Online Gaming Review

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

~ the last words ~

Online Gaming Review opened on 1 December 1995, put up by Paul Bannister, at a point when the computer games press meant a magazine with a cover disc. It carried reviews and downloadable demos, plus interviews with the people making the games. The whole category was maybe a dozen sites wide, and OGR was one of them before IGN or GameSpot existed in the shape anyone remembers.

It grew the way things grew then. Fifty visitors a day at launch became over 2,100 per weekday by August 1996, and more than 40,000 people came through in the month of July that year. In February 1996 Bannister posted to a Usenet games group asking readers to update their pointers to a new address, which is how a website announced a move before anyone had a mailing list. USA Today made it a Hotsite and the Adrenaline Vault put it in a top ten.

Here is my distance from it. I got online in 1998, in Turkey, on a modem that topped out at 33.6k, and the single thing a site like this was for was demos. A 40 MB demo on that line was not a download, it was a commitment that occupied the phone for an evening and failed at ninety percent often enough that you learned to care about resume support more than about the game. By the time I could actually pull files at any speed, OGR had already stopped being a place.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

In October 1996 Air Age Publishing bought the site. Air Age owned Computer Player magazine, so the website that had been competing with print got absorbed by print. In December 1997 the arrangement went the other way and OGR launched a companion paper magazine of its own, with the premiere issue dated January 1998.

In August 1998 Strategy Plus bought OGR from Air Age. Strategy Plus owned Computer Games Magazine, which published on the web as cdmag.com, and that purchase is where the obituary actually starts.

~ the fold ~

On 8 February 1999 ogr.com still served its own front page, titled "OGR.COM: Computer Gaming Reviews, Previews, News and Features", with a description bragging about being the internet's most respected source of computer gaming information. By 20 April 1999 the same address answered with a few kilobytes whose first instruction was a JavaScript location.replace pointed at cdmag.com/Home/home.html?brand=OGR.

That is the whole fold, visible in the byte count. The site stopped being a site and became a value in a query string on somebody else's publication. It stayed that way, the same frozen page, through every capture of 2000 and into April 2001.

~ what the domain did next ~

By 29 June 2001 the redirect was gone and ogr.com was serving Computer Games Online directly, masthead and all: "Serious gamers. Serious fun." The OGR name was no longer anywhere on the address that carried it.

On 28 November 2001 the domain answered with a frameset titled :: ogr.com and a keywords tag reading "sites, site, web, net, guide, search". A link farm, in other words, parked on a name that six years earlier had been one of the first places on the web to review a PC game.

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