Remembering Old Man Murray, the Website That Rebooted Games Journalism

Our friends at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the PC gaming partisans, uncovered a bit of a snarl in the Wikipedia page for now-primordeal gaming protoblog, Old Man Murray. An overzealous—or perhaps simply vindictive—Wikipedia editor had deemed the entry about OMM “unnotable” and fit for deletion. But within 24 hours, RPS had mustered such overwhelming support from the gaming industry (Valve’s Gabe Newell, Linden Lab’s Rob Humble, former Gamespot honcho Greg Kasavin, et al.) that the Wikipedia entry for Old Man Murray was rightfully restored.

If you’ve never availed yourself of Old Man Murray, suffice it to say that the site’s humor and incision still stings after a decade. It’s almost hard to appreciate how ahead of the game OMM was back then; their meta-humor and willful, ironic troglodytism was aped by internet idiots for years, but without the brilliance—and it really was actual borderline genius work at times—pretenders just couldn’t reach the heights of criticism masked as lowbrow humor which made OMM’s Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek (and occasional contributor and fictional time traveler Marvin) the Cahiers du Cinéma of videogaming.

Definitely read all the praise heaped on Chet and Erik at RPS, but more importantly—especially if you’ve never done it before—dig into the OMM archive. [Rock, Paper, Shotgun] [Old Man Murray]

Fun Fact! Long before Crecente blessedly appeared to lead Kotaku out of the wilderness, I very nearly hired Erik Wolpaw to be the editor of this then-unlaunched gaming blog. He was interested, but Nick Denton dilly-dallied for months and Erik took another job. Erik, we’ll always make room for you when you get tired of classing up Valve. We’d even scrounge up a janitorial position for Chet.

Image: (Jack Monahan/Gausswerks Design Reboot)