Our 1st Post 10 Years Ago
https://www.gamesfreezer.co.uk/2013/05/games-freezer-switching-on.html
🥶ORIGIN
The year was 2012. I wanted to build a website because it felt like something productive to do with the very small amount of spare time that I had when my first child was born. I started a property buying guide website which is called propertynotepad.co.uk which still exists today.
I used a service that I can't remember the name of to build it but then I wanted more customisation of the website to make it look unique so I found Blogger by Google which made customisation fairly simple.
At this point, I realised that there was only so much I could write about the property buying process and decided that if I was using Blogger to build a website I should start something new that I could write forever about.
I looked at football as something I could talk about forever but it felt overplayed with too many footy blogs. After compiling a list of potential topics I thought about video games as a potential but yet again it felt like there were heaps of other people blogging about video games.
Although at this point in 2012 it didn't feel like the Retro Gaming scene had as many people blogging about it. So I went with a retro gaming-themed blog in order to rekindle my love of video games from my youth.
🥶The Name
My original choice was going to be something like Video Games Almanac, Games Chest or Gamers Shelf. I wanted something that implied old games and that was original. It proved tough to find anything that fitted the bill. Then I came across the idea in my head of storing old games in a sort of deep freezer to be preserved for the future. Then I tried Games Freezer in all the usual places like Twitter, Instagram and the 123 Reg website registry and the name was available everywhere so I went with it.
Initially, the web address was in the .eu domain as www.gamesfreezer.eu because that domain was mega cheap to purchase at the paltry fee of 99p per year! So I went with .eu as a starter and began designing the website properly in Blogger.
The website was constructed using some standard blogger templates to get a feeling for Blogger and then over time I learned some small HTML snippets of code which enabled me to make customisations to the layout on the fly and over time the website evolved into the design that we say today which is a retro pixel styled type of website. I wanted it to look amateur but clean rather than just following the IGN wannabe style of identikit websites.
🥶The Logo
Originally it started out as a pixel art outline of a freezer that I created on my iPhone using a Pixel Art App. It was crude but did the job.
Then I discovered People Per Hour which is a freelancing website where people will undertake small tasks for a small fee. A guy did an angular design for me that was icy and looked quite 'cool'. After a while, I felt that the look needed to be more retro so then someone converted the angular design for us to a dark blue pixel art freezer. We've stuck with that little blue pixel freezer ever since then and the freezer is part of our everyday life at GF HQ.
Later on, our friend Tilly aka @Bhaal_Spawn made us a Zool Ghostbusters version for us as a Halloween treat and we now have a couple of versions, one with Zool and one with the 10 Years anniversary banner across it which both look cool.
🥶Rating System
The original rating system for reviews was only introduced when Britt came on board in 2016. We went with an ice-themed rating system that kept with our Games Freezer theme and either had Melted, Melting, Cool or ICE Cool in ascending order of how good the game was. The problem we found with this was that there wasn't much nuance to the rating system when you had a game that was somewhere in between. Eventually, we moved to number out of 10 scale and retained the Melted, Melting, Cool, and Ice Cool categories associated with the numbers. Britt also then came up with the idea to add in an extra special rating for 10/10 games and so Frozen In Time was born of which there has only ever been one occasion where we have awarded the F.I.T 10/10 rating and that was Aground which Britt stumbled across and fell in love with (I'm assuming this is what happened with Britt and @KingdomOfCarts when they met)
🥶BREXIT
In 2016 we were forced to switch from a .eu Domain to .co.uk following Brexit which is something that never really dawned on me at the time would need to happen but it did apparently so off we tootled to the sunny lands of .co.uk and we've never looked back since. I actually think that since we went to .co.uk our visitor numbers have increased. Is this one of the only Brexit success stories?! (a little bit of Politics there)
🥶PERSONNEL
Originally it was just me churning out memories of retro video games from my past and I loved doing this but there was only so much I could write about so eventually I enlisted the help of an old school friend...ENTER THE PANG MAN!
Pang Man was a schoolmate when I was about 10 years old and we consistently chatted about SNES and SEGA from around 1991 until we left school in 1998. Much like me, he had a love for video games mags such as Mean Machines and Super Play and began writing us a series of reminiscing retro gaming posts in 2013. Pang Man went on to write for us for around 6 years before he bowed out of the GF limelight (we still talk and he has amassed a nice collection of MAME games on his custom-built arcade machine since we last saw him).
Next up we had our American friend Beth write for us for a while and it was great to have another voice in the freezer for people to listen to but Beth had to also bow out due to not having the time to dedicate herself to the GF but she is a force of nature and you will see that she has gone on to have a fully-fledged successful career in the video games industry and is also one of the world's finest purveyors of the donut (doughnut).
Britt Joining GF in 2016 was one of the most pivotal moments in the history of GF as it was a time when I was beginning to lose my way with where the site should go next and the number of posts that I was producing was getting lower. It was actually a chance message to @KingdomOfCarts on Twitter that led to me being put in touch with Britt and from there onwards we haven't looked back since.
Britt's enthusiasm for all video games both old and new rekindled my passion for not only retro games but also for the indie games of our present. It was at this point I knew that we could really take GF to the next level as long as Britt was on board. With the unrelenting review enthusiasm of Britt we began to review Indie Games on a regular basis rather than just talking retro games.
As Britt's reviews got noticed more and more we were able to gain more contacts in the industry to be able to get more and more games into the Games Freezer and this is mainly due to Britt. It's not only his reviews and mega enthusiasm for everything video games it's also the fact that with him Britt brought some other friends along for the ride to create a cast of contributors to the Games Freezer that means that today GF is in safe hands.
Britt has also brought along such wonderful contributors as Pixel Hunted, Co-Op Chris, Dr Congo Fighting, Transvaal, Lee, Max and Mike who all take their turn to play an assortment of indie gold and offer up their written opinions on a regular basis.
That brings us right up to date and as of today, we have come a long way as a website in 10 years considering that none of us get paid and we do this purely out of love for video games.
Of course, Britt and I often talk about how awesome it would be to do this full-time and earn some kind of living from it but for now, we don't care as we're GF4EVA!
🧊
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