Gameplanet

» see gameplanet.co.nz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The website is gone and the forum attached to it is still running. That is backwards. The normal order is that a publication gets sold and then gets absorbed, and the community underneath it is the first thing switched off, because a message board costs money to host and generates nothing anybody can sell. Gameplanet went the other way, and the reason is that the forum was there before the publication was.

In 1999 Simon Garner set up the first Counter-Strike server in New Zealand and was doing the web hosting for GameZone, a small games shop on Symonds Street in Auckland owned by Simon Barton. The two of them started Gameplanet on 13 September 2000 out of that arrangement, which was a games shop with a server attached and somewhere to talk about both. It ran as a non-profit under GameZone before incorporating in late 2002.

The forums came from the same soil. There had been separate community sites for separate games, each with its own login, and in 2002 they were merged into one board under the name GP Forums with a single account across all of it. That merge is why the community outlasted everything built on top of it. It was never a feature of the magazine. The magazine was a thing the community grew.

Gameplanet began as a Counter-Strike site in 2000, and in 2002 I was playing the same game in internet cafes in Ankara, on the local network, in rooms where nobody read a website about any of it. That is the honest distance here. Turkey had the audience and the machines and skipped the part where somebody writes it down, so the countries that built a real domestic gaming press are the interesting exception rather than the pattern.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

For most of two decades Gameplanet was the largest video gaming website in New Zealand, publishing news and reviews alongside the board. The case for it existing is entirely geographic. New Zealand is five million people at the far end of every distribution chain there is, with a classification office of its own and release dates that arrive whenever the region gets around to it, both of them worse than the version described in the articles you would otherwise be reading.

So the value was never the review score, which you could get from anywhere by 2005. It was that the person writing had paid New Zealand dollars for the thing and had waited the New Zealand amount of time for it to arrive. Every country outside the two that produce the coverage has this problem and most of them never got a site that fixed it.

~ the postmortem ~

By 2016 the advertising had thinned out enough that the business could not carry itself, and in June that year the online retailer Mighty Ape took a controlling 60 percent stake. That bought four more years, which is a decent return on a rescue in that industry.

On 28 April 2020 Garner posted the notice himself, under the handle Egor he had been using since the server days. There was, he wrote, sadly no realistic prospect of the business recovering, and online advertising had largely ceased to be a viable way to fund content. The pandemic gets named in most accounts of this, but it is closer to the last shove than the cause. He thanked seven past editors along with Barton, warned that Power Up memberships would not carry over and offered refunds to anyone still paying. The site went off the next day.

~ the long tail ~

GP Forums did not go with it. The board was locked overnight while the data moved across to Tapatalk, and it reopened the following morning as its own thing. Garner described the move as a return to their roots as a non-profit community run by gamers for gamers, which reads like a consolation and turned out to be accurate. gpforums.co.nz still answers in 2026, twenty-four years after the merge that created it.

The domain went somewhere better than usual too. gameplanet.co.nz now redirects to Overkill Games, a New Zealand gaming retailer whose own history page traces its staff back through GameZone on Symonds Street to GPstore and Mighty Ape. That is not a squatter and it is not a coincidence. The address ended up back with the same people who owned the shop the site was hosted out of in 1999.

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