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GameFAQs is a popular website about video games that has helped gamers through "FAQs" and "walkthroughs" for games since November 1995. It was started and is maintained by Jeff "CJayC" Veasey. It has the second largest database of video games on the Internet [1], second only to IGN. The systems and games range from the 8-bit Atari days to the Next-Gen consoles of today. The site supplies FAQs, guides, images, codes, game saves, reviews, and game data free of charge to anyone who visits the site. Registration opens the extremely active message board community and the ability to contribute.

GameFAQs culture

GameFAQs is noteworthy for its active message board community. Below are minor descriptions of some its more famous boards:

(Note: Karma is a representation of a user's status. One, and only one, karma can be gained per day if the user logs in.)

Most well-known

  • Another hi :) Place (AP) is a GameFAQs Social Board created when LUE's user level requirement went up to 31. AP is definitely not a part of LUE anymore, and has somewhat of a tightly-knit community. There are many social topics around and is known by its inhabitants as "Your GameFAQs home for polygamy and wit." Some of AP's residents have made their first names known to the board and ask to be addressed by them. AP also has it's own, semi-official website containing a set of guidelines, quotes, and a member list, or APe list.
  • Current Events (CE) is the oldest social board on GameFAQs. It is usually the second most popular social board on GameFAQs.
  • Life, the Universe, and Everything (LUE) is the most popular GameFAQs Social Board with usually well over 50,000 posts. The name was derived from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. It was originally created to shunt the more annoying users off of RI. LUE has been very controversial in GameFAQs history, and is often viewed as one of the worst boards on the site. Discussion today is usually sex-related and has been for years. LUE is also home to many fads, including the infamous LUEshi (an ASCII image of Mario riding Yoshi created by the user Patamon), and the phrase "y helo thar", which was said on a recent live broadcast of Conan O'Brien.
    • Though the board used to be open to all members with 30 Karma, it was raised to 75 Karma following the "Scum Wars" around November 2002 (see [2]). A 150 Karma requirement was implemented after the "RevoLUEtion" on May 7th, 2003 [3], and soon after the board was removed from all board listings. To get to it, one has to manually type in the URL.
    • On November 15 2003, any future growth potential LUE had was shut down. Following a massive Livejournal invasion by LUE, CJayC "sterilized" LUE by forbidding any user with a user ID greater than 888113 from ever reaching LUE. The last person to ever get into LUE, Lunarhawk99, was hailed as "The One" and made 500-post topics where ever he posted. Soon after, from January 4th to January 15th, CJayC ran a sign-up for LUE; people that haven't signed up aren't allowed to visit the board. This was done to prevent any new members from visiting and to permanently remove banned users. In exchange, LUE was granted slightly more leeway when it comes to controversial topics. (CJayC's announcement)
  • Random Insanity (RI) was originally created to shunt the more annoying users off of CE. It quickly became host to text-based roleplaying and "social topics" where people could come in and talk about nothing in particular. One of the most popular of these is Pikadeth's Playhouse, which spawned many imitators. Originally RI was slightly hostile towards CE (the origin of "board invasion" being a ToS violation), with the RICE wars being remembered by the "old RIers". RI also has a history of being competitive with LUE; in the early days, users would perform "raids" on LUE in the PM hours. Before the RI Refugee Crisis [4] it usually had twice the number of posts on CE and LUE combined. However, after the incident most of them migrated to LUE.
    • RI had many dramas and traditions of its own, including roleplaying, which started on the board and later moved to RP/FF. Gaw's Laws, a set of rules for roleplaying popularly used at the site, originated at RI. Today, roleplaying is somewhat of a niche, with social topics and one-liners dominating instead. RI has often had problems accepting new users, with resistance coming from "veterans" -- users who, while not necessarily there for very long, tried to establish standards on the "randomly insane" board. One event that still resonates with even the newest users is Gamequeen incident. [5]

