There hasn’t been
a new VGJunk article in nine months – wow, nine months, really?
Even I didn’t think it had been that long – so as you can
probably tell, VGJunk is closed for business. I really should have
mentioned something about it earlier, but the unpleasant finality of
saying “right, VGJunk is over” kept putting me off. I thought
maybe I’d come back to it, and I did try a couple of times, but
those attempts were non-starters so here we are at The End. I also
held out through October just in case a new Halloween Trick or Treat
game was released, because I’d have come back for that. I know, I’m
as disappointed as you are.
So why did I stop?
Normal, boring life reasons, I’m afraid. Lack of time, mostly. For
a big chunk of VGJunk’s run I was acting as a carer, which resulted
in a situation where I didn’t have a job to go to but I also
couldn’t get out of the house much; a fertile breeding ground for
bad jokes about long-forgotten ZX Spectrum games. That’s all
changed, and amongst other things I’m working full time - and after spending all day
typing things into a computer in an office I’m not exactly
desperate to come home and spend all night typing things into a
computer. VGJunk articles may look
like amateurish, hurriedly-cobbled-together things, and that’s
because they are – but each one took a pretty long time to put
together and that’s time I just don’t have any more. I can
scarcely believe I kept up the schedule that I did, frankly.
I
also felt like I was getting into a bit of rut, writing articles just
for the sake of having put something out that week, and that the
standard of quality was slipping below my admittedly very low bar.
There’s no fun in forcing it, and I started VGJunk to be a fun
thing that would occupy me during some of the roughest times in my
life. In that sense, VGJunk was outshone its goals, because I did have a hell of a lot of fun writing these hundreds of thousands (millions, even) of words.
So
that’s that. Will VGJunk ever return? Probably not, and it’s
especially unlikely to be in its old format, but never say never. I
do love writing, and I’ve been tentatively getting back into
writing some horror fiction and stuff like that, but that’s a hobby
that I’ll most likely keep to myself.
Best
wishes to you all,
VGJunk