In the last couple of weeks, Adventure Gamers—a beloved game site dedicated to point-and-click adventure gaming since 1998—has become a cruel pastiche of its former self. The site, primarily run by volunteers and enthusiasts, has fought for the much-maligned adventure gaming genre through thick and thin for almost three decades, but visit today and you’ll find more “reviews” of gambling sites and slot machine games than the latest adventure releases. And for an extra kick in the shins, the new owners wiped twenty years of forum posts without warning. How did any of this happen?
Adventure Gamers, originally launched as Adventure Fan in 1998, has long been a bastion for the point-and-click genre. Beginning just as the adventure game began to hit its doldrums (losing favor as one of the primary PC formats to the ever-booming FPS and RTS and the burgeoning MMO), the site stood firm and continued to dig out every single adventure game that appeared, no matter how obscure, and no matter how utterly awful. It was doing god’s work.
To briefly share its history, Adventure Gamers was owned and run for its first 18 years by Marek Bronstring, with Jack Allin brought in to work as the editor-in-chief. In 2016, Bronstring sold the site to Ivo Teel, with editing duties continuing under Jack Allin. Come 2022, Allin was no longer editor, and Teel took over editorial duties. That is, until recently. While there has been no official announcement, Ivo Teel recently sold the site to new owners, and the result has been an overhaul to twist it into a festival of gambling affiliate ads.
In amongst the dominating tabs for casinos, betting and poker, all articles are now credited to “AG Staff” rather than their original authors, and they’re buried beneath reviews of god-awful-looking slot machines that contain lines like, “The Da Vinci Diamonds slot machine is a work of art. It draws players in with its beautiful visuals and fun gameplay.” We have no way of knowing for sure, but given the site’s new peculiar use of “In summary” midway through articles and a weird reliance on incongruous bullet point lists, it sure looks like the work of an AI. It’s a sad sight.
After digging through Reddit threads and social media posts, I discovered that the split in 2022 was not a happy one. One former writer, Will Aickman, alleged on BlueSky last week that Teel fired Jack Allin “because he didn’t want to pay him anymore,” which caused an exodus of writing staff. Another AG alumni, Joshua Cleveland, claimed on Reddit that around the same time, Teel had tried to sell the site to him for “six figures,” to which he responded, “I almost fell off my chair. We just wanted ownership of our own work.” So, to try to work out what actually happened here, I got in touch with both Ivo Teel and Jack Allin to find out more about what had happened in 2022, and the circumstances that led to the popular site becoming what it is today: gambling promotion. It seems that no one is happy about any of it.
The beginning of the end
March 2022 was the moment everything went wrong. Jack Allin, the site’s main editor, had been working for what he described as “a rather laughably small amount” to organize the team of mostly volunteers who wrote for the site, and to edit the articles that were posted. However, he saw hope this was about to change after Allin “spearheaded” a Patreon for the site that he called “very successful.” The goal was that, with more money coming into the site, he would be able to be better compensated for his work. However, Allin claims that this isn’t how things worked out. “Imagine my disgust when my deposit that month was for far less than before, followed only by radio silence for weeks.”
Allin recalls that when he was eventually able to get in touch with Teel, the site’s owner responded with what he called “nebulous nonsense,” saying that after that round of fundraising expired his pay expectations wouldn’t be met, and that the two had “different ‘visions’ for the site.” He was told he would be let go at the end of that month, which was three days away, and asked if he could write a farewell article. In the end, Allin ended up continuing on for two more weeks, and provided what he describes as “a month’s worth of finished article content beyond that.” He was compensated for this extra month. And then he was gone.
“There was no raging firestorm, no bloody war,” says Allin. “Just a back door pink slip as my reward for 18 years of blood, sweat and tears.” Clearly still very upset by how things went down, Allin added, “If he’s uttered a single word of public appreciation for my efforts to this day, I’ve never seen it.” Hopefully he’s about to.
Ivo Teel also recalls how finances were tight at the time. After he acquired the site from Bronstring, Teel says he never took any compensation and “consistently invested my own capital to keep the site running.” He adds that “Jack received payment for his editorial work based on our limited resources and his original agreement with Marek.” However, the most recent owner saw the results of the fundraiser very differently.
“After years of trying to reach break-even and regularly supplementing the budget myself,” Teel told me in response to some questions over Reddit DMs, “we faced a challenging situation. When we had a rare revenue windfall that could cover about three months of operations, I felt we should preserve that capital as reserves rather than continuing the cycle of me adding personal funds.” He adds, “Jack, understandably given his significant contributions over the years, felt he deserved increased compensation.”
Despite this, Teel told me, “I felt we couldn’t continue if there wasn’t mutual understanding of the financial constraints.” He reflects on the situation saying he thinks both were right, in that Allin deserved fair compensation, and that Teel couldn’t continue to sustain losses. He adds, “Though the parting likely wasn’t mutual, I still have great respect for Jack and his contributions to both our site and his work now with AGH.”
And then there were two
AGH is the Adventure Game Hotspot, a site set up by Jack Allin and other former Adventure Gamers contributors in the wake of this split, and the organizer of the annual convention Adventure Game Fan Fair. Seen by many as the continuation of the spirit of the original site, given the recent dramatic changes at AG, it’s certainly now the de-facto spiritual successor. However, for three years the two sites ran side-by-side.
