The Adrenaline Vault

» see avault.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 1998 an English-language games site was mostly somewhere you went to get the demo. The reviews were the reason the page existed, but the file was the reason you were on it, and on a 33.6k line at home the choice to start a forty megabyte download was a genuine decision that took the phone away from the household for the evening. The Adrenaline Vault was one of the handful of addresses in that set.

It started in 1995 in Irving, Texas. Angel Munoz was running a Dallas investment banking and consulting firm at the time and he was also a gamer, and his stated reason for building the site was that he thought the print gaming magazines had stopped telling the truth, trading honest coverage for access and advertising. He founded AVault with a partner, Jeff Fox, and staffed it with hobbyists on the understanding that they would write what they actually thought.

Word of mouth did the rest and it worked. By 2000 the Adrenaline Vault was drawing three to four million unique visitors a month, which put it alongside GameSpot and Games Domain at a moment when that short list was the whole of games coverage on the web. There was a period in 1999 when it was popular enough to be worth stealing: somebody cloned its pages, meta tags and all, so that AltaVista searches for the site landed on a copy that redirected to a porn site. The FTC traced it to a Portuguese hacker working with an Australian operator and got an injunction.

My own distance is the one that applies to most of the American games web of that period. Sites like it got read the way you read something a search result handed you, without loyalty and without ever knowing who ran it, and my actual gaming life in Turkey between 2002 and 2005 happened on a cafe LAN where nobody read a review before playing anything. They mattered to me as file hosts and second opinions rather than as publications I followed.

~ the dossier ~

~ who came out of it ~

The staff list is the strongest surviving argument for what the site was. Emil Pagliarulo reviewed games there part-time and ended up its editor-in-chief. He had reviewed the first Thief for AVault, which is more or less how he got into development at Looking Glass Studios working on Thief 2, and he has been at Bethesda since 2002, where he became lead designer on Starfield. Pete Hines was a staff writer and finished as a senior vice president at the same company. Brian Clair published the site, later produced Sins of a Solar Empire and ran publishing at Stardock.

That is the ordinary story of enthusiast games writing in the late 1990s, which functioned as an unofficial recruiting pipeline into the industry it covered. It also cuts the other way, and AVault is a clean illustration. The site's whole pitch was that its writers had no stake in the business. Part of the reason the writing was good is that several of them were about to join it.

~ the actual end ~

Munoz's second act outgrew his first. He founded the Cyberathlete Professional League on 27 June 1997, largely on the back of the audience the Adrenaline Vault had built, and the CPL is why he gets called the father of professional esports. It ran around sixty international events and paid out more than three million dollars in prize money.

The site did not benefit. Its parent, NewWorld.com, turned toward competitive gaming, AVault was reworked into a blog, and it drifted. Munoz resigned as chief executive in 2011 and the board announced it was selling off the company's assets that December.

Then the ending, which is the reason this is not just another slow-fade games site. At the start of June 2013 the Adrenaline Vault came under a sustained denial of service attack. Chip Hansen posted on the site's Facebook page that it had resulted in the complete loss of the website and its databases. There was no recovery and there was no relaunch. Eighteen years of reviews written by people who went on to make the games came off the internet in a couple of weeks, taken by somebody nobody ever identified for a reason nobody ever established.

~ what is left ~

Part of it survives in the Wayback Machine, incompletely. A reader at Old PC Gaming pulled the 2006 reviews out and republished them as a standing archive, which is the only curated remnant anybody made. Everything earlier is whatever the crawlers happened to catch, which turns out to be plenty of front pages and not much of the depth behind them.

avault.com still resolves. It redirects to beamstream.gg, a live streaming platform Angel Munoz co-founded and launched in April 2024. Whatever became of the assets the board put up for sale in December 2011, the address ended up pointed at its founder's current company instead of at a squatter, which is not how most of these finish.

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