It's not like now, where everybody has an Xbox and plays online. It was a very small collection of hardcore nerds. Back then, the gaming community was pretty different. Kevin "Fragmaster" Bowen, longtime SA administrator and moderator: Rich and I met back in 1998 or so, at least in real life. I got paid $24,000 a year to write about Quake 2. Around '98, GameSpy said, "Do you want to run PlanetQuake?" So I said, "Yeah, OK," and moved to Orange County. In my free time I would play a lot of Quake 2 and write about Quake 2. Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka, founder of Something Awful ( I dropped out of school my junior year because I hated engineering and took a job being a systems administrator for the Vanderbilt Vision and Research Center. This is the story of Something Awful, as told by the people who made it what it was. It was also the worst: insular, exclusionary and, at times, vicious. It was the best of its day: independent, original, and fiercely creative. Experienced travelers in the internet's darker corners. Kyanka's dark, esoteric humor proved popular among a certain set-typically young, typically male, often though not always left-leaning. He was, from the start, a prophet of doom. What set Kyanka's site apart was its cynicism-about everything, but particularly about the role the internet would play in a changing society. It was a goulash of parodies of Silicon Valley groupthink and internet dumpster diving. At first, Something Awful was what we would think of as a blog, though that term wouldn't enter common parlance for a while, yet.
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