lasted eighteen years at one address, which is longer than most of them managed anywhere.

~ the long silence ~

The last review Absolute Games published was of The Order: 1886, on 1 March 2015. News kept limping along for another twenty-two months. The final item went up on 27 December 2016 and then the feed simply stopped, with no farewell post, no notice on the homepage, and no statement from Rambler about what had been decided or when.

For two and a half years after that the site sat there fully readable and completely frozen, eighteen years of reviews still served, the newest one aging out of relevance one week at a time. It is a specific kind of ending that the web does better than any other medium: nothing is taken away, nothing is added, and the archive keeps answering long after anybody is home.

~ what sits at the address now ~

On 19 August 2019 ag.ru came back to life as the Russian version of RAWG, a game database and recommendation service. Type the domain today and you get a working site with a 200 response, which is why the odd automated checker still lists Absolute Games as alive.

It is not. The publication ended on 27 December 2016 and the domain was reused by its owner three years later for a product with a different purpose and no continuity of staff. The URL survived the magazine, which is roughly the opposite of how this used to work in print.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »