Brief History of SA

November 5, 1999 - While working one night for Gamespy, radium and I were making fun of some goofy-ass game that another employee was playing. I don't remember what it was, but it involved him shooting dinosaurs that apparently had megaphones built into their tracheas, because they would make the most God-awful noises. Imagine grabbing a bunch of stray pit bulls, cramming them into an industrial trash compactor full of broken syringes, and then magnifying the noise they make by about 600 times. Doing that will result in a sound about 1/15th as annoying as that game. As I commented to radium, "that stupid game Pharcyde is playing really is something awful." He agreed, and suddenly a magnificent idea slammed across my head like a thrown brick, an idea that would change my life forever. The words "something awful" immediately clicked and my brain hatched a wonderful plan. Yes, I had the incredibly brilliant idea to GO OUT AND BUY SOME CHINESE FOOD. After that, while clutching my stomach in pain and attempting to choke back the acidic bile rising in my stomach, I also decided to register www.somethingawful.com. Since my monthly salary at Gamespy was nearly triple the $70 registration fee, I could easily afford it.

November 23, 1999 - Something Awful officially launched. The first piece of content to ever be posted was the review of "WWF Attitude" for the Sega Dreamcast. The front page description of the review was as follows:

"WWF Attitude" destroys any conceivable enjoyment somebody straight could derive from having fat white guys fall on each other.

It's like having your colon cleansed... WITH PURE HISTORY! I'm not going to bother trying to dig up one of the original designs of this site because you will undoubtedly take your own life after seeing something so horrible. Let me put it to you this way: bright orange and lots of it.

January 24, 2000 - SA was officially hosted by UGO under the ever gracious and considerate Chet from Old Man Murray / Murphy. Things were happy and good then, and a peaceful calm had swept across most of Europe and certain areas of Atlantis. Unfortunately, the forecast was "cloudy with a 95% chance of PURE AWFULNESS!"

March 17, 2000 - SA moves to the nefarious Gamefan Network. Why did I haul my site over if I was happy on UGO? Well, back then I was working for Voodoo Extreme, which was on the Gamefan Network as well, and I was told that I had to move my site over to their network. Their reasoning was that it would look "odd" if somebody who worked for their network chose to have their site hosted on a competing network. Since I was pretty naive to the ways of cash-grubbing companies back then, I agreed.

August 7, 2000 - After failing to receive a paycheck for the previous two months, I moved my site off Gamefan to Backbeat Media. This brings us up to...

The present time - SA is moving off of Backbeat Media. While I have nothing but the highest regards for the entire staff at Backbeat Media, SA just doesn't really fit in with their network strategy. This is a site pretty much unlike all the other pages they own, 100% of which are Mac-based. Although we both feel as if I could benefit more from moving to another network, I don't regret any of the time I spent on their network. In all my conversations and experiences with the BBM team, I found them to be highly professional, motivated, and honest beyond belief. They're a real class act of guys, and I will wholeheartedly recommend them to anybody running a hardware or straight-up computer site.

– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)