gamerDNA

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

~ the goodbye ~

i played games in that era, counter-strike at the internet cafe and ultima online on turkish private servers, but i never kept a social network for it. gamerdna was for people who wanted a profile of their whole gaming life, achievements and guilds logged and shown off. that crowd existed, it just was not me. i played, i did not catalog.

so this is looked up. gamerdna was a website where a gamer's identity was the in-game one, the alter-ego and its record, not the legal name. it stored what games you had played and what guilds you belonged to, and it gave clans tools for rosters and event scheduling, so the social ties survived past any single game or server.

it began on september 21 2006 in cambridge massachusetts as guildcafe entertainment, founded by jon radoff on a small seed round. in april 2008 it raised about three million dollars and renamed itself gamerdna, leaning into the cross-game profile idea. for a couple of years it was one of the names in a small pack trying to be the record of who you were across everything you played.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

the pitch was that your gaming self was scattered. an xbox account here, a wow character there, a clan on some forum. gamerdna wanted to be the one place that held it together, so you could carry your history and your people from game to game instead of starting cold each time. back then that was a real gap, before consoles and steam did the tracking themselves.

i only read about this later. still, it sat alongside raptr and the older xfire in the same fight, all of them betting that players wanted a persistent identity above any one title. the problem was that the platforms were about to make that a built-in feature, not a site you had to visit.

~ how it actually ended ~

gamerdna did not so much shut down on a date as get passed around until it stopped. crispy gamer media bought it in december 2009, and crispy gamer itself was falling apart within a year or so. the tracking technology went to a company called live gamer in 2011, and the consumer social network gamerdna.com faded out around then.

there was no dramatic goodbye that i can find, which fits. honestly, a network whose whole value was continuity got ended by the least continuous thing possible, changing hands twice until nobody was left running the front door.

~ what came after ~

the idea did not die, it just moved into the platforms. the thing gamerdna wanted to be, a permanent profile of your games and your people, is now baked into steam and xbox and playstation, tracking playtime and achievements without anyone signing up for a separate site. what was a startup's whole reason to exist became a checkbox in the account you already had.

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