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GameGal.com
One of the first video game sites on the web written for women — back when that still needed explaining.
What it was
GameGal went up in November 1999 and described itself, without much hedging, as the leading game site for girl gamers. It reviewed PC, PlayStation, Xbox, GameCube and Game Boy games, and later PS3, Xbox 360, PSP, DS and Wii — plus gaming and tech news, all from a female perspective.
That sounds unremarkable now. In 1999 it was close to a dare. The launch masthead carried the tagline "good gaming, without the dick," the nav bar ran news / games / features / bitch / (f)e-mail, and reviews were filed under a byline called the Editrix. The tone got more measured as the site grew up; the premise never changed.
It picked up a PC Magazine "Top 100 Undiscovered Sites" badge, syndicated its own headlines to other sites through the GameGal Newswire, and ran a mailing list. Its editors were working press — bylines at Sync, PC Magazine, Blender, AOL, CNET, MTV.com, WWE Magazine and USA Today — which is why a site this small kept turning up on the floor at E3 six years running.
The signature recurring feature was the E3 Hall of Shame, established in 2002, an annual accounting of how the games industry chose to present itself to the world. It ran for five straight years. A late news post titled "Games industry failing women" opened by noting the story could have been written any time in the previous five years.
The archive
The launch
Days old, and already fully itself. "We've got more gaming sass than you can shake a stick at." A review of Xena: Warrior Princess argues she beats Lara Croft. One of the five nav sections is just called bitch.
View on the Wayback Machine →
The redesign
The orange masthead arrives, and with it the layout the site kept for the rest of its life: platform nav down the left, three reviews across the middle, a news rail on the right.
View on the Wayback Machine →
E3, live from the floor
The site at full stride, leading with ten dispatches from E3 2004. The PC Magazine "Top 100 Undiscovered Sites" badge sits in the left rail, above the newsletter box.
View on the Wayback Machine →
The last real design
Wider, cleaner, two columns. Tomb Raider: Legend and Oblivion on the left; on the right, "Games industry failing women" and the sixth annual E3 Hall of Shame.
View on the Wayback Machine →
"GameGal Takes a Breather"
The front page had stopped moving. The reviews are the same ones from 2006. The only new thing is the top story, explaining the quiet — not for lack of love for games, but because the creative team had day jobs.
View on the Wayback Machine →Good gaming, without the dick.
The masthead · GameGal.com, 1999
Who made it
Libe Goad founded GameGal.com. She went on to be Editor-in-Chief of AOL's GameDaily and a senior writer at PCMag, and was named one of the 50 most influential games journalists by Next-Generation.
Dan Ackerman covered E3 alongside her every year the site ran, and later spent nearly two decades at CNET, edited Gizmodo, and wrote The Tetris Effect.
GameGal was not alone. It linked out to a whole neighbourhood of sites doing the same work at the same time — most of them now gone too.
