GamingFringe Mission Statement (hard launch at last!)

Today GamingFringe hard launches beyond the visibility of eight or nine people. It’s been a long road, and rest assured: if our updates before today look sporadic, it’s because we spent those months devoting our attention to setting up the technical side of this website and making countless decisions about our principles and direction. With those issues finally ironed out, it’s time we get rolling in earnest and turn our focus toward creating real, independent, and unique content. For all intents and purposes, we’ve arrived only just today.

So what can you expect to see? What are we about? And what in the world compels us to say we’re on the gaming fringe? Here are some examples to help you know if this is your place.

We’ll write about Fire Emblem and not Mario; we’ll write about Castlevania and not Metal Gear; we’ll write about Mega Man and not Resident Evil; we’ll write about Dragon Quest and not Final Fantasy, and we probably wouldn’t write about Dragon Quest either if we were a site intended for Japan. You see, if a game has a multimillion-dollar advertising budget in an English-speaking region then we’re probably not bothering, because you can go everywhere else for blockbusters. We’d rather promote good games that barely scrape the radar of their own creators and publishers. Someone has to.

Likewise we’ll promote features and services whose creators and publishers won’t. Downloadable games are undersold, underhyped, and even under-released by today’s console manufacturers. Pokemon for the masses may have a multimillion-dollar advertising budget, but competitive number-crunching Pokemon? Not so much.

If someone brings up shooters, we think of Star Soldier and Fantasy Zone, not Call of Duty and Halo. We only mention this because if you just asked your monitor what Star Soldier and Fantasy Zone are, then great – we want to draw attention toward series the average gamer has never heard of.

What gets less love elsewhere has our spotlight. Portable more than non-portable, downloadable more than retail, soundtracks more than graphics, classic and obscure more than new and hyped. We’ll cover games by independent developers who published and promoted their own games through PC releases and homebrew on other systems, without looking down on their lack of brand recognition (nor giving them free brownie points), and we’ll even cover free Flash games.

Most importantly, and in summary, we’ll write about what we like. We owe it to you, and to the game industry which has given us so much, to write without fluff or filler; we’ll write about games if and only if they motivate us to write about them, and whenever they motivate us to write about them – even if that’s sixteen years after they were first released. If we admire or can’t stand something about a game, then maybe you will too.

We hope you’ll stick with us both on our main page and in our forums, and we also hope our appreciation, deep respect, and optimism toward the games we love will shine through with every word.