Type of business | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Type of site | Video game journalism |
Headquarters | Brighton, England |
Owner | Gamer Network |
Founder(s) |
|
Editor | Katharine Castle |
Industry | Video game industry |
URL | rockpapershotgun |
Registration | Optional |
Launched | 13 July 2007 |
Current status | Active |
Rock Paper Shotgun [lower-alpha 1] is a British video game journalism website. It was launched in July 2007 to focus on PC games and was acquired by Gamer Network, a network of sites led by Eurogamer , in May 2017. [1] [2]
Rock Paper Shotgun was founded by Kieron Gillen, Jim Rossignol, Alec Meer and John Walker in 2007. All four were freelancing for Future Publishing and wanted to create a website focused entirely on PC games. [3]
Gillen announced that he would no longer be involved in posting the day-to-day content of Rock Paper Shotgun in 2010, [4] focusing more on his work with Marvel Comics. He continued to act as a director and occasionally write essay pieces for the site. Rossignol founded his own game studio, Big Robot, in 2010, [5] but also continued to contribute to the site for six more years. Meer and Walker left in 2019. [6] [7]
A German sister-site was launched in 2017. It included translated and original content. [8]
Rock Paper Shotgun contributors include:
On 8 February 2011, the game Bulletstorm came under scrutiny by Fox News. These claims were largely ridiculed among gaming websites, including Rock Paper Shotgun, who ran a series of articles discrediting the reports by Fox News. [7] The articles analysed Carole Lieberman's claims and found only one of eight sources she provided had anything to do with the subject at hand. Fox News acknowledged that they had been contacted by Rock Paper Shotgun and responded to their claims on 20 February 2011 through another article, stating that the game still remained a threat to children. [9]
In 2014 a Rock Paper Shotgun article by John Walker about the existence of orphaned classic video games, and the suggestion to let them enter the public domain after 20 years, raised a controversial public debate about copyright terms and public domain [10] [11] between game industry veterans John Walker, George Broussard and Steve Gaynor. [7] [12] [13]
Kieron Michael Gillen is a British comic book writer and former video game and music journalist. In comics, Gillen is known for his creator-owned series such as Once & Future (2019–2022), Die (2018–2021), Phonogram (2006–2016), and The Wicked + The Divine (2014–2019), the latter two co-created with artist Jamie McKelvie and published by Image. He is also known for numerous Marvel Comics projects, such as Journey into Mystery, Uncanny X-Men, and Young Avengers in the early 2010s and Star Wars comics in the mid-to-late 2010s including Darth Vader, Star Wars, and co-creation of the character Doctor Aphra who starred in her own ongoing spin-off comic series Star Wars: Doctor Aphra of which Gillen wrote the first 19 issues. He returned to the X-Men in the 2020s with multiple series during the Krakoan Age for the Destiny of X, Sins of Sinister and Fall of X storylines.
Pathologic is a 2005 survival game developed by Russian studio Ice-Pick Lodge. The game was released in Russia by Buka Entertainment in June 2005, followed by a localised English release from G2 Games and GMX Games in 2006. An updated version, Pathologic Classic HD, was developed by General Arcade, published by Good Shepard Entertainment, and released in October 2015. A remake was developed by Ice-Pick Lodge in the Unity game engine and released as Pathologic 2 in May 2019 by tinyBuild.
GamersGate AB is a Sweden-based online video game store offering electronic strategy guides and games for Windows, macOS, and Linux via direct download. It is a competitor to online video game services such as Steam, GOG.com, and Direct2Drive.
Zeno Clash is a first-person fighting video game with elements of a first-person shooter. It is the debut game of developer ACE Team and uses the Source engine. It was released for download through content delivery service Steam on 21 April 2009. The Xbox 360 version, entitled Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition, was released 5 May 2010 and contains additional features not found in the Windows version. The game is set in the fantasy world of Zenozoik, and follows Ghat, a young man who is on the run from his vengeful siblings, and Deadra, his female companion, as they travel through strange and exotic lands.
The copyright term is the length of time copyright subsists in a work before it passes into the public domain. In most of the world, this length of time is the life of the author plus either 50 or 70 years.
Mythos Games was a British video game developer company founded by Julian Gollop and Nick Gollop in 1988 as Target Games. It is best known for its 1994 strategy game X-COM: UFO Defense, which went on to become the first installment in the later XCOM series. Following the closing of Mythos Games in 2001, the brothers founded Codo Technologies.
Brian Mitsoda is an American video game designer and writer best known for his work on the 2004 game Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. He is the founder of DoubleBear Productions.
