PALGN

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

~ the goodbye ~

Turkey was a PAL country. The television standard that gave this site its name covered us as well, which in practice meant 50 Hz and European release dates, with games showing up months after American players had finished talking about them. So the letters in PALGN described my situation accurately and the site itself was nothing to do with me. Its PAL meant Australia, with the UK alongside, and a release calendar keyed to Sydney.

It started in 2003 for a reason worth recording. IGN moved its message boards behind a subscription, and the regulars on the PAL side of those boards went off and built their own place instead of paying. That origin held. PALGN became one of Australia's largest independent games sites, somewhere above 300,000 unique readers and a million hits in a month, and it stayed independent the whole way. In 2007 it had enough confidence to spin off a second site for younger players, GamerKids.

The ending had no announcement attached to it. The editorial crew walked out, which on a site built by enthusiasts is fatal arithmetic, because the thing readers came for was the copy and there was now nobody to write it. By July 2014 PALGN was defunct.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the release list ~

The feature people stayed for was the Australian release list, maintained until the year the site died. That sounds like filing when you say it now, but a comprehensive regional release list was load-bearing in a pre-download market, where dates slipped by territory and the official word came from publishers with no interest in confirming that your region was last.

Australia also had no R18+ classification for games until 1 January 2013, so for most of PALGN's life the local games press carried a censorship beat whether it wanted one or not. Titles were cut or refused outright, and the gap between what was on sale in one PAL country and another was a running story on sites like this one.

~ the walkout ~

The archive gives the death a tighter bracket than the obituaries do. A working PALGN was archived for the last time on 8 June 2014, about 14 KB of it, still titled Australia's Most Trusted Video Game Reviews. After that the crawlers record nothing at all for five years, which happens when a domain stops resolving, not when a site merely goes quiet. From 21 August 2019 there are captures again, and they are 600-byte stubs mixed with gateway errors.

One more thing went with it. PALGN's Wikipedia entry has been deleted since, so the sentence everyone quotes about the site being defunct as of July 2014 now survives in a mirror of an article that no longer exists at the source. An eleven-year archive of Australian games writing is harder to cite today than the fact that it ended.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »