Insert Credit, Play Again?

So, once upon a time, there was an import/obscure gaming news and features fansite called insert credit. Actually, I believe it was formed all the way back in 1999 by Brandon Sheffield and Vincent Diamante, but I only really came across it more recently, when I was editing Slashdot Games.

Anyhow, ic has a reputation for talking about games in a way which is either somewhat innovative or overly self-absorbed, depending on who you speak to. The site's most famous article series is probably its games journalism feature, closely followed by any feature from Tim Rogers, who is, well, either the Antichrist or the Anti-Antichrist. In any case, ic writers get tapped for pieces by magazines like Wired, Official Nintendo Magazine UK, and a bunch of others, and there's no doubt that even the more 'boutique' games magazines like the Edge-s and the Games TM-s of this world keep an eye on it. Sometimes I pretend it's like the games version of the NME, or at least the earlier-era NME, but - likely not. At the very least, the site has a sense of humor about its own shortcomings.

So, oddly enough, I started working with Brandon Sheffield on a currently dormant spare-time project just before we both got hired on at the CMP Game Group, but now that he's working there (and sometimes contributing features to the site I run, Gamasutra), he doesn't have time to update insert credit like he did - especially the news section. A lot of people had been making noises about doing a 'PHP version' of the site, but, well, it wasn't happening. Hopefully it will soon, but in the meantime, I decided to hack the news section, with Brandon's permission, to run in Movable Type, using an old 2.6 version of the app that I had hanging around (we don't need comments or any super-complex stuff!)

Anyhow, it took a couple of nights of semi-messy hacking about, but considering I'm _not_ a coder of any kind, it shows how easy MT's flexible template system makes it to get a multi-author news posting system with auto-permalinks and archives going, and looking exactly like the old page. Importantly, considering Brandon can't do the crazy news updating like he used to, the strictly-for-fun site has now expanded out to about 10+ news authors, including Click-Stick, Jiji, Zepy, Vincent, Brandon, some other 'shadowy figures', and even myself - I'll post very occasionally, as I did earlier regarding Andamiro's 'Pump It Up' DDR clone coming to PlayStation 2. But above all, after the last ffwd post, which might be considered to some to be 'bad mojo' (even if I was just speaking my mind), I hope that the the effort I put into the insert credit semi-resurrection has helped re-orient my karma just a little. And I'm also hoping ic will continue to be a breeding ground for a slightly alternative view on video games.

Oh, and we moved house successfully. Yay.