Less Well-Known

  • The Couch, The Hallway, The Porch, and The Forum are "forum" message boards for general chitchat, with The Couch being the largest among them.
  • Game Design and Programming is a board where people can discuss programming concepts and code. The veterans at this board usually look down on "Game Makers," focusing instead on making the games using OpenGL. There are even a couple of professional video game programmers who hang out at this board.
  • Message Board Help is the unofficial complaint forum of the boards. If a user feels something is wrong with the moderation system or staff, or possibly a board error, it is usually reported here. It is also used to ask questions about board features. This board was named Questions and Suggestions until the Karma system was introduced. After that, all suggestions and petitions have gone to Site Suggestions.
  • Poll of the Day (PotD) is another social board, similar to LUE, although the topics there are not usually as bad. PotD has nothing particular in common with the Poll of the Day on the main page, and is usually used to discuss women, love, etc.
  • Review Contributors is the board for all the review writers to talk about common interests. This board has been split to better categorize the discussions on it. It is now composed out of three boards: General, Help and Critiques and Social.
  • Special Secret Boards are hard to find because you have to type their board number (found in parentheses) manually in the address bar. The boards are: Spatula (622), Board 250 (250), Brilliant (-1), Spork (542), Eggbeater (486), Semprini (709), Jenny (8675309), Pie (314159265), Rnd() (123456789), Nine (9), Lame (20040401), Toaster Oven (909090909), and Angela (8535937). In all of these boards you can usually find topics that are used for karma raising by many users, even though such topics are no longer necessary. Toaster Oven in particular had been rumored to exist for years, and was finally created by CJayC along with Rnd(), Nine, and Lame as the April Fool's Joke for 2004.
  • Site Suggestions is the official petitioning board, though very few ever pass. Usually passed petitions are a new special interest or social board, though very occasionally a new feature might be added.
  • Spring Contest 2004 was created for the start of a new contest that is comparing what game is the so called "Best. Game. Ever.". The contest itself is quite similar to the Summer Contest in that both are popularity contests. The two boards usually share similar characteristics and similar topics.
  • Summer Contest is the board where people talk about the Summer Character Contest, a huge event at GameFAQs. This board has evolved since 2002 for the most part independently from the other boards mentioned. One well-known event on these boards has happened 2 years in a row, directly after Crono's loss to Mario in both tournaments, each by around 100 votes. Mass account suicides, flaming/trolling, and even accusations of CJayC cheating ensued for days after both times. This board is also known for the constant flame wars between certain groups of users, and the word ""fanboy" is horribly overused.
  • 810-819 Boards were created a few days after April Fool's Day. Originally, CJayC posted on the Icon board (1000 karma requirement) on April Fools Day about making private boards for the first few icons that signed up. Many thought it an April Fool's joke until these boards were actually created. The few people that received these boards also are allowed to name them. So far, the ones that have been named are: 816 (#showarr), 818 (KGB), and 819 (CE Reloaded). In order to access these boards, the founders must send an invite.
  • Secret Boards are game boards where off-topic posting is allowed. This is generally because the systems the games belong to have become so antiquated and obsolete that very little genuine discussion would otherwise take place on them. Many GameFAQers have adopted some of these boards for their own use. The systems whose game boards are secret boards are found in the KSOT FAQ

GameFAQs history

Note: this is NOT a section for history of the boards themselves. This is for an official site history. All others should be linked to below.

GameFAQs was started on 5 November 1995 by Jeff Veasey. At that time it was called the "Video Game FAQ Archive". It was hosted by AOL and was a clone/spin-off of a popular FTP FAQ Archive.

By December 1996, the site was still young, which the appearance and content showed. The site contained less than 1000 FAQs and guides, combined over all systems. The site also focused on the 7 popular systems of the time - arcade games, the Sony Playstation , the Sega Saturn, the Nintendo 64, the 3DO, the Sega Genesis, and the Super Nintendo. Other systems were also listed. The site was very basic and was not updated on a regular basis.

By early 1997, GameFAQs had a new look. In fact, it had two different looks. One was customized for Web browsers that supported frames and the other was made specifically for browsers with no support for frames. The color scheme used white and black and blue. The content, however, was beginning to grow. By April, the site had 1301 files and codes for over 800 games. New features were introduced that would shape GameFAQs - features such as user requests for information, a search engine, recognition for contributors, and others.

