GameFAQs

» go to gamefaqs.gamespot.com now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

the guides are plain text. that is the first thing to understand about GameFAQs and also the last thing, because it explains everything else. jeff veasey, known as CJayC, started the Video Game FAQ Archive on november 5, 1995, collecting about a hundred text guides that had been floating around ftp servers and usenet. by 1996 it lived at gamefaqs.com. message boards and the poll of the day arrived in 1999 and both still run.

in 2000 i printed a final fantasy viii walkthrough at an internet cafe in turkey. forty pages, monospaced, ascii art title at the top. the guy at the counter charged me per page and asked if it was homework. in a way it was.

~ the ascii cathedral ~

the guides are the work of volunteers who documented every game in unpaid, obsessive detail. version histories at the top. tables of contents with search codes like [WLK3] so you could jump around a 300 kilobyte text file with ctrl+f. spoiler warnings. legal disclaimers begging websites not to steal the guide, which websites stole anyway. by 2012 there were more than 56,000 of them covering over 21,000 games.

nobody was paid for this. people spent hundreds of hours mapping item drop rates in games that would never be popular again, because being the person who wrote the definitive guide meant something. it still does. for thousands of older games, a gamefaqs text file is the only complete documentation on earth.

~ the ownership hot potato ~

cnet bought the site in may 2003 for 2.2 million dollars. cnet became cbs interactive, which sold to red ventures in 2020, which sold to fandom in 2022. the domain itself got absorbed into gamefaqs.gamespot.com in 2018. CJayC walked away in 2007, handing the keys to allen tyner, SBAllen, who ran the place for about twenty years until stepping down in october 2023.

four corporate owners is normally a death sentence in this graveyard. the trick here is that the product was never worth modernizing. you cannot redesign a text file. the guides sat there, immune to pivots, while the corporate logo above them kept changing.

~ what almost killed it ~

youtube, in theory. why read forty pages when someone will show you the boss fight. video did take the casual traffic, and wikis took the encyclopedic side. but a video cannot be searched, skimmed, or printed, and a wiki is never finished. for menu-heavy rpgs, for missable items, for anything made before 2005, the text guide remains the correct tool, and there is exactly one archive of them.

~ why it still matters ~

GameFAQs is the library of record for how video games actually work, written for free by people who loved them, and it has survived thirty years and four owners without being rewritten into seo sludge. the daily poll still posts. the boards still argue. somewhere tonight a person stuck in a dungeon from 1997 will open a text file written in 1998 and it will still be right.

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