Well, after five and a half years of writing for Kotaku, churning out more than 8,500 posts of the highest quality about video games, I’m outta here. Today’s my final day as an editor at Kotaku, so please indulge me as I sign off and thank the people that made it possible.
Obviously, I’d like to thank Brian Crecente, the man who plucked me from the hell of a high-paying career and gave me a job writing about video games. Actually, first he just offered to cover my rental car costs (out of pocket) if I would help cover E3 2005 for Kotaku. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.
And even though my coverage included one very positive write-up of Namco’s awful Urban Reign and a very negative one of Shadow of the Colossus, he hired me as weekend editor. This was while I was employed full-time elsewhere, giving me the opportunity to see what a seven day workweek was like. Then he hired me full time in October 2006.
Since then, he’s been a great friend, mentor and inspiration—and I’m not just talking about the hair. He’s a hell of a guy and I consider myself exceedingly lucky to have worked with him.
I’ve had the privilege of working with some amazing talent over the past few years: Owen Good, Luke Plunkett, Brian Ashcraft, Stephen Totilo and Mike Fahey. They’re some of the smartest, funniest and most knowledgeable writers in the biz. It’s been humbling to work alongside this crew. I was just a guy with a shitty Movable Type blog that no one (but Brian Crecente) read, a guy who was fortunate enough to come work at the biggest video game blog on the web.
(I should also note that I’ve also been extremely lucky to work with the likes of Leigh Alexander, Kirk Hamilton, Mark Wilson, Jim Reilly, Luke Smith, Maggie Greene, Stuart Houghton, Joel Johnson, John Brownlee, Eliza Gauger and, most recently, Evan Narcisse, and they’re all pretty awesome, too.)
Finally, it’s been a pleasure working with you, the readers, as well. Thanks for all the compliments, corrections, harshly worded e-mails, alternate headline suggestions, accusations of bias, fantastic tips and everything else you’ve contributed at Kotaku. Even though I may have banned your account multiple times, I still appreciate that you read my stuff.
So, yeah, working at Kotaku has been amazing. But I’m going to go do something else now, leaving the site running at half-Mike operating capacity. If you want to find out what that something else is, you can follow me on Twitter, I suppose, where I’ll talk about it more soon.
Goodbye and thanks again. It’s been an honor.
Sincerely,
Michael McWhertor