Hey there, and thanks for joining our birthday party – we are officially wrapping up the first full year of The Slowdown today. It’s all in the books, baby, and it’s been great! (It’s also the time for another Wordle, to capture the Zeitgeist… by the way, does anyone know of fun alternatives to Wordle for that?)
Admittedly, the date – 4th of February – is revisionist history: Like you might have noticed earlier, our archives actually extend back to August of 2008. It’s the domain, slowdown.vg, that was registered on this particular day.
I think the date is as good a birthday as any because it marked, for us, a distinct change, akin to Woolf’s 1910, where nothing effectively changed, but we now had a marker, a calling card, a signature – something to go by. In the beginning, after all, we had few goals beyond simply publishing to and for the whole wide web instead of just mumbling, redundantly and repetitively, to each other like we had, for years before.
Another factor that relates to the date is the heavy-handed naming process and selection for the blog. Our love for puns meant we had landed on “Slowdown” very early on, but ultimately burnt a considerable amount of brain cells working out the appropriate type of domain. Once I finally landed on the the Virgin Islands top-level domain, we all thought we had found what we were looking for.
In retrospect, I did not foresee the word “slowdown” eluding as many writers as it does; I’ve seen countless “SlowDown”s and “Slow Down”s. No harm done, guys, you’ll get it right the next time! Naming conventions aside, the blog is the end result of trying to make use of what wasn’t useful before, to be more constructive. Having niche interests and a strong ethos, a clear-cut sense of what we want to do, has helped us all stay really motivated. Whether these goals have been met, of course, is up to our past and current readers to decide.
In that respect, I would like to give a huge hand and a shout-out to all the developers, all the indies especially, who have all taken what arguably was a gamble and chosen to work with us three.
Here’s to a good second year! I look forward to making even more friends (@martynzachary, tweet a bro up!), learning more, and above all, keep blogging for, err, those who… spend more time thinking about gaming than gaming!
Nabeel
We hit the ground running with The Slowdown. We came out of nowhere, with hardly any functionality or presentation to the site, and just kept going. It was like there was a purpose to the process, even if it wasn’t apparent from the beginning. And that’s because with the site we have always stuck to our original proposition of writing about what we enjoy. Anticipation of new titles, discussion of current issues, analysis of games. The Slowdown grew from the friendship of three gaming enthusiasts, and our mutual desire to have a place to house our constant ramblings.
After a year of iteration and improvement, I think we have settled into a comfortable groove of writing in balance with our busy real lives. I know that I have lots of ideas for the site and posts I want to write, and I’m excited to see how The Slowdown evolves over the next year. I would like to thank the developers and journalists out there who have helped us in our fledgling year and let us participate in this exciting discourse that is games blogging.