Can things/people stop dying in 2016? We're a little over a month in and it feels like we've had half a years worth of deaths. Did they ever say why they are shutting down?
No staff to run it - they were all made redundant yesterday. Defy Media sacked a load of senior staff when they bought the company nearly two years ago, anyway. http://kotaku.com/video-game-website-gametrailers-closes-after-13-years-1757939279
I guess the site has been pretty obsolete for several years, but I'll always remember going there to watch AVGN as well as trailers in new-fangled HD that brought my cheap crappy laptop to its knees.
Everyone is acting shocked by this but really who visited the site for gaming videos? That's right barely anyone, a better media came along and also people only want to make videos to be paid at some point.
I used to be a moderator of their Game Development section on the forum. Stopped going there about five years ago, due to their website being so slow to navigate and no one seemed to be very active in the GD forum at that point.
To be honest, I forgot they existed. Last I visited the site was 6-7 years ago. Sheesh, everyone and everything is dying out this year. :/
Seriously, on a list of people and things that should die in 2016, none of the people or things that have died were there. Fox News should die, but noooooo
I used to watch a lot of GT/ScrewAttack videos until they started jamming the site with ads (late 00s?) MTV Networks sold GameTrailers (along with AddictingGames and Shockwave) to Defy Media in 2014, so it was basically operating as a shell of it's former self for 2 years or so. One is a millennial advertising thinktank, the other is Viacom. No tears were had.
Wait, does this eliminate ScrewAttack as well? I would be considerably more bummed if that's the case.
They made Ghostbusters on the C64, one of my favorite games ever. Not really into modern consoles, so I don't know of their recent transgressions, but I will always remember them fondly for that. I mean the game actually would say "Ghostbusters, hahahahaha" (or something like that.) Super cool at the time. They also made a Transformers game for C64 that I couldn't figure out, probably was too young. River Raid was good, too, but I wasn't a Pitfall fan...... Come to think of it, I don't know why they're stuck in my psyche. I don't remember them having developed any great games after the C64 era, mostly just publishing games. (Again, not sure about modern era.) This is like when I revisit old cartoons and think, wow, these really weren't good at all. It's all your fault, MBMM.
Activision were absolutely instrumental in the industry as the first independent developer, not to mention giving programmers credit (something Atari were notorious for not doing). They started to go downhill by the time Mediagenic was formed, then went on a studio-swallowing exercise and were a shadow of the former company by the time they became Activision Blizzard. MechWarrior 2. Ghostbusters 2. They were publishing by then and, really, that was it. Their publishing catalogue has been pretty impressive. The past 5 years they've been in let's see how much COD and Skylanders shite we can churn out mode, though. Long before that, stuff like Pimp My Ride showed me they really don't give a damn about quality standards.
The sad thing is they had an incredible library of videos that werent archived elsewhere, which is now lost. Videos had already been disappearing, but now...
No, they merged with RoosterTeeth last year. I think one of their sites stopped doing videos though, I'm not sure which. Yeah, River Raid is probably my favorite 2600 game, but that was 30 years ago, they're as much like original Activision as EA is about Electronic Artists. Though, in an end around way you could say they were a cause of the crash of 83, since they set a legal precedent for third party development, which allowed damn near anyone to make a 2600 game. I think moreso than anyone Activision is on the "ride a hot horse until it dies" train of thought. They churned out yearly or less games for a bunch of things before they stopped being profitable and got put out on the shelf (extreme sports, Guitar Hero, now COD/Skylanders).
