The End Of Giant Bomb

I have been a huge fan of Giant Bomb since around 2010 when a sort of half-friend who was just trying to mooch attention from me being so popular when I was still active as CurryButt introduced me to them randomly one day when he wasn’t writing 8 page long love letters to his anime girl waifu – Azusa from K-ON! – or shoving mashed potatoes against his TV to ‘feed her’.

If you know, you know.

He linked me to a live stream on Justin TV (now Twitch), and what was on is still one of my most favorite videos on the internet. It was Ryan Davis attempting to make a horse jump over some poles, failing, and Jeff Gerstmann making fun of him and repeating the same line the “commentator” in the game was over and over. “Rider meet horse, horse meet rider.” I loved these two random fat fucks being retarded and from then on I spent a decade – up until the “pandemic” started and GB became nothing but a Zoom call with a video game in the background and lost all of it’s charm and the entirety of the chemistry between staff – devouring their content and re-watching anything I had seen already multiple times. Even after literally demanding a cuckold loser mod ban me from everything but watching the content after he tried to give me a “warning” for doing nothing wrong, and him not knowing what to do because his power-trip was ruined by me ordering him to ban me, I STILL continued to love GB.

That’s not to say it was the same as early on the whole time, eventually my very strong love for the site was degrading but at a much slower pace and to a degree where I still felt naively hopeful for change to come. For me, GB’s west coast team completely lost all my interest once Jeff – who this post WAS originally going to be about, but I guess it turned into my general feelings on the end of the site – stopped doing his job. I don’t mean after Ryan’s still very sad passing (and current non-stop turning in his grave), he eventually bounced back from that loss once Dan was hired. However, Jeff and Brad ended up turning the entirety of west coast content into anti-Trump political nonsense once late 2015 came around – and even after 2016’s election had passed it didn’t stop.

This doesn’t surprise me now, or rather what has happened with him now does not surprise me because of that. Listening to Jeff’s stream the same day his firing was announced he went on for around 15 minutes bitching about the new home he has because the people in the area don’t wear masks which terrifies him and how it’s atrocious that he isn’t allowed to get his children (one is a newborn, the other is like 2) vaccinated because they will die if they go near another human being or leave the home at all. He is a full retarded Cali-cuck no matter where he goes, which just goes to show what a pathetic buffoon he’s become over the years but also where he’s always been on the inside, which, again, was clear once he turned GB into circlejerking any games released by his friends (he has never said negative things about his friend’s video games – not once that I can recall, BUT TOTALLY NOT BIASED BECAUSE HE SAID KANE AND LYNCH 2 IS BAD1!!!1!111!) and being some kind of off-shoot of CNN. Even his fucking patreon mentions MUH COVID, MUH “WHEN THINGS GET A LITTLE NORMAL AGAIN”.

I still believed Jeff cared though, it’s just that his content was terrible. Yet, over the years following the constant Trump-bashing, White self-hating, and claims of sexism in the industry outside of GB while hiring no female staff members and having no female guests, it was more and more obvious just how little he was willing to do for his own website, his friends who were also his staff, or for much of anything. He became not just lethargic but even resentful; nearly everything he’s done in the past five or so years has been unironically, unjokingly, completely negative. You can tell he’s been riding the free and very fat paycheck coming from the fact CBSi never bothered to see what he or his staff were doing, let alone taking the time to notice Jeff contributed nothing whatsoever or that he simply stayed home most of the time always with a new excuse. His most recent, for YEARS, being “I have kids to take care of”…which he believes lets you just skip out on work for as long as you feel like it and so do the fanboys who give the same excuse for him, who somehow don’t understand 99% of parents have to still go to work every single day and to a much more demanding job than “sit there while someone plays a video game for 2 hours and sign some papers occasionally”. Having a baby doesn’t mean you have a free pass out of working for your paycheck, yet when it comes to Jeff of course everyone brings it up as something that is irrefutable proof he cannot be expected to do his job and you must accept it. Apparently Red Ventures finally looked into how little the head of the site was actually doing and weren’t happy.

