In 2006 Edge asked who wrote the walkthroughs everyone read. “Belittled, seldom acknowledged, but frequently consulted, FAQs are the closest thing gaming has to a hidden underworld,” it said: “a strange monochrome inversion of the colourful lands on the television screen, where expensive titles are reduced to lists and bugs and ASCII maps.” GameFAQs was the biggest home of that underworld. It began in 1995 as the Video Game FAQ Archive, run by Jeff Veasey under the name CJayC, with 100 articles. By the time of Edge’s feature it held material on more than 50,000 games, “all of them written by devoted gamers for little or no monetary reward”.
The guides were plain text files, decorated with ASCII-art headers and maps drawn in keyboard characters. Anyone could send one in, and some of the people who did became well known for it.
Fast facts
- Began: 1995, as the Video Game FAQ Archive; later renamed GameFAQs.
- Founder: Jeff Veasey, known on the site as CJayC.
- Content: guides, walkthroughs, maps and cheat lists written by players, as plain text.
- Scale: 100 articles at the start; information on more than 50,000 games by 2006.
- Owners: CNET Networks from May 2003. Fandom since October 2022.
A place magazines sent you
Within three years of its start, magazines were pointing their readers at the site. PC Games, reviewing Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in June 1998, found a fatal bug just before the end, and told readers who could not wait for the publisher’s patch that “the folks at www.gamefaqs.com devised some workarounds”. Computer and Video Games listed it among its recommended websites that December: “Loads of walkthroughs for the latest and classic games”. By 2001 PC Gamer’s help pages were simply printing the addresses of GameFAQs text files for whole games.
The site was more than a library. In 2004 Retro Gamer reported a knockout poll in which GameFAQs visitors voted on 64 classic games, two at a time, and chose Final Fantasy VII as the best game ever made. The magazine noted that GameFAQs was “an American based site and it shows”: almost all the entries were console games, most of them for Nintendo machines. Edge counted the days popular guides had spent in the site’s top 50: eight years for Final Fantasy VII, almost seven for Ocarina of Time.
Who wrote them, and why
Edge’s feature named the writers. Alex Eagleson, “a university student in his 20s”, had written 53 walkthroughs, “ranging from RPGs like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion to platformers such as New Super Mario Bros”. He enjoyed “helping frustrated gamers, and exposing your work to such a wide audience”. Dan Engel had made more than 360 walkthroughs and maps. He started after looking for tips on the Super Nintendo game Equinox and finding none, and he chose games nobody had covered: “I find it counter-productive to write for Final Fantasy VII, when it already has 12 other monstrous and complete guides.” Writing them, he said, had made him “the most famous Daniel Engel on Google”.
Andrew Schultz wrote only about older games and saw himself as a kind of curator:
Technology may be obsolete, but the good games that ran on obsolete technology never will be. I enjoy being able to write for a game and know I’m the first person to save that memory in detail.
The writers described real work. Eagleson said a single guide could take months, and Brian Sulpher said writing them changed how he played: “I started to analyse everything about a game, figuring out how to do every little thing.” Sites like GameFAQs ran “bounty boards”, lists of games that still needed guides, with rewards attached. The writers also watched for theft, of each other’s guides and by magazines. Eagleson said magazines had reprinted guides in full, his among them.
Did it kill the paid help?
The free guides arrived while players were still paying for help. In Britain hint lines charged by the minute, and Konami’s 1998 advertising printed a 900 number and a web address side by side. Printed strategy guides were expected to suffer. In 2004 Edge asked why anyone would pay £10 for a guide, “a quarter (but often more) of the RRP of the actual game”, “when CJayC’s GameFAQs site can offer a bare-bones equivalent for free”. BradyGames’ editor-in-chief, Leigh Davis, answered: “People have been asking the same question for ten years. And you know what? We’re selling more strategy guides now than we ever have.” Two years later Edge found sales of guides still “improving year on year”.
Nor did the number of guides measure how hard a game was, in one designer’s view. Asked whether the FAQs written for his games meant he had got the design wrong, Charles Cecil laughed: “It would be very difficult to justify statistically the number of walkthroughs being in some way proportional to the difficulty of the game.”
Later history
CNET Networks bought “intellectual property and certain other assets of GameFAQs.com, Inc” on 6 May 2003. The site passed with CNET’s other properties to later owners, and in October 2022 Fandom bought it from Red Ventures, with GameSpot, Metacritic and others.
Sources
- Edge issue 169, December 2006, pp. 60-65: “A Hinter’s Tale”, on FAQ writers. The site’s origin and scale, Alex Eagleson, Dan Engel, Andrew Schultz and Brian Sulpher, bounty boards, plagiarism, the top-50 counts, Charles Cecil, and guide sales.
- Edge issue 135, April 2004: feature on strategy-guide publishing, with Leigh Davis of BradyGames on GameFAQs and guide sales.
- PC Games (US) vol. 5 no. 5, June 1998: Don St. John’s review of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.
- Computer and Video Games issue 205, December 1998: recommended websites.
- PC Gamer (UK) issues 103 and 104, December 2001 and Christmas 2001: help pages giving GameFAQs walkthrough addresses.
- Retro Gamer issue 5, 2004: news of the GameFAQs best-game poll.
- CNET Networks, Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2003, filed 5 August 2003: the acquisition on 6 May 2003. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001015577/000101557703000047/q203.htm
- Fandom, press release, 3 October 2022 (web, secondary): the purchase of GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs and others from Red Ventures. https://about.fandom.com/news/fandom-acquires-leading-entertainment-gaming-brands-including-gamespot-tv-guide-and-metacritic
- Wikipedia, “GameFAQs” (web, secondary): the start date, 5 November 1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameFAQs
- Gamers’ Republic issue 3, August 1998: Konami hint line advertisement, as cited in the Hint Lines entry.