I haven't been able to properly stop moving since May 23rd this year; my feet have just kept on going even when I really wanted to bail at certain points, even up until our new site launched on December 6th. On May 3rd I started, in earnest, assisting the Giant Bomb team in vetting the idea of taking over the website. Jan had already thrown me some CMS keys to the old place in April as we had no idea what was going to happen, and I quickly made myself familiar with the place. But rebuilding Giant Bomb? Fucking ludicrous.
Bakalar and I had gotten to know each other after working on the Nuke Dot Com ARG and Click Click Bomb; he may not advertise it, but he's a great QA tester for niche web projects! "Knows enough to be dangerous" is a phrase we use in software for product & biz folks sharp enough to talk shop, and JERF's certainly one of those. Neither Jeff nor myself considered those projects as my interview process for eventually rebuilding this place, but that's sort of what happened. Turns out: we work very well together, as I like to iterate rapidly and Jeff provides great, precise feedback that can push a project along in the right ways.
I can't go into too much detail, but I signed a non-disclosure agreement with these guys on May 3rd, and when Bakalar informed the team that I was onboard, I got one message recognizing my joining in on the venture:
I was already planning on heading to PAX East, but after things started shaping up it became outrageously important that I go, not because it would help seal the deal or anything but because I had to be there, as a fan, for the announcement that Giant Bomb would become independent for the first time.
The announcement at PAX was spectacular; a raw moment that had the whole room vibrating on the same wavelength. A deviously orchestrated surprise for Mike Minotti that, up until the day before, was planned to be a LIVE PHONE CALL - luckily they talked Dan out of that idea before the panel. "Hey Mikey here's a few hundred people all watching you on screen, anyways do you want to assume liability with us as owners of this subscription-based website?"
Things moved really quickly from there - GB@Nite was coming together for Summer Games Fest, with the team hustling to secure sponsors, lodging, guests, and travel. All the while we were still hammering out the terms of the sale, and one detail in particular weighed heavily on myself and Bakalar: We'd have to rebuild the site entirely from scratch.
Giant Bomb is many things. It is an outlet founded in 2008 by Ryan Davis and Jeff Gerstmann, and had many social media style functions like follows, wall posts, blogs, and DMs. The site functions as a community-oriented home for gamers on the internet, featuring articles, user reviews, lists, and forums. The Giant Bomb Wiki is one of the largest user-edited databases about games, developers, characters, concepts, and more on the internet (and it's still here, baby). It is a media player and catalog of video and podcasts, and has for years been supported by premium subscriptions for users looking to back personalities they believe in and a website they love.
Anyways, here's a screenshot of my dumb ass thinking I had properly proof-of-concepted a rebuild of this place:
In 209 days, I attempted to reverse engineer every aspect of the website that I could, and kicked off an open source effort to rebuild the wiki. Cutting scope for what we could get done before the end of the year was painful, and still is, but we prioritized providing a home on the internet that facilitated the Giant Bomb Premium experience folks were paying for and the place that you all have come to love.
Podcast RSS feeds, the video catalog and player, forums, comments, articles, reviews, community articles, lists, authentication, subscription payments, ad tech, DevOps, image, audio, and video buckets, CDNs, edge caching and security. I could keep spewing words like this until I pass out - all of this to say that I severely underestimated the project, as is the case in all software made by people ever, and what we've landed with here is far from perfect. I'm simultaneously proud of what we have here, but know the road ahead is quite long in terms of regaining feature parity with the old stomping grounds.
I cried at points; frustrated with the state of data on the old site, pushing through with DevOps and infrastructure tasks I didn't understand, and panicking when traffic took down the premium beta on the first day. There was also the feeling that all the while I was letting down my partner as she took on more and more planning for our wedding while I tried to chip away at this mountain of a website.
It was after the premium beta that I reached out to some old coworkers and said - hey, I need help. This is a lot. I feel like I bit off more than I could chew. My 'braintrust' jumped in on my Trello board with gusto and immediately alleviated things, knocking out refactors and providing polish that I had skipped over. My wife, a talented project manager who was in the middle of knocking out details for our September ceremony, broke down what I had left to do and set me up with a timeline ahead of December to work through.
Z, you're the best. I'm just floored.
I want to take a moment to shout out some folks that were vital to getting this off the ground, some with names and others with usernames:
- Kenny and his methodical test-driven approach that made this project stable and solid
- Christian's front-end prowess and help on mobile responsiveness & with the podcast player
- Blake aka https://jetpacksandrollerskates.com/ for his design chops and exacting instincts that you get to enjoy on this website
- ZombiePie & Marino for their patience, advice, and thorough background information on why Giant Bomb works the way it does
- thank you to XAMPPRocky for her thorough maintainer/reviewer skills
- fr0bie for his background on the Giant Bomb wiki and his expertise with data that I would have absolutely drowned without
- MattSayer for being an out-of-nowhere special agent progressing the wiki along the last few months with sorely needed PHP skills
- secretrob for their consistent involvement in the discord and patience with refactoring things as we go
- Zelnox for a consistent push-forward mentality as he learned on the fly and contributes in a massive way to things like auth and identity on the wiki
- and many other wiki contributors that have chipped in or will in the near future (we will be thanking wiki contributors in a more substantial and material way in early 2026)
- The Discord and Site Moderation teams for moving through it from April to Now (they love Giant Bomb and this community, y'all)
- Frank, Jason, Steve, Adam, Grzegorz, and Anna at Fandom IT
- AlwaysBeClothing, Pugtato, Tosshi, and Paolo for support and space to vent
- Shawn McDowell, Will Crosby, and Lex Luddy for being great to work with but also for being fucking funny
- and of course Jeff Bakalar, Jeff Grubb, Jan Ochoa, Dan Ryckert, and Mike Minotti.
Obviously this thing stopped being my project a while ago, and it's something that we're all going to be building together. I love seeing how passionate people are about this place, the wiki, blogs, reviews, lists, forums, and more - and you have all been extraordinarily kind toward myself and the staff as we wade through this together - big thanks to you, the community: you have been patient, warm, and your excitement is palpable.
2025 has been one hell of a year, and I see nothing but opportunity for all of us here at Giant Bomb - thank you so much for supporting us with feedback, chats, subscriptions, emails, and voicemails. We can't do this without you.
<>