Jeff’s negativity and cynicism can also get excused by some retards as “that’s his style of humor”, which in some cases is absolutely true. Being straight faced, sarcastic, unenthusiastic, and deadpan is a style Jeff has always leaned into a lot, but that’s different from him literally aimlessly with no explanation shitting on every new video game, every old video game, every event they discuss, everyone outside of their sphere of friends, crying about politics and medical issues he has no understanding of, and COMPLETELY shitting on EVERY fan and supporter of Giant Bomb on a constant basis. He has been nothing except purely negative, making listening to him not only uninformative, but also insulting given how much he shits on anyone listening and tells them they don’t matter and should shut the fuck up and not disagree with him, uninteresting because he’s failed to gain any new knowledge or opinions as he is strictly relegated to retro pre-NES shit, and the opposite of fun when half the time he’s on camera or on a microphone he is telling the viewer and massive groups of people (anyone not living in SF or NY referred to regularly by Jeff as dumpster fire trash people) they aren’t worth his time or saying everything new is bad.

If you ever watched any Giant Bomb from before Ryan died and/or during Dan being at the west coast office, you’ll see Jeff is actually pretty gleeful and easy to laugh even while doing his ‘deadpan and unenthused’ act – he’d always end up smiling, grinning, or just outright belting out with laughter. The last time he did any of those 3 things was several years ago aside fake exaggerated laughing and typically only at his own jokes. If you’re an actual fan you’ll know the way he is now and has been for awhile is not how he really is, not to mention he’s lost all his creativity and work ethic.

On the other side of things was the “GBeast” crew, the staff that had either moved from the Frisco office (Vinny and Alex, eventually Dan) or those they hired at the east office over time. You had a very insecure rich-as-fuck upper-upper class mulatto who was, and still is, battling with his obsessive need for people to see him as some poor and oppressed “black” when he isn’t any of those things who also only used GB to get ‘known’ enough to have a larger company pay him more within a year and fight his insecurities about his skin color. You had an obnoxious and just plain gross to look at woman screaming constantly as her attempt at comedy (who also claims to be a comedian by trade) who OPENLY admitted to not caring about video games and literally never playing any outside of mobile games and who never stopped being confused by how to play a video game with 2 analog sticks at the same time and most importantly always bitched about inequality and sexism…while being hired specifically for her sex, even when the job was for an on-camera video game playing and loving and commentating position and she did not fit the requirements at all. Oh, sorry, they hired her as a ‘video engineer’, yet she also admitted – and proved – she knew nothing about that either, she also had zero job experience prior thanks to her extremely rich ex-NASA rocket scientist father spoiling her. But, yeah, sexism is totally against women and the rich are evil, I believe you. But you also had Vinny, Alex, and eventually Dan.

Vinny held down the east coast all on his own for a good while before Alex and Dan (and later those two I just mentioned) came and even on his own created some of my other personal favorite content like Velvet Sundown and Bot Colony. Vinny was always my favorite, so I didn’t mind him being on his own, and in fact I really enjoyed him not being hampered by the now political-commentary website the west had become. Alex was welcome and I enjoyed watching the longer shows they’d do together like playing through all of Mass Effect. Dan was also an amazing addition to the east crew once he moved, his crazy antics mixing perfectly with Vinny’s upbeat silliness and even leading to fantastic stuff like the Shenmue endurance run or the GTAV heists – at least until they started bullying Dan constantly to the point it stopped being funny and started being just shitty until he outright quit.

I always found reasons to keep sticking with Giant Bomb and believing in them, after all no matter who they hired they’d still be the same core group and even Jeff and Brad would occasionally stumble into being fun again.

