Games - GameFAQs

	Games - GameFAQs

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GameFAQs is a popular website that has provided video game resources free of charge to visitors since November 5, 1995. The site includes FAQs, walkthroughs, images, cheat codes, game saves, reviews, credits and release information for games.

It was started and is maintained by Jeff "CJayC" Veasey, and has one of the largest databases of video games available on the Internet. The site covers a wide range of systems, with many obscure consoles and titles. Registration with the site allows access to message boards (which has posted over 290 million messages in over 26 million topics by over 3.4 million users) and the ability to contribute game content. Since 2003, the site has been a wholly owned subsidiary of CNET Networks.

Any registered user may submit information to GameFAQs; almost all of GameFAQs' content was created by its users. Typically, the information is reviewed before being put up. Submitted guides may be rejected if they are of low quality, or if several other similar guides on the same game already exist.

History

GameFAQs was started on November 5, 1995 by CJayC. At that time it was called the Video Game FAQs Archive, and was hosted on AOL. It originally served as a clone/spin-off of a popular FTP FAQ Archive.

By December 1996 , the site was still young, as both appearance and lack of content demonstrated. The site contained less than 1000 FAQs and guides, combined over all systems. The site focused primarily on the seven popular systems of the time: arcade games, the Sony PlayStation, the Sega Saturn, the Nintendo 64, the 3DO, the Sega Genesis, and the SNES - although other systems were also listed. The site was very basic to every degree of the word, and was not updated on a regular basis.

By early 1997, GameFAQs had two different designs. One was customized for web browsers that supported tables , and the other was made specifically for browsers with no support of tables (or text-only) . Despite these changes, the color scheme consisted of only white, black and blue, and looked somewhat amateurish. The content, however, was beginning to grow. By April, the site had 1301 files and codes for over 800 games. New features were introduced by CJayC that would shape GameFAQs' future - such as user requests for information; a search engine; recognition for contributors; and more.

IGN affiliation

By late 1997, GameFAQs had moved off of the AOL servers and was partnered with then titled Imagine Games Network (IGN). During this period of time, CJayC was working on GameFAQs more than ever before. It is assumed that this is when GameFAQs became his full-time job. Until this time, he had been working in either the radio field (unconfirmed report) or with computer/web programming (evidence taken from a later radio interview). GameFAQs had made it through two years and a new aspect of the site began; user contests. There were only two winners of the GameFAQs Second Birthday Contest out of 1000 entries, but it was a start.

Throughout 1998 , CJayC continued to work on the site and post new user-submitted FAQs and codes. In late 1998, the site received another design overhaul. Still operating as an affiliate of IGN, GameFAQs added links to other Snowball partners to its menu bar, and had a number of aesthetic changes applied to it. The actual content of the site hadn't changed much, but CJayC always kept the users informed about the latest events and news. There were frequent updates to the site, even if they weren't always contribution-related. This continued for some time.

In early 1999 , GameFAQs had yet another new layout. The sidebar and tables on the homepage which showed the top games were added. The color scheme was also changed from blue and white to pink and red. GameFAQs was still under the flag of IGN.

In November 1999 , several things happened very quickly. On the fifth, a Quick Search box was added to all pages, at which time the site was also celebrating its fourth birthday. On the seventh, the opened as Beta and a Poll of the Day would be implemented by the end of that week.

Between December 1999 and late 2000, GameFAQs slowed down in terms of the addition of new features. The GameFAQs chat went beta on , but did not last long due to administrative issues - it was simply too hard to control. The IRC server, however, definitely brought a rise in the site's activity, with more people visiting the domain at different times of the day. The GameFAQs chat was initially revolved around a minor number of administrator-owned channels, but eventually allowed users to create their own (such as #trivia, #lobby and #console_war) through a petitioning system involving an accumulation system whereby as each new channel was created, the number of users required to sign a petition (each user was limited to one sign at any time) increased by one. Rooms which had been created but had low usage were also closed down later on.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for GameFAQs ]

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Games - GameFAQs

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