Penny Arcade Forums

» see forums.penny-arcade.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I had forums, and they were in Turkish. My message board years went to donanimhaber and frmtr, where I kept a signature listing my hardware and updated it whenever a part changed, which is a thing every teenager on those boards did and nobody has ever fully explained. The English-language gaming board was a country I could see from my window and had no reason to enter.

Penny Arcade began on 18 November 1998, a webcomic about video games by Jerry Holkins writing and Mike Krahulik drawing. The forums came later, in the early 2000s, as the natural appendix to a comic with three updates a week and an audience that wanted to argue. By 2009 an industry piece could already describe them as almost a decade old.

They then did something the comic did not, which was to keep mattering after their own format stopped being how people talked online. Forums were superseded twice over, first by the big social networks and then by Discord, and this one went on running with a moderation culture strict enough to be notorious and a population that had in many cases been posting there since university.

~ the record ~

~ a comic with a city attached ~

The scale is easy to underrate now. Holkins said the site was handling more than two million pageviews a day in 2006, and that figure explicitly excluded forum traffic, which was counted separately because it was enormous on its own.

Administration was informal for years. It was originally run by Krahulik and a small group of friends, and only from 2003 did it get a dedicated technical admin in Kevin Hamilton and a separate person handling policy. A community that size held together by people who knew each other personally is a structure that does not scale, and the fact that it held for two more decades is the interesting part rather than a footnote.

~ the theory ~

On 19 March 2004 Penny Arcade published a strip called Green Blackboards (And Other Anomalies), containing an equation written on a board: Normal Person plus Anonymity plus Audience equals Total Fuckwad. It got named the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and it has been cited in academic papers and corporate trust-and-safety decks ever since.

The thing worth noting is where it came from. It was not theorized from outside. It was written by people running one of the largest message boards in English, describing what they were watching happen to their own users every day. It is field notes from the moderation queue, and it has held up better than most of the research that followed it, which is faintly embarrassing for the research.

~ what a forum was for ~

A board like this accumulated things nothing has replaced. Andrew Hussie posted Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff there, which means a piece of the origin of one of the largest fandoms of the 2010s sat inside somebody's gaming forum. That is normal for the format. Threads ran for years, in-jokes had documented birthdays, and the archive worked as a searchable record because it was flat and public and did not expire.

Discord replaced the social function and destroyed the archival one. A chat server is a room you have to be standing in. A forum was a building with the old rooms still in it, which is why the shutdown of one takes something away that the migration does not carry.

~ what really happened ~

Penny Arcade announced the wind-down and it closed in May 2025, more than twenty years in. There was no scandal attached and no acquisition. Running a large forum in 2025 means paying for the hosting and the moderation of a format whose users are not being replaced as they leave.

The ending itself was unusual enough to note. Rather than switching it off, Penny Arcade worked with long-standing members to stand up a successor it deliberately does not own or control, named Coin Return by a vote of the people moving there. Companies almost never do this. The normal exit is a farewell post and a domain that stops resolving, with the community left to reassemble itself in a group chat somewhere. Handing the keys over is more work and gets less credit, and it is the only version of this ending where the thing that was actually valuable survives the thing that was paying for it.

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