Retro Gaming Australia

My fellow retro gamers,

2011 was the start of a great push forward for Retro Gaming Australia. We started publishing regular content updates and articles. Our traffic grew by 500%. We launched into social media. And we even posted a modest profit.

It’s not good enough. We have proven that we can do better. Before I started working full time, our numbers for the year at that point were twice as good as the numbers at the end of the year.

It has become clear to us that our strengths lie in the production of content. While we’ll always hope that the site’s forums will play host to active discussions about retro games from an Australian audience, the interest is just not as great as we’d hoped. In fact, with the terrible economy, it seems interest in retro gaming collection is drying up. We’ve decided that trying to build a big happy community of Australian retro gaming fans is not really for us.

We’re going to shift our focus onto producing great editorial content. We want to celebrate our favourite video games, dig up stuff people have forgotten about and explore the history of the industry. We want to be entertaining without being overly cynical or resorting to cheap dick and poo jokes. There are plenty of places where you can get that sort of thing.

We will still help to promote the retro gaming community in Australia. Our friends over at Retrospekt do a fantastic job of organising events, so you should give them your support. If you are organising a retro oriented event in Australia and want a bit of a plug, contact us and we’ll be happy to accommodate you.

In terms of editorial content, you can look forward to the following over the next year:

• More feature content. We’ve planned history articles like our Duke Nukem one for a number of series. These will be joined by articles celebrating some of our favourite games, articles examining some of the worst games ever released, and explorations of video games in other media – both adaptations and portrayals.
• Video content. My capture equipment is ready. I’ll probably just end up sitting around with a beer in hand ranting on a Friday night like a sad old man
• Audio content. We have a decent idea for a podcast, but need at least one more person.
• The return of the Video Game Ad of the Day. Starting tomorrow, we’ll be bringing back advertisements from the biggest games released over the last 35 years. We’ll only be focusing games people actually care about, though
• The launch of our major project. In production for almost two years, this section of the site should provide everything you ever wanted to know (and a whole lot more you don’t care about) about video gaming in Australia and New Zealand.
• An increase in the frequency of Auction Watch.
• The return of the news (maybe).

We will now also be accepting solicitations and pitches for articles about video games. If you fancy yourself to be a decent writer and have a good idea for an article, let us know. If we like what you’ve sent us, we’ll strike a deal and pay genuine Australian currency for your work. It probably won’t be much, but we tried offering people the opportunity to write for us for free and the response was a collective “piss off”.

We’d also like to look at giving the site an actual cohesive design. If you are/know a decent designer who’d be willing to do such a thing for cheap, please contact us.

It should be a great year, so I hope you will come along for the ride.

Matt Keller
Owner & Managing Editor
Retro Gaming Australia