SquareGo

» see square-go.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

SquareGo went online on 10 May 2006 as Fidget Magazine, started by Josh Wilson, who was then digital editor of The Skinny, the Scottish culture monthly. The name changed before that August. The two publications stayed linked until August 2008, when SquareGo separated from The Skinny on terms the record describes as amicable, and carried on under a company called Fidget Publishing out of Edinburgh.

It was a small operation with an unusually long masthead. Four editors over nine years, ending with Graeme Strachan from January 2013, and a list of staff writers running to eleven names. It is also a reminder that for most of the 2000s the English-language games web was not a handful of big sites, which is how it gets remembered, but hundreds of these: regional, and run by people who had another job.

I was online for every year SquareGo published and never once came across it, which is not a regional gap so much as a scale one. A site doing thirty thousand hits in a week is doing well for what it is and is still invisible from Ankara, where the games reading I did was whatever surfaced in English search results or got linked from a forum.

It collected the things a site that size collects. Computer and Video Games made it Site of the Week on 7 November 2010. The List ranked it the 26th best website in Scotland on 21 July 2011. Neither award came with any money attached to it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the print year ~

From August 2007 to August 2008 SquareGo also came out on paper, monthly, with a stated circulation of 30,000 copies. In February 2009 it signed a distribution deal that put it in every Scottish branch of Gamestation, which was the specialist games chain of the period before GAME absorbed it.

Nothing fixes the operation to its decade more precisely than that deal. A games magazine distributed through a high-street specialist chain made sense in 2008 because the chain existed and had people walking through it, and both halves of that stopped being true within a few years. GAME had bought Gamestation in 2007 and retired the name in 2012.

The website outlived the print edition by nearly seven years, which is the usual direction of travel, and the columns were the kind a volunteer masthead produces: a bargain-bin column, a Scottish industry column, a monthly Japan column, a column about games in India.

~ what the domain does now ~

Output slowed through 2014 and stopped in March 2015, the same month Strachan's editorship ended. Nobody posted a farewell, or if somebody did, no copy of it survives anywhere I could find one. What the Internet Archive shows is a front page that kept answering at roughly fifteen kilobytes through all of 2015, 2016 and 2017, and was still that size in January 2018. By that June it had collapsed to about two kilobytes.

Today square-go.com resolves and returns a login form for Postfix Admin, the web interface for administering mail domains. The registration is alive and pointed at a mail server, and there is no site behind it. That is a cleaner ending than a parking page: somebody kept the domain for a working purpose and let the magazine go.

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