It’s 2013 as I write this, which means this site’s been around for a little over twelve years now (!). That either seems impressive or sad depending on your point of view. Actual site anniversaries and milestones have been lost to the fickle, swirling sands of time (read: I forgot), but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the various iterations of the site over the years and offer some commentary before I forget all of that too.
Just Games (’95-’96)
One of the most frequent questions I get is why is the site is called “Just Games Retro” instead of the grammatically-correct “Just Retro Games.” Aside from “JGR” being a snappier acronym than “JRG,” the reason lies entirely with the games magazine I wrote when I was around twelve years old. I was a regular subscriber to Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Players back then. At some point around 1995, I thought trying my hand at reviews would be fun, while a video store membership meant I could write about a variety of games each month. I conned a friend into writing too and away we went.
Just Games was drafted up on a Compaq 486 using Print Shop Deluxe. Reviews were restricted to one page and written entirely within that program, so it was the only time in history that I was ever forced to be brief with my words. Various news and cheat codes were cribbed from current issues of the professional mags. We’d then print out issues on regular letter paper, staple them together, and try to sell them to merciful neighborhood locals for a few bucks.
This is also the reason I still go by “The J Man.” It’s what I used in the magazine. If it sounds like a nickname a little kid would make up for themselves, that’s because it is.
Just Games had four official releases, one of which I wrote solo after moving away (that move was the primary reason the mag died). There is a mythical “lost” fifth issue that I last saw on a 3 1/4″ floppy disk some 17 years ago, and every so often, I get cheesed at losing it and try a fruitless search to find it. The whole concept of game reviews would lie dormant for me until about five years later…
Fun Fact: Just Games magazine would reference fake characters like The Editor, Father Time, and Mr. Toothph, all named from clip art within Print Shop Deluxe. There was only a maximum of two of us writing, and I remember feeling embarrassed by that, so I made up additional staff to make us seem more “legit.”
JGR Version 1 (’00-’02)
Like every retro game review site ever, JGR came about around 2000 entirely due to emulation and abandonware. For me, it was unfettered access to the entire NES library at no charge. Like a kid in the proverbial candy store, I spent weeks trying out games I had never played before, naturally forming opinions about them, and the concept to start reviewing games again grew from there. To me, it was obvious to resurrect the Just Games name. Slapping “Retro” onto the end would make it clear this was all about 8 and 16-bit games.
Version 1 of JGR was hand-coded in Notepad using my very limited knowledge of HTML from a high school computer class. Art was never my strong suit, so the button art and logo came from an online generator (we’re still tied to that logo and font today!) The big feature of 1.0 was the use of “cutting-edge” Web 1.0 frames to maintain the sidebar while loading review pages inside the main content window. I was awfully proud of that, which I’m sure I stole from looking at another page’s source or some template.
As created, Just Games Retro was never intended for the public. It was just an extension of the old ‘zine – more a way for me to catalog games and my thoughts on them. I’m not really sure what the excitement of bashing out private reviews at 6 AM while listening to Pearl Jam was, but it was certainly there, and in no small part thanks to the feeling of endless games and worlds to explore through emulation. I was stupidly excited to check out every NES game I’d never had a chance to play (or had even heard of), and legitimately thought I could have the entire NES library reviewed in a couple years, tops.
The early site could fit on a floppy disk (later, a USB drive) so I would take it into school and sneakily work on it when I had the time. It was there that a few friends noticed what I was doing, read the work, and thought it was pretty dope. It was the first thought I had of actually making JGR public in some way, but I didn’t have the means in 2000. It was also Static‘s introduction to JGR, which would pay off shortly.
Fun Fact: I’ve always been a sucker for holiday-themed special content. This version of the site is the only one that’s ever changed based on a holiday. Using some found Christmas clip art, I made the borders colored Christmas lights, added some snow drifts, etc, for the month of December. Did I mention this was entirely for myself and not even viewable to the public?
Version 1.5 (2002)
When I made the move to college/university, I found that I’d been granted 100MB or so of free server space to do with as I pleased. You can damn well bet what I pleased.
With JGR live, I was able to convince others to get involved in writing reviews. Static came on board, along with another friend, and a friend-of-a-friend, who took the names Cloudrulez and Wedge Antilles. We were still focused on 8 and 16-bit consoles and I was still doing all coding by hand in Notepad. They’d email me the review text and I’d convert it manually. Why I would download old NES games, but not a warez copy of Dreamweaver, I’ll never know. I guess I wouldn’t download a car.
