My Misguided Attempts at Success
by Joseph Delgado

With Intervue Digest there has always been a drive to make this site better, to make it more and more commercial. I admit it looks pretty good and mostly commercial, but it doesn’t have commercial backing with people providing content daily or even hourly, so it looks like a commercial page, but it’s really, and always has been, a personal one with a domain name.

My writing style has also gone more and more commercial which wakes me up in the middle of the night soaked in sweat. I don’t want to write like a stuffed shirt and I don’t want to go in the wrong direction with writing. It has suffered enough and I don’t want to kill the last bit of ability I have left.

I’ve also become a stat junkie. My site’s stats are pretty depressing when I compare them to November 1996 where I had 1,459 hits for my shareware page. Last month my shareware page had 37. Things have changed in the last couple of years. Shareware and Gamer sites have taken off and now there are a lot of commercial sites that I can’t compete with. Most of them provide more content in fifteen minutes than I do in a week, so who am I trying to kid here? Myself. I have been beating myself up for a long time and looking at what I had and going about the wrong way to get it back.

I noticed this change in the net-parties and how I described the games we played. When I first started to write them I talked about how the actual game went. Otto came at me in his Warhawk Mech with PPCs blasting, but by the time he reloaded… The last one in May was only a straight review of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3. I was thinking about it some more. By the time the Net party was posted UT and Q3 have been out for a while. Magazines and stuff had already beaten the issue to death and shown countless screen shots and offered demos on CDs. Who cared at that point it was old news! Lastly writing game reviews kind of sucks because it’s all a matter of opinion.

I’m an avid reader of Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer. In CGW’s July 2000 issue they received a letter from Raven Software about a bad review of Solider of Fortune, a very violent first person shooter. The CGW review basically called the game racist since the player killed a bunch of minorities and very few white folk. Stuff like that I don’t want here. If a game sucks it sucks, I don’t need pressure from publishers saying what I did wrong. Furthermore, if any legal action came out of it… I don’t even want to mention it.

So it’s going to be hard, to de-commercialize myself and get back to the way I started, just having fun. Back in 1995 and 1996 I tried to make a living with Enchanted Quill Press and Intervue Digest and worked on it every day. I earned what I called success and I had a lot of fun, but was still broke. Now all that’s gone and only one avenue of success is left—to have fun.

Thanks for reading and visiting my site,
Joe