It's hard to believe it was just over a year ago I was last writing one of these "times are 'a-changin'" posts, but as Jeff Gerstmann said on a recent Twitch stream, you could argue that a shake-up had been coming down the pipeline for a while. With three of the Giant Bomb old guard discharged, it was conceivable that the fourth might make their exit relatively soon after. After the departure of Brad, Alex, and Vinny, I was optimistic about the site getting stripped down to its bolts, providing an opportunity for the staff to reassemble it to a new spec. At its best, it could have been the kind of radical refresh that spawned Giant Bomb in the first place. And the site's history since then has been eventful.

In the past year, Giant Bomb has not rewritten the book on games coverage, but the faces and focuses of the outlet have changed. We got shows about Power Rangers, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, internet culture, games industry news, and god-awful music. In contributors, we were treated to Danny O'Dwyer, Tamoor Hussein, Lucy James, Jeff Grubb, Jess O'Brien, the Two Minutes to Late Night team, and everyone who dropped by for The Arcade Pit. The site veered towards a content salad approach to entertainment, and my feelings about that have been mixed.

Jess O'Brien and Giant Bomb were a match made in heaven. Back when I was in university, a friend introduced me to some of the originators of the Let's Play format and the video creators adjacent to them. Sat off to the side of that group of misfits was Voidburger, a Silent Hill obsessive with a sunny and nonchalant presentational style. I still have nostalgic memories of her 2014 Shattered Memories run. Over time, Burger grew into her skin (bun?), unfairly dwelling in YouTube obscurity even as her personality grew bigger and her editing more refined.

When Jess was picked up by the huge explosive, it was an unexpected collision of worlds for me. It was like hearing my favourite deep cut on the radio or finding a beloved actor in a film miles outside their typical genre. Jess's warm enthusiasm made her a counterweight to the more laidback members of the team, creating a temperamentally balanced panel of hosts. It also goes to show, if you're plugging away for years on work without receiving your big break, it doesn't mean that broader recognition has become unattainable.

Guilty Treasures reinforced the site's personality-driven approach but with an intimate and documentarian tone. Danny O'Dwyer did for the programme what he did for No Clip, looking at games with an inquisitive and dignified eye without losing the human voice in the semi-formality. I wish it had run for more than four episodes.

Arcade Pit elevated the site's ambitious live production to new heights, teetering atop the legacy of Steal My Sunshine and Burgle My Bananas. But rather than using the single-game format of either, it keeps alive an almost lost art, incorporating an assortment of playables, as game shows like Button Mashing, Starcade, and GamesMaster had before it. By framing its games within a game, Arcade Pit establishes a systemic guarantee of surprises, variety, and madcap fun. Yet, it was also one of the features which felt the most conflicted about who it was vicariously borrowing its personality from. While Burgle My Bananas might have endured some practical setbacks, the former Giant Bomb game shows did have a well-defined crew on deck. Arcade Pit, by design, was in a state of constant rotation, and many of its guests were well-removed from the site, meaning its voice was in flux, never quite settling on one accent.

I felt a similar way about Albummer. The premise of these streams is right up my alley: a circle of music critics rummage through the stinkiest garbage to ever slop onto record store shelves. It's just the end product isn't in that Giant Bomb dialect. Dropping right after the departure of the Nextlander founders, the podcast hit at a time when the site most needed to reaffirm who and what it was about. Yet, the show introduced six people we'd never seen before whose jokes and subject matter were divorced from the rest of what the site had been or would be. Lord knows that wasn't the Late Night crew's fault, but then they also had an improv troupe style of delivery that was never going to be to my taste.

I'm going to say something that always applies to my writing but is vital to repeat when discussing people so close to home: My criticism of these creations is not an assessment of the people behind them. Following the opening act of Jeff, Brad, Alex, and Vinny is one of the toughest jobs you could have in games coverage. When media falls down, it's usually that difficulty in producing it rather than a lack of talent that is the culprit. Even the most acclaimed film director or video game producer can disappoint fans now and then.

Continuing, the nature of Armed and Dangerous and JeffJeff's Bizarre Adventure meant they would always be for a select audience. When you cover a range of media, if someone doesn't like the topic you're currently on, they know there might be another item along in a minute that does pique their interest. When you deconstruct one piece of media for your whole podcast or video, it's a godsend for people who love it, but everyone else is locked out for good. Without a passion for Power Rangers or JoJo's, I couldn't connect with these spots. Then there was the Very Online Show, which was caringly researched by presenters that knew how to poke fun while remaining lovely hosts. However, I'm just so terminally online I didn't get that much out of these explainers of cyber-culture.