By late 1997, GameFAQs was beginning to take shape. It moved out of AOL servers by this time and was partnered with Imagine Games Network (IGN). Jeff Veasey was hard at work on GameFAQs now. It is assumed that this is when GameFAQs became Veasey's full-time job. Until this time, he had been working in either the radio field (unconfirmed report) or with computer programming/web programming (radio interview). GameFAQs made it through two years and a new aspect of the site began - contests. There were only two winners of the GameFAQs Second Birthday Contest out of 1000 entries, but it was a start.

Throughout 1998, GameFAQs had the same idea. Veasey continued to work on the site and put new FAQs and codes up. In late 1998, the site got another overhaul. Still under IGN, GameFAQs added links to other IGN sites. The content of the site wasn't changed much, but Veasey always kept the users informed of what was going on. There were frequent updates to the site, even if they weren't contribution updates.

In late 1999, GameFAQs had another overhaul. The sidebar and tables on the homepage that show top games were added. The color scheme was also changed to blue and white, but it wasn't exactly the same. GameFAQs was still under the flag of IGN.

In November 1999, things happened quickly. On the 5th, a Quick Search box was added to all pages. The site also celebrated its fourth birthday. On the seventh, the message boards opened as a Beta and a Poll of the Day would be put up at the end of that week. Now, the site begins to change from a FAQ archive to one of the best gaming help sites on the internet.

Things on GameFAQs slowed down over the next few months and years. The GameFAQs chat went Beta, but didn't last long due to administrative issues - it was simply too hard to control.

2001 was the next year of changes for GameFAQs. The site left IGN. To make money, a banner was placed on the site that was sold to non-profit organizations. This was changed by May of 2001, when CNET Networks began affiliating themselves with GameFAQs. Also in May 2001, the Chat feature was completely shut down.

In September of 2002, another change was made to GameFAQs, because of advertising changes at CNET. The ad was moved from the top of the page (horizontally) to a vertical position in the sidebar. This also led the way to navigation of systems at the top of the screen. Changes were also made to links on the side, minimizing them and placing more links in "index" pages in subsections.

Recently, around May 2004, GameFAQs underwent the biggest visual change yet. It partially merged its game boards with those of GameSpot, and radically changed the graphics. The site's webpages have table-less layouts that are powered by CSS. It also converted into a php-based board.

Today, GameFAQs is fully owned by CNET Networks. Jeff "CJayC" Veasey is responsible for working on the main site - e-mails, codes, FAQs, reviews, saves, game data, coding, and updating the homepage. CNET has hired Bethany Massimilla to administrate the GameFAQs message boards and lead the moderators. CNET also supplied new (and faster) servers for the entire site. Although the changeover between the site being run by one man to the site being owned by a company and split into two sections was rough (technical errors, downtime, lost e-mails, and other problems), things have gone for the best, although some people disagree.

GameFAQs Spinoffs

Many people have created their own site based upon the GameFAQs look and feel. These are commonly referred to as GameFAQs spinoffs.

The first spinoff was called GameFAQs Hell, created by Chuck "NeoGenesis" Sakoda in 2002. His first attempt at cloning the boards were performed in ASP and MS Access database services. After giving up on that, he made a new version in PHP and MySQL. He released the source code under the GNU General Public License. The only copies of the original source known to still exist are versions 0.5.3 and 0.8 (the last official version of GameFAQs Hell), 0.6 and 0.7 were released, but those are assummed to not exist on anyone's hard drive anymore. It has been confirmed by CJayC that he had a link to GameFAQs Hell in the board help section for promotion of the source.