After working on some other projects for a few months, Allin approached former AG friend Joshua Cleveland with the notion of starting a new site, because “there was still…a giant hole in my life where AG was.” Many writers joined the new site, although the editor stresses he didn’t set out to poach. “They all came willingly and eagerly,” he adds, saying that he never insisted anyone not write for both sites. “This was never about revenge; it was only ever about starting something worthy of the work we’d be doing previously.”
Meanwhile for Ivo Teel, no longer paying Allin’s (undisclosed) salary meant he was able to remove advertising from the site but for occasional “integrated campaigns,” adding that he continued operating the site this way for years, “while figuring out how to maintain quality without Jack’s valuable editorial contributions. The reality was challenging, though some excellent volunteers helped fill certain gaps.” However, what Teel describes as a combination of “my high-stress job, raising three children, declining web traffic and AI search results” led to his considering a sale. At one point he explored selling Adventure Gamers to PCGamesN, and briefly listed it on Acquire.com.
Teel says his goal through this was to sell to buyers who would want to “continue operating the site as-is and work with existing review staff,” which is what he says he believed of the site’s new owners. “I was mainly relieved that a larger, professional team would focus on it—something I could no longer provide.”
However, soon after the sale, the new owners talked about converting the site’s back-end to Wordpress, which Teel insisted wouldn’t work “given the site’s complexity and integrated forums.” But communication went quiet, Teel still running the site day-to-day, when one morning he discovered the site had moved to a new platform and that a lot of content was missing. Also, multiple sections had disappeared, and the site was suddenly filled with gambling content.
Teel says he’d never imagined this would happen. “I originally learned the company was primarily SEO-focused, acquiring sites much larger than ours. I had anticipated they might use it for occasional guest posts or content tied to their other properties, leveraging the site’s established reputation and link authority while maintaining the original operation.” But this proved to be entirely wrong.
When I ask Allin how he feels, seeing the site he’d worked on for decades so desecrated, he told me, “Apart from just a little bit of schadenfreude (I am still human, after all), I’m obviously appalled. And shocked, but not surprised, if that makes sense.” Contrasting Teel’s position that the site had less advertising, Allin contends that in its last few years it had been “out the wazoo,” including paid content, and what he suspects could be AI-generated posts. “So the site was already a shell of its former self. But I don’t think anyone imagined that it would ever be turned over to a gambling outfit.”
Another change that occurred via the new ownership is that the author’s names have been removed from every article, going back to the start. Suggesting that, while he’s not opposed to responsible gambling, he’d be “horrified if anyone got sucked in on the back of decades of my hard work,” Allin adds how the removal of bylines is a whole new conflicting factor. “I’d say I would never want my name associated with that kind of unethical deception,” he says, “but I guess the new owners have taken care of that, as none of the content is attributed to the original authors. Which makes me a whole other kind of angry.” He notes how awful he feels for the many writers who can no longer get credit for the work they contributed.
“It’s all disgraceful,” Allin says. “I’ve heard even Ivo is surprised by how thoroughly the new owners have destroyed it, and I believe he didn’t do this out of malice. But really, you don’t get to sell your house to Bob’s Demolition and Tenement Co. and then act surprised when they turn it into a slum.”
Allin is right that Ivo Teel was surprised. Admitting that he had not seen where Adventure Gamers’ new owners were heading, he explained, “Now it’s become clear that our expectations for the site’s future were quite different.” His hopes of a continuing of the legacy were dashed, and Teel is contrite about it. “In hindsight, I should have done more thorough due diligence on their other properties and long-term strategy. It’s genuinely sad to see something I’d poured a decade of my life into transformed so drastically from what it was meant to be.”
A small glint of hope
As mentioned above, the Adventure Gamer forum was collateral damage in this whole fiasco. It’s perhaps hard for those who have grown up in the years since forums were an internet community’s main means of connection to understand just how integral and important such boards were, and indeed still are. Decades of conversations, discussions, arguments, friendships, fallings out and much more are contained within, along with unique vocabularies, memes, jokes and memories. To have that just vanish can be devastating.
Allin wasn’t willing to go into details about this possible hope when I pressed him about this, but explained that “fortunately, it seems the new AG owners don’t care about the forum content existing elsewhere, so both Adventure Game Hotspot and another website I’m not at liberty to disclose have been in touch with Ivo about possibly hosting an archived version.” This endeavor will likely take weeks, “if not longer,” to get the archive back online. “If needed,” Allin adds, “the Hotspot will step in and help where we can, as it’s just not right to have so much history wiped out of existence.” I’ve confirmed with Ivo as well that this is going ahead.
The loss of any long-term site is always incredibly sad, but it’s especially the case when we’re talking about decades of incredibly hard work by legions of volunteers, passionately sharing their enthusiasm for an under-represented faction of gaming. And to see such a site exploited for gambling affiliate ads is just galling. No one has come out of this situation happy, apart from perhaps the mysterious new owners. The site acknowledges no owning company, has removed all the links from its Contact Us page, and its History page had its last update in 2022.
However, despite this shyness, I have managed to dig up who it is. A company called ClickOut Media, which says it offers to “help brands gain exclusive access to the world’s top crypto, finance, and tech publications—without the hassle.” The company is currently advertising the position of a “Gambling Editor.”
It’s fair to say the spirit of Adventure Gamer lives on through Adventure Game Hotspot, but obviously that site’s archives only go back to 2022. This whole situation is all very sad. But with hope of saving an archive of the forums, there’s at least a chance the original community won’t be completely shattered.
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