I think Paste got there first.
20 years ago nobody in the mainstream media took games seriously. That’s why, when I first bought an issue of Paste in 2004 or 2005, the thing that most stuck out to me—more than its unexpected Atlanta-area address, its beer coverage, or the CD sampler that came with it—was its coverage of video games. I think it was only half a page, at the absolute end of the magazine, a couple of reviews that were maybe 300 words each, but it was something you just didn’t see in mainstream media at the time: smart, literate criticism that took games seriously as an art form and recognized them as part of the larger culture, right alongside music, movies, TV, and books. I’m sure Rolling Stone or Spin or Entertainment Weekly had written about games many times before then, but it was never a regular or notable part of their coverage—and I’d be surprised if any game reviews they ran were written with the quality found in that issue of Paste, and if they weren’t written for the same stereotypical teen gamer audience that all media at the time assumed were the only people interested in video games. Paste’s tiny games section didn’t condescend to some imagined audience or seem like a desperate attempt to reach different readers; it was written for the Paste reader, and treated no differently than anything else Paste wrote about. I’m not sure who the games editor was for that issue—either Jason Killingsworth or Chris Dahlen, who went on to Edge and Kill Screen, respectively—but whoever it was had a pretty direct impact on me, personally.
I was already getting paid to write when I picked up that issue of Paste somewhere in the Boston area, but I didn’t take it seriously. I’d write a few record reviews a month for a couple of alt-weeklies, maybe interview a band I liked every few months, but it wasn’t a career. It was never supposed to be a career. But that issue of Paste showed me that video games—something that had been a part of my life as long as I could remember, but never even occurred to me as something worth writing about—were worthy of serious criticism, and that real-deal magazines, ones you could buy at a bookstore and everything, might actually publish it. There’s a direct line from me buying that issue of Paste to me writing about games for the first time a couple of years later, when an editor at the Weekly Dig asked if anybody wanted to review a game. A year after that, I wrote a few freelance reviews for Paste when it was still a print magazine, kept contributing once it fully relaunched as a website, and then, in 2011, became its games editor.
As Paste’s games editor I’ve had the opportunity to help build what I think is pretty clearly this section’s lasting legacy: the role it’s played in launching and nurturing dozens of the best game writers of the last 20 years. I don’t think you can find a notable games outlet today that doesn’t have an editor who did crucial early work at Paste, whether as a freelancer, an intern, or as assistant editor. It’s easily the best part of this job, and the reason I struggle to see myself doing anything else in the world of games. Nothing’s more rewarding in the media industry than introducing the world to smart, new, exciting voices, and that’s always been my priority here.