AllGame

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

~ the eulogy ~

The shutdown notice is the best sentence any of these sites ever wrote. "We're sorry to announce that after many years of celebrating the world of video games, AllGame has run out of quarters." The site went dark on Friday 12 December 2014, sixteen years after it opened as the All Game Guide in February 1998.

What it was, underneath, was one third of a much larger idea. All Media Guide was building a machine-readable catalog of everything humans had published in the entertainment categories, and it shipped that catalog under three consumer front ends. AllMusic covered records and is still the reason a lot of album credits exist online at all, with AllMovie doing the same job for films. AllGame was the third one, and the least famous of the set, because games were the youngest medium in the group and the least respectable one in 1998.

The ambition was cataloging rather than opinion. An AllGame entry gave you a release date, a platform, a publisher, the people who worked on it, and a review written by a member of staff rather than by whoever wandered past. That last part is why people mourned it. Thousands of games from the 1980s and early 1990s have exactly one written critical assessment anywhere on the open web, and for a long stretch that one was AllGame's.

Ownership went through four hands in sixteen years. All Media Guide sold to Macrovision in 2007, which renamed itself Rovi. Rovi spun the consumer sites out as All Media Network in 2013, and All Media Network was bought by Blinkx and folded into RhythmOne in April 2015. AllGame did not survive that last stretch. It was the smallest revenue line in a portfolio being tidied up for sale.

~ the dossier ~

~ the all media pattern ~

The interesting thing about AllGame's death is that the database did not die with the website. Rovi kept owning the metadata, because the metadata was the actual business. The consumer sites were a shop window on an asset that got licensed to cable providers and set-top boxes and anyone else who needed to know what a thing was.

So the reviews are not deleted, they are just not addressable. Somewhere inside what is now TiVo there are files with a paragraph about an obscure Amiga release that a person was paid to write in 1999, and there is no url that will get you to it. The Internet Archive has partial captures, and a lot of what people quote as AllGame today comes from Wikipedia articles that cited it before it went down and preserved the sentences by accident.

~ what got buried with it ~

Every reference site that dies takes a specific kind of loss with it, and for AllGame it was coverage of the unfashionable. Anyone can find a review of a famous game. The value of a completist database is the entry for the licensed platformer nobody played, and that entry has no second copy anywhere because no enthusiast community formed around a game nobody played.

My own gaming years ran through internet cafes between 2002 and 2005, where Counter-Strike was more or less the whole product and nobody was looking anything up. When I did want to know what a game was, the answer came from a Turkish forum or from a magazine on a newsstand, not from an American reference site indexed by US release date. AllGame was organized around a shelf I never stood in front of, which is a distance you only notice once the thing is gone and you go looking for what it held.

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