I found some Javascript code online, so this was the introduction to the randomized quote generator that would line the top of the page for years to come. Quotes were various fake slogans for the site. Highlights include the David Letterman-inspired “Home of Muncie’s Largest Canned Ham,” “9 out of 10 doctors agree that JGR is an excellent source of daily fiber,” and my personal favorite, “Formerly Just Gams Retro – all pictures of Betty Grable, all the time.” I really don’t know if anyone even noticed they changed every time you loaded the page.
It was also the sole time JGR had an intro, animated in Flash by my college roommate. Music from the game Interstate ’76.
Looking back, I was much… erm… “sassier” during this time. As Static likes to point out, the 2002-2003 period is where we were wont to end our reviews by just getting tired of writing and giving up. I also clearly hadn’t found my “voice” yet, and needed to learn that not everyone needs to channel Seanbaby (or AVGN). Also, being dismissive did not necessarily make one cool – a super tough lesson for a Xennial. I think I’ve gotten better over the years at balancing entertainment and history, and hope that thorough, honest examinations are more beneficial than something exaggerated for comedy. It’s very easy to trash a game having not even picked up the manual, while it’s annoyingly harder to actually do the research. Also, age and experience have shown me that very, very few games have literally no redeeming features whatsoever.
Though I admit, I still laugh at “Where’s Waldo? Who fuckin’ cares?”
Fun Fact: This version was the only time actual features were found in the “Features” section. I had plans for a few, but only three articles were written. “Face Off” compared two versions of the same game (the Genesis and SNES versions of RoboCop vs Terminator). The “Retro Collection” gave mini-reviews of multiple Star Wars and Friday the 13th-themed games. I would eventually drop the features altogether, feeling they took my time and attention away from real reviews.
Version 2.0 (’03/’04-ish – 2009)
At some point within the next few years, I decided I wasn’t pleased with the look of the site. However, I couldn’t design at all, so I browsed around for free templates. I came across an appropriately Space Invaders themed one, with a Javascript paddle knocking back and forth along the bottom. Fixed width was introduced here and frames were dropped. JGR’s now-defining gray/orange scheme was part of the template’s design. I liked it, so it was adopted. This became the site most of you were probably introduced to.
Inspired by my swanky new site, I wrote and wrote and wrote. Most of the currently-existing reviews come from this fruitful era. It’s also the point that I started to consider actively promoting the site in some way. Promotion was not something I previously was interested in at all, and I remember taking a “if you build it they will come” approach. If I built-up a repository of content, then so much the better if someone eventually stumbled upon it. There would be so much for them to read!
But I eventually took light steps into this arena – joining prominent Abandonware rings and getting listed as an official review source on MobyGames (a story for another day). Through this, I met fellow ruffians Rik and Stoo (A Force For Good), Mr. Creosote (The Good Old Days), and Mu’addib (the lost Abandonware Blog, for which I wrote a few good articles). I also found out that, basically, there were a whole bunch of people doing exactly what I was doing already – and, in many cases, better.
This was also when I decided to include PC game reviews. This honestly caused me a lot of deliberation, because I knew exactly what it would mean – a loss of focus on 8 and 16-bit games, and a further dilution of content. It made more sense to me to focus in one area, review all the games for one system (a reason why Jaguar reviews were added – the library was small, and I thought I could do it) and then “close out” that system before adding the next. I had this sense that a random, slipshod variety of reviews, years, and systems would turn people off from the site.
Ultimately I went with it because I knew it would keep the reviews going. Freeing myself and Static up to ramble about whatever had interested us enough to play at that moment is what made somewhat-weekly reviews possible. It also brought in Ubergeek for a time (bringing us up to three), who produced some great articles for the site. We’re getting close to having more PC reviews than all the other categories combined, but if it keeps the writing flowing, it keeps you coming to the site. It may not even be as “controversial” a decision as I felt/feel like it is.
