Chalgyr's Game Room Reaches 15 Years

Celebrating 15 years of our team celebrating gaming with you!

It’s hard to believe I’m writing that above statement fifteen years to the day after I put this post out into the world:

Let’s get this first post out of the way, shall we?

Inspiring stuff, right? I mean, probably not in reality. It was just my effort to get a Blogger (now Blogspot) blog post written before I lost interest (or more likely, lost my nerve to 'put myself out there'). Now, normally we don't post Sunday content, but hey - the date landed where it landed.

November 10^th, 2009 is when I planted that particular flag in the digital world to… well, I’d like to say great fanfare. However, seriously I think my wife was the only one who saw that post at the time. Maybe her aunt. Probably my dad. Tree falling in a forest when no one is there to see it kind of stuff, right?

Then came my first real post – a review for Soulcalibur IVon PlayStation 3.

Again, it was just me writing for an audience of basically me. I decided I just wanted to write my thoughts around games like no one was reading them – because they weren’t. Except a funny thing started to happen. My little blog started to get comments and joined several other similarly themed gaming blogs in a sort of circle of sites where we read each other’s content, supported one another, asked each other questions and frankly – we just helped one another get better.

We started writing guest posts for one another, doing podcasts with one another and in my case, writing reviews for other sites who seemed to value my written words. I learned how to work with PR companies in the background, saw my reviews start to show up on Metacritic through other sites and most importantly – started to meet a lot of others who shared my passion for video gaming and writing about it. This was what benefited CGR the most.

There was a lot of ‘me’ and “I’ in those first few paragraphs, but Chalgyr’s Game Room only started with me – it grew with others who started to join the team. It was a somewhat slow trickle early on, but as more people began to write regularly for the site, a surprising thing started to happen. Not only were we getting more content out, but we were getting more readers as a result. We were also getting more people asking to participate. What had begun as a solo passion project became a site that has seen dozens of people come and go now over the last decade and a half as we have written previews, reviews, random thoughts about gaming and more.

Video gaming has always been at the forefront of things, but we’ve examined so much more than that. The team discussed game music, Games of the Year, board games, music creation software, discussed tabletop roleplaying, gaming hardware and so much more. Our third most popular article ever was one written about Magic: The Gathering back in 2014.

Still, video game reviews have been what became the site’s focus. So much so that when you view our review catalog here, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page past the hundreds of linked reviews, you see we have three more buckets of reviews at the bottom of the page. That’s a lot of words over fifteen years. Quiz time: which review of ours has the most hits ever? TheElder Scrolls V: Skyrim – PC Review. This article went live on April 20, 2012 and has over 33.4 thousand views. 

What has helped make Chalgyr’s Game Room such a special place for me is how I just created a safe space to chat about what I enjoy about gaming and found a lot of others who were already friends or became friends who wanted to do the exact same thing. I don’t over-edit things and try to create a ‘CGR voice’ – because everyone writing here has their own. I don’t want to temper it down; I wanted to see it amplified. Sure, we all have our various typos that get cleaned up, but we’ve never been interested in pushing agendas. We love gaming, we just want to share those experiences with others who also love gaming. We don’t always view things the same way – but that’s fine. It’s expected even.

I want to take a moment to appreciate many of the cool things we've gotten to do on this site. Partnerships with big players in the industry allowed us to write about things (often times getting our hands on the game or product early), and providing us with opportunities we wouldn't have had otherwise. No money is being made by us if you click off to these sites, but when I first spun up that first blog post a decade and a half ago, I never imagined I'd be interacting with the companies that we have associated with since. Whether it was Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro sending us per-release Dungeons & Dragons tabletop supplies, Turtle Beach allowing us to review their headsets, Asmodee working with us on some table top game reviews, or big name publishers such as Microsoft, Koei Tecmo and Capcom to literally hundreds of smaller studies and indie developers that have brought their passions to digital life. It's been fantastic to be part of that journey.

Dex:

Agarest: Generations of War Zero:

Chronicles of Tal-Dun: The Remainder:

We've had our reviews mentioned in accolade videos and images, had developers acknowledge our feedback in implementation of game improvements and graced numerous Steam pages over the years (as seen above). 

It's not all flowers on these reviews, however.  We've had more than our fair share of low scores given out over the years. We of course tend to lean towards games we think we'll enjoy, but since we like talking about gaming in general? We're willing to talk about some of the ones that didn't work for us as well. Heck, most of the time when we do our Games of the Year, we have multiple categories including our Biggest Disappointments. I don't want to dwell on these lower scores, because we generally want to celebrate having fun with gaming. We know a lot of work goes into these titles. But we have had our share of lower scores, such as PlataGo (which scored a 2 with our reviewer). 

Chalgyr's Game Room is about the discourse. Sure, the majority of our articles are reviews, but it would be remiss of me not to bring up our Retro Reviews, Memorable Music, Jaggy's Corner, Gaming Thoughts, loads of News posts and so much more. We're a diverse team that love to talk about numerous aspects of a wide variety of games.

I’ve been asked before why the name Chalgyr’s Game Room (CGR). It was a bit of a whim (keep in mind, I was writing for an audience of me at the time). But some of my best memories involve the camaraderie and competition of gaming over the decades, whether it was my friends as kids, or as a father who played games with his wife and children. So, I wanted to make a digital ‘game room’ where we could get together and share laughs, memories and more. This is why you see the couch in so many of our images - that throwback to the idea of couch co-op and just sitting around with friends with controllers in-hand. I guess it only makes sense that CGR hit its stride when more people began to participate, to fill that digital game room with their thoughts and feelings.

The amazing thing? The site’s just getting stronger. Here’s a look at our page views over the last fifteen years. The last two years have been particularly strong for us. With over 3.6 million unique lifetime views and over 6 thousand comments? It’s clear we’ve found an audience. I made our site’s tagline “Where it’s all about the games” – here I can say “It’s all about the team”, past and current. 

Over 5,600 posts later, Chalgyr’s Game Room is going stronger than ever. Our best day ever? March 31, 2024 – so earlier this year with 171,709 views. I couldn’t have done it without a fantastic team, and we couldn’t have done it without our amazing readers. Here’s to a great end of this year for all of you, and to many more years of news, reviews and other gaming thoughts to come.

 

Article by: Nick