Games Domain

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

~ the last words ~

Games Domain went online in March 1994 out of Birmingham, England, built by a developer named Dave Stanworth. That date puts it ahead of nearly everything it would later be compared to. IGN did not exist yet and GameSpot was two years away. For most of the mid-90s it was one of a small handful of places on the web where you could find a demo or a patch for a PC game without already knowing which FTP server it lived on.

The core of the site was the downloads archive and GD Review, an online magazine of staff reviews and previews. A Games Info section carried FAQs and walkthroughs. In the late 90s the whole thing was mirrored in seven countries, which mattered enormously when the file you wanted was a 30 megabyte demo and the pipe you were pulling it through was a modem. It spun off Kids Domain for children's titles and Console Domain for consoles, and on December 1 1999 it launched a print magazine, Games Domain Offline.

At its peak in 2002 the site was doing around 1.4 million users and fifteen million page views a month, which put it among the leading gaming destinations on the web at a moment when that ranking was still contested.

Then the ownership started moving. Attitude Network bought the site in early 1998. Theglobe.com bought Attitude Network in April 1999 for $52.8 million. The dot-com collapse forced theglobe.com to shed it in August 2001, and BT Openworld picked it up that October. BT sold it on to Yahoo in November 2003. In March 2005 Yahoo retired the brand and the URL.

~ the record ~

~ downloading on a modem ~

I was pulling game demos over a 33.6k modem in Turkey in the late 90s, and the arithmetic of that is what gets forgotten. A 30 megabyte demo was a two hour download if nothing dropped, and the line dropped. Mirrors were not a convenience feature. They were the difference between a file arriving and a file not arriving, which is why a site keeping copies in seven countries was worth something real.

Which specific archive a given file came from is not something i could tell you now. In that period the download sites blurred into one another and you went wherever a search result or a forum post pointed you. Games Domain was one of the names in that rotation and one of the older ones, but the brand loyalty everyone assumes existed did not.

~ five owners in eleven years ~

The ownership chain is the actual story of what happened here. Stanworth's independent site became an Attitude Network property in 1998, an asset on theglobe.com's balance sheet in 1999, a piece of dot-com wreckage in 2001, an ISP's content play under BT Openworld, and finally a line item Yahoo had no use for. Each owner bought it for a different reason, and none of those reasons had much to do with the archive.

BT at least tried something. Games Domain Multiplay launched in November 2001 as a matchmaking and server service for BT Openworld subscribers, which was a sensible use of a games brand by a company selling broadband. When BT's content ambitions shrank, the site went to Yahoo, which already had Yahoo Games and no reason to run a second gaming property.

~ the brand goes ~

Yahoo retired the Games Domain name and address in March 2005, eleven years after Stanworth put it up. gamesdomain.com now redirects to Yahoo Games. The review archive and the demo library were not migrated anywhere a user could reach them, and what survives sits in the Internet Archive next to scanned issues of Games Domain Offline.

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