Fun Fact: JGR moved off of college servers after graduation, where I saw that my paid hosting granted me a free blog. I half-heartedly opened something called “The Grog” (a nod to Monkey Island) and might have mentioned it in a news post or two. I had planned to use it for side stories and comments, but ultimately didn’t do a damn thing with it. I blame my general aversion and distaste for blogs at the time. Though it did inspire the great line: “It’s not called a blog, because ‘blog’ sounds like something you do when you chug a gallon of milk.”
Version 3.0 (never released): HTML Strict
Up until around 2008, JGR’s code had been the Wild fuckin’ West. It was a loose combination of functional code scraps, hacked templates, and me generally not knowing much of what the hell I was doing. I remember the early days being marked by throwing out lines of unfamiliar code and keeping them out if the page still loaded after the change. That was my idea of “tidying up.” JGR up to this point didn’t even have a doctype defined in the header and I’m pretty sure every browser had to run it in Compatibility Mode.
This sloppiness eventually bothered me strictly on principle. I’d heard no complaints, nor did the site seem to have issues running in various browsers, but I felt it was time for a change – and that change should be orderly! I’m going to be and adult and a responsible web person!
My first goal was to throw Space Invaders out of the design. It had served its purpose and I no longer liked the idea of inviting Taito to fire lawyer missiles at me. I wanted to keep the color scheme established by the previous template, as well as the fixed width layout, but make the whole thing look sharper and cleaner (and more reliable on the code side). As I recall, I went back to mining for templates and found a nice, clean one with viciously strict HTML code. I changed the color scheme, got a higher-res version of the logo courtesy of Static, and started the process of converting every page to the new format.
There were about three hundred pages. I did not consider the task I had signed myself up for.
Each page’s review text would get copied over to a template page by hand, paragraph by paragraph, HTML tagged/coded by hand, and the final page run through an online code checker to validate. It was laborious as all hell. At the same time, I was playing fewer “retro” games, writing less reviews, and generally getting tired of the whole thing.
Fun Fact: I had long considered building the site around the concept of a computer or game console. The page would be like the bezel of a monitor or television, the font would be retro-appropriate, and the navigation would be similarly authentic. I, of course, did not possess the skills to even remotely pull this off and dropped it in favor of something more standard.
Site Closes (Dec, 2009)
So what “killed” JGR? I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to answer that question. I really feel like I’m in a different place than I was when I made the decision, making it a little hard to retroactively understand and then put into words. For starters, the issue with too many system categories definitely never went away – I was always disappointed with letting some reviews (NES, Genesis, SNES) languish while focusing “too much” on others. But forcing reviews for those systems became a chore, which I felt produced bad reviews.
I was definitely disappointed with the lack of steady content. Ubergeek and Static had moved on, while I remember feeling like a “bad host” for letting weeks or months go by without updates. I mean, we don’t and never have hosted ads or see a cent of revenue per visitor. We’ve never had visitor targets to hit or need for analytics. But it was this sense of a commitment to the readers I knew were showing up – if I was going to have this site running, then it was my responsibility to provide content. Trying to balance work with personal life, and this unpaid hobby on top of that, was getting to be a bit much.
Finally, and one of the biggest reasons, I wasn’t playing that many retro games anymore. The achievements system on the Xbox 360 was inspiring me to squeeze more value of out each game than I ever had before – playing on the hardest difficulty, finding all the collectables; all that kind of Tony Hawk “unlockables” bullshit that I never bothered with in the past. Somehow, with a little virtual shelf showing off what I had done, I felt like I was walking away with something – anything – that made the effort worthwhile. This meant more time with modern games and less time with retro titles. Hadn’t played an adventure game in years. Hadn’t booted up an emulator in about as long. I just wasn’t as passionate about the classics as I used to be.
So, it seemed like a good time to call it off. If I couldn’t keep up, I felt like I owed it to the readers to make a decision. I didn’t feel great about it, but it felt like the right thing to do. I spent the next few months trying to negotiate a new home for the reviews (which, luckily, didn’t pan out). Wrote a few things for a friend’s site, but lost interest when his focus shifted drastically to streaming “Let’s Play”s. Reviewed a few MMOs on MobyGames, which are still there, as well as one or two titles on A Force For Good. But mostly, I languished and came to realize that not directly running a site in fact did not make things easier or “better” after all.
Fun Fact: I tried my hand at writing more modern reviews during this period, and confirmed that I absolutely hate it. I think it’s a nagging sense that everyone has an opinion on modern games, so even trying is a waste of everyone’s time.
