Nine Years of Indie Gamer Chick

Wow. So, I missed my annual June 30th “thank you” post to the community by a couple days, and I hope that doesn’t lead anyone to believe that I take being Indie Gamer Chick for granted, because I don’t. When I started this blog on July 1, 2011, I never could have imaged where it would take me in life. The type of friends I’d make. The people I’d meet. The legends of gaming who tell me they like my work, even though it’s supposed to be the other way. It’s been a surreal, but incredible, nine years.

I won’t lie: the fire I once had as a writer doesn’t burn as brightly today, in 2020, as it did when I started IGC. That’s probably been obvious for a while now. While I genuinely believe my reviews over the last few years are my best work ever, finding the motivation to sit down and write them has been a greater struggle than I could ever have imagined. Tom Zito, founder of Digital Pictures.. yes, the company that did Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and other crappy Sega CD games.. didn’t actually start as game maker. He was a writer. Specifically, he was a music critic.. He wrote for Rolling Stone, in fact, and was one of the most respected men in the field of music criticism. But, one day, he told his editor “I’m running out of adjectives” and moved on to other things.

Well, although I’m not moving on from being Indie Gamer Chick, I fully admit, I’m running out of adjectives.

I’ve even thought about quitting Indie Gamer Chick. Not because of the community. My God, you guys have been so good to me. You have no idea what you’ve meant to my life. Rather, I think game writing, game reviews, etc, should belong to those whose fire burns bright. Mine no longer does, at least for most indie games. I still play them. I spend probably a couple hundred bucks a month just buying indies. Playing them? Writing about them? I think I’ve been burned out for a while now. I think it shows.

Thusly, I spent July, 2019 through June 30, 2020 exploring other aspects of gaming. My life-long love of pinball finally was married to my love of video games when I launched ThePinballChick.com, a blog that I get to work on with my Father, Oscar. He’s in his 70s now and he’s in the best shape of his life. He’s also in the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease, and while his treatment and therapy is going great and he’s expected to be healthy for a few years yet to come, he’s on the clock. Doing The Pinball Chick with him has been truly incredible for both of us. When his time is up, the work we’ve done is something I’ll always be able to look at and cherish. A project that I did with my Dad. My hero. He’s also started playing video games himself. It was recommended to treat the condition. We went from me and my friends picking games for him to play to him scouting out and buying his own games. His favorite so far? The Ghostbusters game! He also was fond of games in the Zelda and Metal Gear series, while he found stuff like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts to be too.. out there.. for his tastes. You can’t win them all.

For those that don’t pay much attention to my Twitter, I’ve also been exploring gaming’s past over the last year. For my entire Indie Gamer Chick existence, I’ve gotten scorn from the retro gaming community for being against older games. I always felt that was unfair. No, I don’t like every legendary game, but anti-retro? I buy every classic-gaming compilation, always have, and have done my best to help preservation efforts for games from my era and earlier. But, yea, maybe I could have given the classics a bit more credit. And so, we built a computer just for me to run emulators off of and I’ve spent the last several months running through classic games. I played through hundreds of Atari 2600 games in May, and began a summer-long project to play hundreds of NES, SNES, and Genesis games in June. I’m still working on them now. I’ve found the whole experience to be personally rewarding and educational. It’s opened my eyes to dozens of marvelous lost treasures that deserved to go down in history and didn’t. I imagine the heartbreak felt by fans of those games isn’t all that different from the heartbreak I’d feel watching an incredible indie game go unnoticed by the general masses. We really aren’t all that different after all.

And so, that’s where we are today. Am I done? Nope. Will I be back to writing indie reviews full time eventually? I think so. Maybe the fire doesn’t burn as bright, but it still burns. I still work with the development community, offering support and advice. I still work as an advocate to the indie scene full time, and always will. And actually, I think I’ll come away from this retro gaming journey I’m on a better gamer and a better writer, with a new appreciation for the medium that I’ve cherished since a 7-year-old girl asked for a PlayStation for Christmas in 1996, or later when I was the 9-year-old birthday girl getting an Nintendo 64 with Banjo-Kazooie to celebrate the day. Gaming has been everything to me. That won’t change. Even when times are tough, and they’ve never been tougher for as many people as they are now, we have our games, and the worlds and wonders they bring us to explore. And so today, nine years to the day after I published my first game review, I want to thank every single reader, every single developer, and the entire community for their support. I never took it for granted, and never will. You all have my love and gratitude forever. I’ll never be done, because you’ll never be done.

-Cathy Vice
July 2, 2020