From an idea on a night shift.
The Games Ingredients began in 2011.
It started with a simple idea.
Games are made of ingredients.
Controls.
Mechanics.
Rules.
Systems.
Feedback.
Story.
Sound.
All the little things that come together to make a game work.
Or sometimes not work.
I wanted to understand why one game could keep you playing for hours while another could lose you in ten minutes.
That question became The Games Ingredients.
Where it really started.
The idea came together during long night shifts at work.
There was music.
There were people called John – spelt one way or another.
And there was plenty of time to think while standing at a workstation trimming and assembling seats for the toilet-seat empire.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, the idea for a games website started to become something real.
At work there was a lad called Mick.
He was heavily into Yu-Gi-Oh!, always writing something and always full of ideas.
At the time, he was working on a book called The Runic.
I’d been down that road myself years earlier with a book called Artika: War of Innocence.
One night Mick and I got talking.
He mentioned a friend called Dan who was studying game design and might be able to help with the website.
That conversation became one of the first proper steps.
An idea became a connection.
I bought some hosting.
Started putting pages together.
And slowly, The Games Ingredients became real.
Building something from nothing.
It wasn’t polished.
There was no company behind it.
No big budget.
No established audience.
But it existed.
Reviews began appearing.
Articles followed.
Over time, the site became more than just a place for opinions.
We started looking beneath the surface.
Mechanics.
Systems.
Design decisions.
Why something worked.
Why something didn’t.
And then things started getting interesting.
The Games Ingredients began connecting with companies including Activision, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.
We gained access to games.
We attended events.
We ran competitions with Codemasters.
We hosted giveaways with Guerrilla Games.
For something that had started as an idea during night shifts, that meant a lot.
We had built something real.
Where It Went Wrong
But it didn’t last forever.
There wasn’t one dramatic moment when everything collapsed.
It happened slowly.
Updates became less frequent.
Momentum disappeared.
The energy that had driven the site began to fade.
And the truth is, I drifted.
Not the team.
Me.
As the person who started it, I lost focus and I didn’t lead it in the way it needed.
People had given their time, energy and belief to The Games Ingredients, and I didn’t hold it all together.
Eventually, the site closed.
Trying again.
Years later, I tried to bring it back.
The Games Ingredients 2.0.
TGI 2.0.
New site.
New structure.
Same name.
On paper, it made sense.
But something was missing.
The framework was there.
The history was there.
The spark wasn’t.
And you can’t fake that.
So I stepped away again.
Not because the original project had failed.
It hadn’t.
It had already done far more than I ever expected.
The problem was that I was trying to rebuild the past instead of asking what should come next.
The reset.
Then redundancy changed everything.
Routine disappeared.
There was uncertainty, but there was also time.
And one question:
What now?
Looking back properly, I realised The Games Ingredients had already achieved what it originally set out to do.
It had grown from nothing into something real.
It had worked with publishers and studios.
It had created opportunities.
It had climbed its mountain.
There was nothing left to prove by simply reviewing games.
So I stopped trying to recreate the old site.
Creating instead of reviewing.
After years of pulling games apart and analysing how they worked, the next step suddenly felt obvious.
Build them.
Create systems instead of discussing them.
Make design decisions instead of judging them from the outside.
Take the ideas that normally ended up in articles and turn them into something people could actually play.
That shift eventually led to WOMBATSOFT 84.
The Games Ingredients stopped being just a place that talked about games.
It became the starting point for making them.
The Games Ingredients now
The Games Ingredients today is different from the site that began in 2011.
It is no longer built around chasing review scores, release schedules or trying to cover everything.
It is a home for ideas.
Games.
Experiments.
Projects.
Things worth making.
The curiosity is still the same.
I still want to know why things work.
The difference is that now I can try building them myself.
Instead of reviewing somebody else’s game, I can make one.
Instead of wondering whether an idea would work, I can test it.
Instead of only looking at the ingredients, I can start putting them together.
Where it goes next.
I don’t really know.
And that’s probably the interesting part.
There will be more games.
More experiments.
More ideas.
Some things will work.
Some probably won’t.
Some will turn into something completely different halfway through making them.
That’s fine.
The important thing is to keep creating.
To take an idea out of your head and put it somewhere another person can see it, play it or experience it.
And, whenever possible…
Finish the bloody thing.
The Games Ingredients began by asking what makes a game work.
These days, it is also a place to find out.
If you actually read all of this, give yourself a cookie.
You’ve earned it. 🍪