Then it became a zoom call because they got scared of coughing rather than guys hanging out at a couch watching the official Steak-Umm cooking tutorial and spending time with Police Dog Lasy or in a tiny cramped studio doing stupid shit like using Easy Bake ovens while playing cooking mama or making big bets over a terrible Mario game, and gone were the days when a random friend-of-the-site would be passing by during a UPF and just choose to hang out instead of returning to their office. Though even before the “pandemic” they had dropped all effort; for years before then they had already gone from making full episode parody television shows and other silly shit like that for GOTY as a massive super fun conclusion to each year to…making a podcast of their GOTY arguments (irritating, loud, and boring – also like 8 hours long a day) and absolutely nothing else and they moved offices to some locked up room with no couch and a news desk for some reason wherein no chemistry could ever be found.

As always I tend to digress so we’ll get back on track now…well no, I’m about to do it again. I lost interest in a huge portion of Giant Bomb not only thanks to the ‘politification’ of the west coast and Jeff losing all his charisma – but also had to ENTIRELY drop Quick Looks (one of the main pieces of content they used to produce) with very few exceptions ever since the release of the quick look covering Valkyria Chronicles 4, wherein Jan and Ben claim the game and it’s developers are racist because “Darcsens” is a word. Jan, the new front face of GB at the moment, said it’s their racial slur for “dark skins” – blacks, and his proof was…showing a black girl in his party who is not a Darcsen and a girl who dislikes Darcsens happening to have a generic dislike of this black character. Ben I can somewhat forgive on this one as he came in with no information, but Jan had to play the game to a certain point to get to the content he shows in the quick look. There is no mistaking that Darcsens are the game’s version of Jewish people during WWII and that the game IS literally a WWII anime, and worse than that is the fact that by the point in the game he is there are mentions of Darcsens, Darcsens literally in his squad that he even rushes past in the list to make sure nobody notices, and the entire story about the war told you being about Darcsens – all of which are shown to be pure pale white people with purple hair. Because they are jews. Not blacks. There is not a SINGLE BLACK DARCSEN IN THE ENTIRE FRANCHISE because, again, Darcsen are Jews – not blacks (unless you ask the black israelites of course DASSS RITTTEEE). And it’s important to point out they both specified this was not just racist because it was a person disliking someone for their skin color, but that the word itself was racist and proof the staff, for making that word up for black people with dark skin and thinking it was acceptable to call them that even in fiction, were racist.

He didn’t screw up, no mistake or confusion was there, he’s just a fucking retard trying to be relevant and purposefully stoking flames of the woke crowd to gain points from those too stupid to notice he was literally making shit up at the expense of a game he thought nobody cared about (while being the first console sequel to one of the top selling games of the PS3 gen), even after a billion people sent angry comments and corrections he refused to apologize and GB – the entire crew, even Vinny – took some hard stance on constantly and actively harassing their userbase for seeing it as an issue that they completely made up racism and claimed even the staff themselves were racist for it. Not to mention the FANS all crowding in the comments to celebrate Jan calling out the evil racism against blacks…that isn’t there. Looking at how Jan’s behaving now – laughing and bragging about how HE is “GIANT FUCKING BOMB!” now rather than Gerstmann or anyone else on the exact same day they fired Jeff – it makes me wonder how much he’s worked with Red Ventures since they purchased the company from CBSi and Jeff Bakalar at undermining Gerstmann and the site as a whole to cultivate himself as the next big face of the already mostly irrelevant boomer gamers known as Giant Bomb.