James Michael Rossignol is a British video game journalist and critic, as well as an author. He has also branched out into games, founding the company Big Robot in 2010.
Love is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) created by Eskil Steenberg. Unlike most such games, the content in Love is almost entirely procedurally generated. Another major difference is that there are no pre-determined quests; instead, the gameplay is emergent from the interactions of players with each other, with NPCs and the environment. Love uses skill-based progression and any benefits gained from defeating NPC enemies apply to all players from the same settlement.
Bulletstorm is a 2011 first-person shooter game developed by People Can Fly and Epic Games and published by Electronic Arts (EA). The video game is distinguished by its system of rewarding players with "skillpoints" for performing increasingly creative kills. Bulletstorm does not have any competitive multiplayer modes, preferring instead to include cooperative online play and score attack modes. Set in the 26th century, the game's story follows Grayson Hunt, a space pirate and former black ops soldier who gets shot down on a war-torn planet while trying to exact revenge on General Sarrano, his former commander who tricked him and his men into committing war crimes and assassinating innocents.
Anna Anthropy is an American video game designer, role-playing game designer, and interactive fiction author whose works include Mighty Jill Off and Dys4ia. She is the game designer in residence at the DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media.
BioShock 2: Minerva's Den is a single-player downloadable content (DLC) campaign for the 2010 first-person shooter game BioShock 2, developed by 2K Marin and published by 2K Games. The player assumes the role of Subject Sigma, an armored and genetically modified human, or "Big Daddy"; Sigma must travel through Minerva's Den, the technological hub of the underwater city of Rapture, to download a schematic of the city's supercomputer. Gameplay is similar to that of BioShock 2, with new enemies and weapons.
Sir, You Are Being Hunted is an open world survival horror stealth video game developed by Big Robot for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux. An alpha version of the game was made available on 19 August 2013. After years of no updates, in September 2021 the game was updated to version 1.5 by the external Dutch game development studio Den of Thieves Games.
Proteus is a 2013 adventure game designed and created by Ed Key and David Kanaga for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. In the game, the player traverses a procedurally generated environment without prescribed goals. The world's flora and fauna emit unique musical signatures, combinations of which cause dynamic shifts in audio based on the player's surroundings.
Gamer Network Limited is a British digital media company based in Brighton. Founded in 1999 by Rupert and Nick Loman, it owns brands—primarily editorial websites—relating to video game journalism and other video game businesses. Its flagship website, Eurogamer, was launched alongside the company. It began hosting video game trade show EGX in 2008. In 2018, it was acquired by ReedPop, a division of RELX.
Teleglitch is a game developed by Test3 Projects, a rogue-like action and indie game incorporating features of survival horror. After initial release, a version incorporating free expansion content was released through Paradox as the Die More Edition.
Call to Arms is a real-time tactics and strategy video game developed by German company Digitalmindsoft as the spiritual successor to the Men of War series. The early access version of the game was released on 30 July 2015 to Steam. A stand-alone expansion pack, titled Gates of Hell: Ostfront, was released in 2021.
Tom Jubert is a British video game writer and narrative designer. He is best known for his work on many high-profile games, including FTL: Faster than Light, The Talos Principle, and The Swapper. Although he has worked on AAA games, most of his work has been on smaller indie titles.
The Outsider is a fictional supernatural being in Arkane Studios' Dishonored franchise, residing in an empty otherworldly dimension called the Void. After appearing in promotional webisodes, the character made his game debut in Dishonored (2012), where he grants magical powers to the player character. He serves a similar role in the game's sequel, Dishonored 2 (2016), though he may be rejected. The Outsider reappears in Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (2017), which follows former-assassin Billie Lurk as she attempts to kill him, though his ultimate fate is up to the player.
Limit Theory is a cancelled real-time strategy video game developed by Josh Parnell under the Procedural Reality name. Parnell launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the development of the game in November 2012, with an intended release in early 2014. Although the campaign was successful, raising more than three times the required amount, the project eventually entered development hell. In September 2018, the title was officially cancelled. Since then, game's development has been used as an example of occupational burnout in indie video game development by some video game journalists.
my new company, Big Robot
As someone who desperately pines for the PD model that drove creativity before the copyright industry malevolently took over the planet, it saddens my heart that a game two decades old isn't released into the world.
...games more than a couple of decades old aren't entering the public domain. Twenty years was a fairly arbitrary number, one that seems to make sense in the context of games' lives, but it could be twenty-five, thirty.