By: Brian Crecente

For 1Up's Luke Smith game journalism started and ended with Halo.

It was the summer of 2005 when Broken Halo: Five ways Bungie can fix Halo 2 put Luke on the map and squarely in the pay of Kotaku. The 1Up feature story by Luke explained, in detail, how Bungie could fix Halo 2.

One and a half years and two jobs later, Luke Smith is abandoning the profession to go work for the people the game he once so thoroughly disparaged.

His departure could be seen as a sign of a distressed profession, an outcome that is more the growing pains of game journalism then the product of Luke's own longterm goals.

Luke eased into game journalism when he was still in college working toward his English Literature degree. It started as a gig at the college paper writing about music and art. Occasionally he wrote about gaming.

After graduating, Luke went on to work for a weekly in Dearborn, Michigan, then for a Detroit weekly and finally for Kotaku.

While Kotaku wasn't Luke's first game writing gig, he says it was where he started to come into his own.

"It was a pretty bizarre and cool part of my gaming life," Luke said in a recent interview. "I was living in this nightmare of an apartment with this couple who just fucked and fucked nightly. I tried to stay in my room, eat microwave food, play WoW and write for Kotaku."

Luke came to Kotaku straight from the hands of game writing guru Clive Thompson.

"Clive and I had this long public dispute about narrative versus ludic elements of play and we talked about it on his blog a lot," he said. "Then I saw he had an AIM and I started to AIM him. Clive and I became friends and we would bounce ideas off of each other for stories we were working on. Him for Slate and me for real Detroit Weekly."

When Kotaku started expanding past just one writer (that'd be me) to more, Thompson suggested Luke and we hired him up.

"Kotaku was where I totally got my chops," Smith said in a recent interview, "Citing the sources, being accountable."

But Luke didn't stay long, leaving after a short stay to run the news section for 1Up.

"I left Kotaku for a couple of reasons, nothing about the work climate or the volume," he said. "At the time stories (on Kotaku) were unsigned. Kotaku was like the Brian Crecente vision. If I posted something or Ash did people thought you did. Also, there was no health insurance, it was just full-time freelance."

Luke took over the 1Up news section, modeling it initially after when he did at Kotaku and then adding his own take on blogging. He also became part of the 1Up Yours show and with his addition the show seemed to take off.

But as the year passed by, Luke became increasingly disheartened with the state of game journalism and the ethics at play in the burgeoning beat.

"Video game journalism is just weird," he said. "You have guys married to women in marketing for the games they cover. Video game journalism is still very young, very early, still trying to find out what it is."

"I was getting increasingly frustrated."

And it was then that Bungie contacted Luke about coming to work for them. As soon as he sent the company his resume, he said, he stopped writing about Bungie and Microsoft to avoid any potential conflicts. About a month later Luke accepted the job at the company.

The reaction to Luke's decision to jump from covering the game industry to working for it was met with mixed reaction. There were those happy or sad to see Luke go and others who felt he had sold out. Luke says he has taken it with a grain, perhaps a bag, of salt.

The reaction, he says, is in many ways justified, but it misses the point. The reason he left, not where he is going.

"It's one of these professions where you have people working tons of hours, more than they should be," he said. "There comes a point when the rewards don't align for people and when that happens they leave."

Luke's last day at 1Up was Friday, he starts in his new career on May 7, but doing what?

"I'm no longer going to be in journalism," he said.

Instead Luke hopes he will be doing something that he thinks will bridge the gap between journalism and PR, something that cuts out the middle man and gets the information straight to the gamers.

"You see these developers who can bridge the gap between fans and the development community," he said. "I think there is a really rich opportunity for someone to come in and tell the stories that people want to know. I think there is a very interesting potential shift about how people are going to cover and get information about games.

"Right now you have four bridges between developer and reader: Developer to pr, to journalist to reader. This could get rid of those middle two bridges."

While I think that Luke is in many ways right about the future of gaming, I see it as more of a negative than a positive. With this increase in direct to consumer spin-control, journalists are even more necessary than they once were in this industry.

And Luke agrees.

"I think absolutely there is still a need for journalism, it has to find out how it's going to operate, function."

Now that Luke is on the other side of the thin green (why not) line, maybe he can try and shake things up from the inside out.

If not expect a feature in the near future: Broken Luke.