My point with THAT whole tirade is that I had to even cut out quick looks near entirely, one of the most popular and numerous pieces of content from the site…and yet, I still persevered and believed in the old staff, in Gerstmann, and in the hope that Ryan’s legacy could be something great still. Then you had Dan quit, then you no longer had the long charity streams or GOTY content, then you had fucking clickbait youtube titles and thumbnails, then you had the zoom calls, then you had Ben and Abby quit (thankfully), then you had the quick looks being LITERALLY JUST RANDOM CHUNKS OF OTHER CONTENT edited and uploaded as a ‘quick look’, then you had Vinny, Alex, and Brad quit due to Jeff’s bullshit, then you had Chip’s hilariously man-who-says-to-call-him-her looking girlfriend cuck him for his dream job, then you had Danny O’dwyer promise a bunch of content before literally buying an RV and ditching out on ALL of it for a year and still going, then you had a bunch of random diversity hire muslims thrown on the staff, then you had a show without a single staff member talking shit about random music albums, then you had a fat fuck who is supposed to be some DEEP GAME NEWS INSIDER who is always 2-3 weeks behind what is going on while treating it as breaking news, then you had more and more shit fucking retarded and non-gaming content that was not remotely enjoyable to anybody, there was more than all this but the point is eventually you finally had Jeff’s immediate and quick exit.

With that we arrive at the present; Jeff Gerstmann was, just days ago, fired from the site he founded along with Ryan Davis and Giant Bomb has, finally, officially been killed off with nobody from the original staff remaining. The closest thing left is Rorie who was not on the staff until 5 years in and even then only started doing content beyond “laughing in the background while drinking and saying retarded shit about dogs sometimes” the past few so is far from some old real crew member.

Jeff’s goodbye was not even from him, nor the announcement really about him, and unlike all other staff members who left he had no content as his last hurrah. The front page of GB posted a news article (that was then forced off the front page 2 days later) very vaguely mentioning Jeff having left the company then spending about 6 paragraphs telling the reader not to unsubscribe from premium and to keep coming to the site. It was hilariously disrespectful not just to Jeff, but to the audience which mostly is comprised of people who followed Jeff there from Gamespot or knew Giant Bomb as Jeff and Ryan’s website one way or another. They even stated it was “like Saturday Night Live changing the cast” or “a sports team losing a member”…ignoring the fact Jeff FOUNDED the website and was not just some “cast member” but the creator. It was written by a PR person, probably a woman, and was as disgusting as Jan’s face and as off-putting as Austin’s pretend blackness. Which is why this is an upsetting yet also hilarious and deserved conclusion to not just Jeff’s time there but to Giant Bomb as a whole.

I’ve gone over so many threads on their forums, the entire comment section of the “announcement” of his leaving, and I’ve looked elsewhere as well to see the belief of the ever-retarded fanbase of GB and Gerstmann as to why he was “leaving”. They all ignored every bit of context and go with this idea he quit to try something new and, well, if you say otherwise on the official site you are basically immediately locked and banned so there isn’t much of that going on. The fact is though that if you watched Jeff’s stream you’d know; he had no clue he was being fired until the prior night. He went on and on and on the very day the announcement about him leaving went up talking about how he only had since ‘late last night’ to prepare his twitch, prepare a patreon, make a crappy podcast image, record the first episode live on the stream, try to (and fail to) think of a name to use for his attempt at a new endeavor to support his new massive house he just bought, and he even had to set up a youtube during the stream – and doing all this while having his eyes well up with tears and his voice be very shaky, both being rare for Gerstmann. Everything he said was about how he had no warning, had no idea it was coming, and had to do all this in the last 12 hours. That isn’t how things work when you are told months, weeks, or even just days prior, and REALLY not what happens if YOU are the one quitting. Jeff Gerstmann was undeniably fired from his own company.

This is the perfect end to Giant Bomb for me. Jeff had completely ruined the site with his laziness, disinterest in video games that came out after the fucking Amiga, disdain towards his own staff and audience, and his lack of compassion for Ryan’s dream. He deserved nothing more than to have the legacy he appropriated from Ryan and shat all over to be yanked away from him unceremoniously. Better yet was the way they went about announcing it. The most flippant little mention of him by “giant bomb staff” and not even allowing him a word of goodbye. When Vinny, Brad, and Alex left Giant Bomb did not even have a single official mention of it ANYWHERE, not in content, not on the site, nothing aside a fan making a thread on the forum to discuss news they saw on fucking Gamespot and half the repliers being banned. If that’s the level Jeff cares about his actual real closest friends (him and Vinny were almost as tight as him and Ryan, and he’s been personal friends with Alex since before even Gamespot – not “I imagined they were pals”) and coworkers then why should he be given anything better? They got NOTHING, at least he got a few mentions!

