Type of site Gaming Owner Tyler Malka Alexa rank 1828 (August 2015) | Available in English Created by Jim Cordeira | |
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NeoGAF, formerly known as the Gaming-Age Forums, is an internet forum that discusses video games, founded as an adjunct to Gaming-Age, a video game news website. Since April 4, 2006, the site has been independently hosted and administered.
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Some notable people from the video game industry have posted on NeoGAF, including Andy McNamara, Cliff Bleszinski, Frank O'Connor, Gary Whitta, Greg Kasavin, James Stevenson, Jeff Gerstmann, Jeff Green, Jeremiah Slaczka, Larry Hryb, Ryan Payton, Shawn Elliott, Tim Lewinson, Steven W. Burns and Vic Ireland. Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights has also posted on the forum until he was permanently banned.
History
The Gaming-Age Forums began as an adjunct to Gaming-Age, a video game news and reviews website, running the UBB forum software and hosted on the Gaming Age servers. As Gaming-Age outgrew its hosting, IGN took over hosting of Gaming-Age's forums. After IGN ceased hosting of GAF in the summer of 2001, GAF moved to ezboards, and the administration of GAF became more estranged from Gaming Age.
As the Gaming-Age staff became gradually more divorced from the day-to-day operation of GAF, problems with the new Gamesquad hosting cropped up. As software bugs in vBulletin 2, the version GAF was using at the time, continued to worsen, the Gamesquad hosting became increasingly more impractical, until the forums' database became corrupted, forcing a move to new hosting in order to change software and salvage what was left of the forums' database. In the spring of 2004, a fundraiser was held to move GAF to new hosting. On June 6, 2004, GAF took its current form (known as "NeoGAF" to long-time posters) and moved to new hosting and new software, vBulletin 3.
As of April 4, 2006, the forums were relaunched as "NeoGAF", the former in-moniker, by its administrators. NeoGAF also features its own front page, an upfront admission that the forum's audience had drifted from that of its birthing news site, but yet mandated a single portal to represent the forum's members.
In popular culture
In the video game Scribblenauts, if the words "neogaf" or "gaf" are written, the NeoGAF logo will appear in the game. It can be mounted by the player and used similar to a helicopter (except it will not stay aloft in the air). If it is interacted with, the logo will spawn a gamer character.
In the computer role-playing game Pillars of Eternity, an in-game inn named the "Goose and Fox" is (subtly) named after NeoGAF. Its innkeeper Bishop is named after one of NeoGAF's mods, and there are other easter eggs pointing to the forum.