I Joined 1up.com sometime in 2000 when I was 10 years old. While reading OPM I saw an ad for Gamers.com and joined hoping to be featured in the magazine. I don't remember my first thread there, but I do remember my second, it was a thread asking if I could create a thread telling people to go to my first thread. I don't know why I stayed, but I did. Overtime I got to know the other posters there and became friends, it was a small community at the time and unlike large boards like Neogaf you had a chance to get to know the personalities of the people that posted there. 
 
Eventually the boards were moved to 1up.com. During the move many users left. 1up was just starting to move into podcasting with 1upyours and GFW Radio. OPM, EGM, GMR, and GFW were all running. Great personalities were at the site like Shawn Elliot, Jeff Green, Garnett Lee, Ryan Scott, Anthony Gillagos, Shane Bettenhausen, John Davison, Dan Hsu, and the list goes on. This I believe was the very peak of that website. 
 
Unfortunately, like all things, it did not last. The first to go was OPM, the magazine that brought me there in the first place. At this time I had migrated away from the OPM board over to EGM NGR. NGR was very different from the OPM boards. The OPM boards were filled with fairly middle of the road posters that were very nice and forgiving for a new poster. NGR on the other hand was a cut throat wild west style board where bad posting would get you ravaged crying in the fetal position before a mod even had the chance to respond. Though it was harsh, I loved the personality of all the posters. You had womanizing rabble rousers, anime loving 4 chan addicts, people that spoke entirely in double entendres, flamboyantly gay posters flirting with eachother, and total losers. It was the most entertaining board I had ever been to. 
 
As I continued to post and read the magazines and listen to the podcasts I ended up spending my entire adolescents on the site sharing it together with the people on NGR. 1up in my eyes was hands down the best game site on the web and my homepage. I eventually became a mod on the website and still am to this day. 
 
But then the lay offs happened. Every single editor I cared about either left then and there or left later on. Along the way all my favourite magazines were shut down as well. Testament to the clout NGR had it actually survived after EGM closed down. 
 
At this point no one on NGR bothered reading the front page anymore and they gradually had a falling out with the remaining staff. Eventually NGR got so fed up with them that they left and formed their own message board, Thugmansion.com hosted and supported solely by the members of the message board. After years of growing up together we developed a saying, NERL, no one ever really leaves. Though members have left for a while they always returned at some point down the line. It's still happening even on the new board. 
 
So after 10 years 1up has shut down, fired, lost, or alienated everything and everyone that made me come back to it. I still post there in hopes that it will somehow lift itself back up, but I doubt it will. 
 
So, in my search for a new website to get my info about games I came here. Once again I have editors with great personalities, I have message boards with interesting discussion, I have a podcast filled with wit that's fun to listen to and I have brand new features like achievement tracking, quests, quicklooks, endurance runs, and a huge database of games. Now Giant Bomb is the site I recommend when someone asks me about games.  
 
I doubt I'll ever find the community that I did with 1up, but Giant Bomb has become my favourite game site. I hope things work out better for it then 1up, and I'm actually confident that they will.

Welcome!
 
You probably don't know me, but I lurk the hell out of the 1up boards (and have for several years now) because the posts in the off-topic sections are pretty incredible (in every way imaginable). I totally remember you from over there. I haven't checked out thugmansion.com, though.
 
Anyways, that's kinda off-topic. It's a bittersweet thing to experience the fall of a site that you spent so much time on, and I hope that giantbomb treats ya well for the duration of your stay here.

Thanks guys, I'm really glad this site exists. It's almost the best site just by default with how bad their competition is, but even if the state of the rest of the industry wasn't so bad it still would be the most creative and interesting site out there. I love the quest system in particular, it turns the whole site into a game. It's ingenious in how it both adds content to the site and encourages posters to use all the features, as well as getting users to push up their page views.

1UP certainly has declined and, to be brutally honest, I'm shocked that it still gathers more page views a month than Giant Bomb.  I still have a deep respect for Scott Sharkey and Jeremy Parish, but the new guard definitely doesn't hold up to the golden days. While seeing prominent community members are unavoidable on any site, 1UP has way too many cliques between the blogs and message boards to the point where there's almost an active distaste between the two groups; plus, they fellate the egos of their community staples, leaving absolutely no room for new members to grow. Also, added to the fact that the Oddcast basically encourages behaving like assholes on their own site, I can't take their content seriously.
 
In any case, welcome! I'm glad to have you here!