A Little History, 11-20

I'm not sure of the exact order of events, but I know that we started the show first. Some time immediately after that, we had an encounter with a game review site that shaped our idea of what we were going to do with DropShock.

Our friend and, later, contributor to DropShock, Sam, started posting reviews for a website called GamesAreFun dot com, which isn't even around anymore. In fact, I had even helped Sam out early on by designing their logo. Derek and I would visit the site, and decided that the guy who ran the site was a dick. He really was. We argued with them a lot, but I wouldn't say we were trolling, because we weren't antagonistic, we just had strong opinions. Subsequently we were banned, un-banned and then banned again because, like I said, the guy who ran the site was a dick. But this got us to thinking, in addition to our own show, why not our own forums, where we could set the rules and give people the platform to express themselves freely without being harangued for dumb shit like "bad language." 

And that's what we did. I suspect that the forums are responsible for much of our growth in popularity at that time. We had a special section just for flame wars, where we allowed no-holds-barred arguments and bitch sessions, called the Rumble Pit. Moreover, our intention both within the forums and on the show was the kind of over-the-top vulgarity and humor that friends might share when not in mixed company. We didn't feel that we needed to censor ourselves for the sake of some attempt at propriety. That didn't sound like fun to us. We hate censorship, and after being censored at GamesAreFun, we absolutely wanted to make a point that we weren't going to do it, not to ourselves and not to our listeners.

The freedom we offered on the forums, I think, resonated with lots of people. Also, I had received notice from fans of the show that a number of other sites, many of them new, had directly lifted our Rules of Conduct, which was a kind of ToS that we had specifically written to express our intent and expectations with the forums and anyone who joined them. It really felt like we were on to something.


Episode 11

Episode 12

Episode 13

Episode 14

Episode 15

Episode 16

Episode 17

Episode 18

Episode 19

Episode 20