It's been two years. That's probably as much a surprise to me and Yug as it is for anyone else who knows us well. We pride ourselves on our inability to stickb to anything for any length of time. Occasionally we have uselessness competitions, to see who can accomplish the least with our lives. It's a close run thing. I can dedicate myself to a longer span of general uselessness, but Yug can have a ferocious intensity of uselessness in short bursts. I'd win the distance race, but Yug is a sprinter worthy of respect.

It's been an interesting two years. Two years of promise and hope. Two years of changes, evolution, improvement and sorrow. No… wait… I'm confusing it with an episode of Heroes.

Speaking of which, I'd like to publicly state that Mr Shoosh is not my friend anymore. Any conversation we will have from now on can be done through lawyers. He made me watch Heroes. This is pretty much the equivalent of telling someone to try heroin, it's really good. Heroes. Heroin. Coinciden...

It's been two years. That's probably as much a surprise to me and Yug as it is for anyone else who knows us well. We pride ourselves on our inability to stickb to anything for any length of time. Occasionally we have uselessness competitions, to see who can accomplish the least with our lives. It's a close run thing. I can dedicate myself to a longer span of general uselessness, but Yug can have a ferocious intensity of uselessness in short bursts. I'd win the distance race, but Yug is a sprinter worthy of respect.

It's been an interesting two years. Two years of promise and hope. Two years of changes, evolution, improvement and sorrow. No… wait… I'm confusing it with an episode of Heroes.

Speaking of which, I'd like to publicly state that Mr Shoosh is not my friend anymore. Any conversation we will have from now on can be done through lawyers. He made me watch Heroes. This is pretty much the equivalent of telling someone to try heroin, it's really good. Heroes. Heroin. Coincidence? I think not! Still, I got one of the guys at work to start playing World of Warcraft, so I guess that's kind of fair.

Two years. Geologically speaking it's not really that long. Over that period of time a layer of sand under immense pressure at the bottom of the ocean turns into… a layer of sand. It's possibly slightly uncomfortable, though. I'm not sure. I'm no geologist. But the video game world is not geological. Things move fast. Things change. Consoles rise and fall like continents and games come and go like the people that inhabit them.

When we first started this site the next gen was the next generation, not the current generation. The new Nintendo DS was the shiny new Nintendo console with a lacklustre launch lineup which was getting little or no support from Nintendo and had a dim future by comparison to the awe inspiring PSP that would be coming out soon. *cough* The Playstation 3 was unknown except by adding the number 1 to the ass kicking Playstation 2, which was always pretty much a given.

We started the site largely in protest of the crappy release schedules that meant the Australia was so far behind the US and often Europe. That's still happening, the still-to-be-launch of the Playstation 3 is proof of it.

Stuff has changed on the site itself, too. It actually took nearly a year before we decided to try one of them new “podcast” things all the cool kids were doing, and about another 3 months before I finally actually got the hang of the RSS stuff required to make it an ACTUAL podcast, rather than just a bunch of mp3 files bunged up on a server.

Another relatively recent addition was one that caused quite a lot of debate between Yug and I. Originally I was opposed to the concept of user feedback. Basing my opinion largely on the comments on other gaming websites the last thing I thought the site needed was a bunch of ignorant morons typing poorly understood badly spelled nonsense all over the site. We have Yug for that. Yug felt that some degree of feedback and interaction was necessary and beneficial. We agreed to disagree on that, and I made the user comments system to shut him up.

What was immediately surprising and continues to please us is the level of our readers. More and more it becomes obvious that gaming is no longer the sole province of L337 speaking gamerz or basement dwelling RPG nerds. Most of our readers (and contributors) are intelligent, well spoken and mature gamers. Over time we've leapt from the home-made user comments system to a proper forum, in fact almost completely taking over the GamersWorld forums.

We've added another important resource to the site. Our fine crop of reviewers/minions. Originally the site was only intended to have two reviewers, Yug and myself. It had no concept of "other" people, and I'm still hacking around that brilliant bit of foresight on my part. We are greatful for the skilled and uncomplaining and completely unpaid help and support of our awesome reviewers: AJ, Oracle, Jessi, Brett, Romi, Anna and Samo. For their support, time and talent, we are greatful.

I'm supposed to thank "you the reader" now, but I don't want to sound like an academy awards acceptance speech, so I'll go on.

Our site traffic has grown exponentially in two years. Of course... it's hard NOT to grow exponentially when you start from zero. Though a combination of word-of-mouth and blatant spamming of other websites and forums we have grown to a size now that's getting pretty close to where we want to be. There's always room for growth, though, and we're always looking for ways to reach new people, and annoy/offend them.

That increased traffic has also meant a lot higher profile for us, which has in turn increased the opportunities that have been offered. Recently we've been able to attend all sorts of events, including the media launch for the Playstation 3, which we not only attended, but were actually featured in. We hosted the main stage at the eGames show, the largest video games event in Australia. We've met people from every aspect of the video games industry. Gaming media from magazines, the web, and TV. We've established relationships with people from all of the major gaming companies. In many cases those relationships extend to drunken carousing, and in some intelligent and friendly discussion. Yug and I divide those activities between us. See if you can guess who specialises in what?

I even met a girl at one event and started a relationship. And yes. She was drunk. No, not for the whole thing.

It hasn't always been easy. We try to treat Australian Gamer like a business. But it's a crappy business. We're only now starting to generate revenue streams, and the expenses are always there. Business cards have to be printed, plane tickets, postage, printing, taxis around unfamiliar cities, drinks while out, bailing Oracle out of jail... It all adds up, and it all comes directly out of our wages. In general it has often been Yug that bore the bulk of that cost. But from now that's going to have to change. I'll be having to accept a lot more of the cost, probably now more than he does. I only hope I can do that with the grace Yug always has.

That has been the hardest thing. If you've ever run a business with a friend you have to know how hard that can be. And when the business deliberately loses money, and uses up valuable time, that can be even harder.

Ultimately, though, we started this "business" not to be a business. We started it because we were friends. It's easy to forget that sometimes, but it's also probably the only reason that we can still be doing this. Because we know that after any disagreement we might have, and there have been some nasty ones, we can still talk to each other, still keep the site going.

So now would come the bit where I tell you about the future. I want to say exciting things. An AustralianGamer TV show, or a buyout by News Limited. I want to say we're adding amazing features. I want to say we're going to a fully collaborative Web 2.0, or that we're joining up with Sony's Home service so you can actually walk through Australian Gamer, or that we'll be giving away a Playstation 3 every week.

But I'm not. We're going to do the same thing we do. We're going to try and make the best site we can. We're going to try to keep things fun, fresh, new and different to those hoity toity “big” sites. But we're going to grow. We're going to be able to do more. We'll have better competitions more often. More features. More content. More updates. We'll add new sections from time to time, and enable features long dormant (such as the search Yug has been nagging for 6 months about).

Most of all, though, we're going to stay friends, and we're going to have fun.

It's not a business. It's an adventure!!