Version 4.0 (May, 2011 – Feb, 2021): Enter WordPress
Static had long suggested that I should port the site to WordPress, but I wouldn’t hear it. Part of it was because I was so invested in knocking together my own clean code. Another, much larger part was my aversion to anything related to blogs. I did not want the site called, thought of, or associated with a “blog” because blogs seemed unprofessional. Despite the fact that the label surely fits (mostly run by one person, no financial backing, no editors, very loose deadlines with no oversight), I believed anything I wrote would be outright dismissed if it was on “a blog.”
Bear in mind, I also thought that blogs were basically LiveJournal – like randos talking about recipes, or moms writing daily updates about their kids – so I mostly had no idea what I was talking about.
WordPress was also dangerous, because it meant going back to the laborious work that helped burn me out in the first place. I was a little worried that the process alone would squash any lingering desires to start the site back up. However, I finally did some initial investigation into the software and liked what I was seeing. I was most impressed with the system’s flexibility and the ability to literally “drop in” new functionality without having to write a lick of code.
I laid out many of the reasons for the change in this post, and stand by them today. I know I’m not going to be learning high-level coding or paying for a developer to knock out something custom, so the “hands-off” functionality of WP is ideal. Adding professional quality features is a widget search away. Sorting reviews is better and easier than it ever has been. There’s a comments section now! A version of the site automatically optimized for iOS/Android! And I’m obviously quite fond of not having to hand-edit HTML files for every new review.
Uncle Dave joined as a reviewer May 11, 2013. His first review – and the addition of an N64 section – went up on the 17th. He’s brought many more reviews to the site, become a voice for sports games that’s better than my halfhearted interest, plus added invaluable knowledge of cricket and wrestling. It’s a better site thanks to his work!
Fun Fact: JGR was “closed,” as in no more new reviews, but never taken down. Once I saw that WordPress was going to work out, I quietly changed the existing front page to tease the changeover. The fraction is roughly how far along I was in porting the reviews over.
Version 5.0 (Feb, 2021 – current)
It’s now 2023. JGR coasted for ten years on WordPress, which is pretty stunning when looking back. My first thought is, that’s impressive. My second is shame that there should be so many more reviews to show for that time. But, coming to terms with not having weekly or daily output has been what kept the site from a second closure.
A lot happened in those ten years. I got married in 2016, and (happily!) checked out of the site for a few years. I came back as the stability of a good married life settled in, and Chinese handhelds let me run emulators in bed at night. Uncle Dave absolutely kept the site going during that time, for which I thank him endlessly. He is now distracted by his own lady-friend, so the cycle begins anew. 😀
Meanwhile, the underlying code stalled. The site was hacked with SQL injections at least five times. Now that we’re off it, I can admit we stayed on PHP 5 for a length of time that would make security professionals barf. I was dimly aware that things needed to be improved, but also stuck in a 5-year contract with my webhost, who wouldn’t roll over my pre-paid years to a plan supporting PHP 7. Reverting the site once a year seemed okay compared to wasting hundreds of dollars.
Then there was a spot of pandemic and I had lots of time to look into web security and such (as well as do slightly mad deep dives into Wizardry and Phantasy Star Online). My hosting contract was coming due, I knew a long time ago that I was ready to jump to a new host, and the stars aligned in such a way that it was a great time to give JGR some much-needed upkeep.
PHP was upgraded. SSL was now implemented – even though there’s no private data captured or stored here, Google apparently likes an HTTPS. Visitors can now rate games alongside the review. Mobile versions of the site had been added through the WPtouch plugin, but are now native. Navigation options were expanded greatly. And a whole lot of older reviews had to be touched up (usually with new, higher-resolution screenshots) to match current standards.
And so, here we are today. It’s been a long journey, and will no doubt continue to be. I’m coming to terms with the realization that I won’t be reviewing every game ever made after all, but the process of discovery is still enjoyable, and often still fascinating. I hope that level of curiosity makes it into the reviews. I don’t know if what I’m doing really will continue to survive and be useful to future generations, but I do treat it as such, and the moment that commitment dies is the moment JGR really will shut down.
In closing, as always, thanks for reading! I hope you get something valuable out of our musings, and hope we’ll continue to deliver on down the line!
Feel free to throw some thoughts down about all this here.