Since the GameFAQs Hell time, there have been dozens of other spinoffs opened up, and more sources appeared. A few of the most famous ones are listed:

  • GameFAQs Hell-based
    • GameFAQs Hell - GameFAQs Hell was the first spinoff, the one that started it all.
    • Mediarchive - Mediarchive was one of the most featureful and popular spinoffs of all time. It contained a contribution system similar to GameFAQs'. The source code was leaked toward the end of its days. The creator, Jay, claims that he would have released it two days later if it weren't leaked by Counteray, the guy who paid for and hosted Mediarchive. The leak of Mediarchive led to many more spinoffs popping up and others adding more features and fixes to MA code
    • Outboards - The oldest spinoff still in existence, started in August 2002. It uses a heavily modified version of Mediarchive, by Jay and outbreakorn. Some people say this is the best spinoff, some say it's the worst.
    • whiteFyre - whiteFyre is the second oldest spinoff in existence, started in September 2002. It is owned by ultimategamer00. The source code was leaked in August 2003 by a group of hackers (the day, 8/8/03, has been dubbed "wF2" by wF's detractors). In February 2004, the owner officially released a newer version of the source code. He claims that the new one is a complete re-write, however, since the old had several similarities with GameFAQs Hell, and the current database structure is still much like GameFAQs Hell, most people hold the idea that no re-write actually occurred.
    • Special Ops - The owner of Special Ops, Anthony "Ant P" Parsons, started hacking at GameFAQs Hell to make it more GameFAQs-like and remove severe exploits and bugs in the original GameFAQs Hell. It contains an advanced CSS theming scheme, and work is underway to completely rid the HTML output of any tables.
  • Original Source - This is a list of spinoffs not based off of GameFAQs Hell (most are closed-source, thus deritives of them are few, if any)
    • Turkeybot - The owner of Turkeybot, Tonglebeak, wanted to make the best spinoff there ever was, with more features and better speed. It contains the most customizable CSS sheet, account security, many other great features, and claims to never have been hacked.
    • GameFAQs Clone X - The first and only working spinoff written in ASP. It is the closest to a true GameFAQs spinoff there is. The original set of boards were hacked because the owner left the database path in the released source code, and the passwords were unencrypted. The source is availible for download. Old Skool GameFAQs - Really the only spinoff that has edited the GFCX code. Ricapar9x, the owner, has added themes, message quotes, a homepage, bug fixes, etc.
    • Flying Turkey - A spinoff that is very user-friendly. It has a lot of options that normal users can do and even more through the shop and higher levels. Flying Turkey is a spinoff with an origin of The Couch made by Magus.
    • Archetype Zero - A very feature-rich spinoff. Contains several features from Special Ops, whiteFyre, and some unique to Archetype Zero. Started in January 2004.
    • Metaboards - A source code made by U.X.O (also known as Fish and radfox). The purpose was to create a new and "properly coded" version of GameFAQs Hell. It was very active in development for the first three months, however it hasn't had anything since February 2004, and has been considered abandoned. All versions of the source have been preserved.
    • LUElinks - A private board created by Llamaguy, only for members of LUE. The interface is similar to that of GameFAQs, but several features are added, most notably the abilities to vote on links and receive tokens for adding good links. There is a running joke among LUElinkers that whenever someone asks for the url, they all claim that the site does not exist.
    • LUE2 - First GameFAQs spinoff to use the new GameFAQs layout. It was originally created in 2003 and used Mediarchive source, but got shut down in three days. Later it opened again with the name 'LUE@OldDh', changed to 'LUE2.5', still using the Mediarchive source code, and was shut down again in about two months. It reopened again in August 2004 with new original source code and with the original user database from 2003.
    • Titan Boards
    • Oracle Gaming - Owned by Inty AKA Intanos VI

Anthony Parsons keeps an archive of free sources for download. It is also available at Onion's page.

There is a page that was a project to keep a record of all spinoffs created and formed. This page was last updated on April 2004, and is slightly out of date since some boards (like gg's) have been closed. This list is here: [6].

The history of spinoffs is extremely interesting. A big spinoff, Darkside Legion, was a banned word ("darksidelegion") at GameFAQs after receiving a notorious reputation, because its members were said to contact unsuspecting people and persuade them to give his or her password away. Many Mediarchive-based spinoffs have been hacked by spinoff coders. There has been long-standing tension betweeen Outboards and whiteFyre, the two longest-running spinoffs. Many small spinoffs have been hacked several times, as well as whiteFyre (twice, on 8/8/03 and 8/8/04). The only known sources without major security holes are few and far between. A list of them are AT0 [leaked], Special Ops, and Turkeybot.

See also

Official sites

Unofficial sites

GameFAQs board histories

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