It didn't help that I've been missing the in-office streams for a while. There's something about seeing a bunch of people sitting around on a sofa shooting the shit with each other that really sells Giant Bomb's vibe of laidback camaraderie. The sets also served as colourful eye candy full of all sorts of nods to the fandom and the site's wry but absurd humour. Plus, dragging a couch into a room with tinted lighting was the only way you got Giant Bomb's legendary E3 shows: after-hours parties roping some of the industry's funniest and most fascinating into a 3 a.m. haze of bleary-eyed hilarity. That party ended back in 2019.

It's fair enough if you think these are more my problems than Giant Bomb's problems, but this is where I sat. And while some of my discomforts were specific to certain shows, there was also a throughline here: Where Giant Bomb had been fueled by a core team of well-defined personalities, it had become increasingly diffuse. Instead of strapping itself tight to a core company of familiar faces, the site's video and audio came to rely on an array of teams that only occasionally overlapped and that you would rarely see in the same room together. Everyone on these crews was hard-working, masterful, and palpably appreciative of the fans. Still, some of these teams had very different goals than others, eroding the impression of the site having an essential identity.

While the publication always had these stray hairs of energy drink reviews, wrestling discussion, Dragonball dissection, etc. They were combed back into place by Giant Bomb's status as a video game website first and foremost. Now, there was an increasing drift into other media coverage. Giant Bomb was a website about video games, but also about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Power Rangers, internet trends, terrible music, and whatever weird curiosity showed up on the Voicemail Dumptruck that week. All before you got down to the off-topic discussions on UPF or the Bombcast.

I think a lot of the announced changes at Giant Bomb address this dilution of its identity, but there was some understandable pushback against how those changes were declared. Jeff's departure from the site was sudden and unexplained, and in the aftershock of his exodus, you had a letter many people interpreted as a hurried corporate attempt at cleanup. Keep in mind that we had already seen Jeff fired from Gamespot by faceless, profit-motivated businesspeople. The nature of the site's founding means we tend to be sensitive to corporate interference. To be clear, the letter heralding a new era of Giant Bomb came straight from the staff's desk.

I think some of us read it as marketing speak because it made plenty of broad statements about the past and future of the site, and what about it appeals to us, without stating many specifics. For example, it wasn't made clear what "entering a new era of transparency" meant, and ultimately, the priority is not on transparency; it's on privacy. Which is good. I don't think anyone at Giant Bomb has the responsibility of publicly detailing every aspect of their work, but that's not what the letter suggested. It also imparted that Giant Bomb would meaningfully change but somehow remain the same. And if Giant Bomb is "a bunch of passionate friends talking about and around video games", couldn't you say almost any games outlet is Giant Bomb? I don't want to tear down anyone who was left in a rut here, but I also want to acknowledge the fan response.

I further think it's useful to study the reaction to that article because there's an example here of how we can speculate the worst will happen and be entirely wrong. For all the doomsaying, in the end, the reception to the Giant Bomb's future plans was overwhelmingly positive. There is an aching lack of conclusion to Jeff's journey with the site. There was no dedicated event in which the community could say goodbye. However, we did get concrete and specific promises about the site's roadmap that address many of the issues I mentioned above.

Instead of a fractured team of contributors subbing in and out, we've now got an official lineup of nine crew members. One of them is Jeff Grubb, whose extensive knowledge of the industry can help fill in for Gerstmann's. Another is the chaotic evil Dan Ryckert who presses a wrinkle of the old Giant Bomb back into the fold. A renewed commitment to video games is a contract to return to what people came to the site for originally and could serve to give the publication back its focal core. And then we have the news that, for the first time in a long time, there are rumblings about filming video out of the offices. On the whole, I think the outlook is positive. I also have to thank the editors for their shoutouts to the mod team. They've been tremendously kind.

As for Jeff, I can't get into everything he's meant to the site without trying to nail a whole other article onto the end of this one. For what it's worth, Giant Bomb has been at the forefront of games coverage's move into the video format, as well as its incursion into community and personality-focused media. As a co-founder of the site and someone who was pulling so many of its levers throughout its runtime, Jeff was integral to that pioneering. I'm not sure there is someone who has as consistent a track record at successfully breaking down the enjoyability of games as Jeff, and that's a legacy that persisted through his time with us here. In an industry trying to blind everyone with marketing and PR dazzle, the Gerst was always a cool head who saw the bigger picture. His grounding in reality also gave him a sharper eye for the ridiculous, enabling him to convey his hilarious brand of humour to the site. To Jeff, the community, and everyone still working on Giant Bomb, I wish you the absolute best. Thanks for reading.