Daily Radar

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

~ the goodbye ~

daily radar never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a us dot-com product, the imagine media bid to be a male-coded entertainment portal alongside ign and gamespot. in 2001 i was still on dial-up at home in ankara reading donanimhaber. honestly, the only daily radar i would have ever clicked was a stray inbound link from a forum thread, and even then probably not.

it launched in october 1999 inside imagine media, the print-magazine house that published pc gamer and next generation. the pitch was a daily news aggregator for games and movies, with editors lifted off the print mastheads and a homepage updating several times a day, in the format that every us media company was trying to perfect that year. for about eighteen months it sat in the second tier of english language gaming coverage, somewhere below gamespot and ign but with the imagine print pedigree behind the byline.

nintendo sued the site over unauthorised pokemon content, specifically the 100 percent unofficial pokemon trainer's guide. by january 2001 daily radar had pulled all nintendo reporting. that took the legs out of half the editorial calendar at the worst possible moment, with the dot-com bubble already deflating around it. on 1 may 2001 imagine media shut the site down, weeks before e3 traffic could arrive. by 2010 the remaining url just displayed a one line notice saying the site was no longer being supported.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

not a games magazine in the traditional sense. it was a portal in the year when every us media company was trying to build a portal, with male readers as the assumed demographic and games as one vertical among the rest. the format borrowed heavily from print but updated like a website. for about a year it worked, then it did not.

~ the dot-com cliff ~

by spring 2001 the imagine parent was looking for cuts. the nintendo dispute had killed a profitable beat. e3 was the one annual moment that justified the gaming vertical and the closure landed before that traffic could arrive. the same season took out pets.com and cnet gamecenter and dozens of smaller portals. daily radar was one casualty in a long quarter.

~ what got buried with it ~

future us inherited the imagine catalogue when the companies merged. they rebooted the gamesradar brand in 2005 as a uk gaming site, recycling the name daily radar had briefly used for its short-lived british edition. so the brand survived in a way the original us product never did. today the daily radar urls redirect to techradar, future plc's consumer technology hub. the dot-com gaming portal it had originally been is gone.

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