Though it didn’t matter to the fans! These NPCs are so programmed to go with whatever they’re told that even when it comes to Jeff losing his own company they cheer and force themselves to feel interested in the new product with the same name.

I also saw a lot of comments to the podcast live-recorded on the same day of his firing reacting to Jan’s “THIS WAS, THIS IS, AND THIS ALWAYS WILL BE GIANT FUCKING BOMB!” ending to the episode as this heroic uplifting moment that “contextualized” (ignore any fags who say that word) it and made it EXCITING. The NPC, the good goyim, see things as either evil bad Orange Man things or else they are powerful heroic Marvel hero moments that empower them because someone said a thing loud like Captain America or whoever the fuck these faggots obsess over. They are soulless lifeless nothings.

So while on one hand it’s quite funny, on the other hand, seeing the final moment of Giant Bomb was a little sad, and seeing this disgusting new crew – forced in by the hands of an outsider that was put at the head who then, incapable of avoiding his genetics, had to undermine the entire website and destroy it – laughing and joking the same day he was removed, not mentioning Jeff at all, and even having a countdown timer to the announcement of his firing, was somehow still quite upsetting and the quickly positive audience reaction even moreso.

I AM glad Jeff is having to face the music for how he’s treated the legacy of the best friend he ever had and those who he still could have, ecstatic even – the moment I accidentally read the news (I was just looking to see if rumors about Dan being rehired were true) I burst out laughing, which isn’t normal for me. Even so, I’m also mad at just how shitty Giant Bomb is treating the departure of the last real member of the staff and the founder of the entire company and how they’re treating GB in general. Hell, just the fact Luchadeer is for some reason thrown on their stream background is upsetting; Luchadeer has NOTHING to do with these people they may as well throw Cool Baby in there too, almost none of them even were ever in the same room as that stupid fucking deer, and they redid the logo to some gay bullshit, and of course threw random Japanese all over too all while having Jan proclaim THIS is the real Giant Bomb without realizing he was used by Bakalar the same way minorities in real life by people like him. It’s retarded.

I really did intend this to be a simple post saying I’m both happy Jeff has been evicted from his own company while at the same time angry about what they’ve done to it, but I suppose it ended up being about my feelings about the downturn of things and where they ended up. Either way, Giant Bomb has been a part of my life since around 2010 – over a decade, and seeing it finally come to a close is strange. I haven’t really been effected by things coming to a close with much in my life, family deaths don’t matter to me, finishing school was just irritating because I lost football, moving has never felt completed any time I’ve done it. Ending the CurryButt era, going through Endwalker, ending a couple relationships, and the end of Giant Bomb are some of the only things I can think of that gave me some kind of larger response or care for their conclusions. It’s not that I’m crying (I was during Endwalker though) nor fuming mad, it’s just that I feel more aware that something that has been a big part of my life is done for now than I usually would because I spent a decade watching these guys for hours upon hours every single day having loads of fun and then watching them decline more and more.

Finally seeing it end, and Jeff getting some sort of comeuppance and him nearly crying the same day his firing was announced, is freeing and cathartic because he’s an asshole and the site needed to be done thanks to his godawful time as the boss. At the same time seeing something so valued by me for so long being shit on by some diversity hires and a guy who eats latka is also upsetting. I guess it mirrors Giant Bomb’s trajectory in that it’s really a mix of huge ups and recently almost nothing but deep lows. It could be sad, it could be uncomfortable or depressing to see…and yet, because of Jeff allowing the site to fall into the terrible state it has for the last few years and how bad Jeff’s content was for even longer than that, I was already so disconnected from Giant Bomb and Gerstmann that it doesn’t feel that way. It just feels strange.

Fuck Jeff Gerstmann and fuck Giant Bomb. Good riddance.