From Game Reviews to Game Creation
This is not a new site.
It is the continuation of something that began years ago.
Where It Actually Began
It began on a night shift that were sometimes long and filled with music, people named John — spelt one way or another — and plenty of time to think while stood at a workstation, trimming and assembling seats for the toilet seat empire.
Somewhere during those nights, the idea for a games website began to form.
I did not want to create another place that simply scored games and moved on. I wanted to understand them. To break them apart and look at the individual ingredients that made them work—or, sometimes, made them fall apart.
The name came first.
Originally, it was going to be The Game Ingredients.
Singular.
But it never sounded quite right.
Eventually, it became The Games Ingredients.
And that stuck.
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 had been down that road myself years earlier. I had written a book called Artika: War of Innocence, but it never really found its footing. The publishing house behind it eventually folded, and the whole thing simply stopped.
Mick and I were both trying to build something in our own way.
One night, we got talking. He mentioned a friend of his called Dan, who was studying game design and might be able to help with the website.
That conversation became the first real step.
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 was not polished.
It was not backed by a company, a large budget or an established audience.
But it existed.
Reviews began appearing. Articles followed. Over time, the site became more than a place for opinions.
It became a place for looking beneath the surface.
We wrote about mechanics, systems and design decisions. We tried to understand why one game worked and another did not. We looked at the choices developers made and how those choices affected the player.
Then things began to change.
The Games Ingredients started connecting with companies such as Activision, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. We gained access to games, attended events and began covering the industry in a way that once seemed completely out of reach.
We ran competitions with Codemasters, including one for Operation Flashpoint: Red River.
We hosted giveaways with Guerrilla Games for Killzone 3.
For something that had begun during night shifts in a factory, that meant a great deal.
We had built something real.
Where It Went Wrong
But it did not last.
There was no single dramatic moment when everything collapsed.
It happened slowly.
Momentum began to disappear. The site became harder to maintain. Updates became less frequent, and the energy that had driven it forward began to fade.
The truth is, I drifted.
Not the team.
Me.
As the founder, I lost focus. I did not lead the site in the way it needed to be led. People had given their time, energy and belief to The Games Ingredients, and I did not hold everything together as I should have.
That is on me.
When I drifted, everything else followed.
Eventually, the site closed.
Trying to Bring It Back
Years later, I returned to it.
I tried to rebuild the site, restore the foundations and begin again.
On paper, it made sense.
The name was still there. The structure could be rebuilt. The history still meant something.
But it did not feel right.
The framework was there.
The identity was there.
But the spark had gone.
And you cannot fake that.
Walking Away
So I stepped away again.
Not because the original project had been a failure, but because I knew that forcing it back into existence would not bring back what had made it special.
Some things do not need to be rebuilt.
They need to be rethought.
The Reset
Then life made the decision clearer.
Redundancy brought a complete reset.
There was no routine and no safety net. There was simply time, uncertainty and one question:
What now?
Looking back properly, I realised that The Games Ingredients had already achieved what it had originally set out to do.
It had grown from nothing into something real.
It had built a name.
It had worked with publishers and studios.
It had created opportunities that many independent websites never get.
In its own way, it had already climbed its mountain.
There was nothing left to prove in reviewing games.
A Different Direction
So instead of trying to recreate what The Games Ingredients had once been, I decided to use everything it had taught me to build something new.
Not another review site.
Not another attempt to chase the same industry space.
Something different.
Creating Instead of Reviewing
After years of breaking games apart, analysing their mechanics and questioning their design decisions, the next step began to feel obvious.
Build the games.
Take everything learned through reviewing, writing and analysis, and turn it into something playable.
Create systems rather than simply discuss them.
Make design decisions rather than judge them from the outside.
Build something that can stand on its own.
And this time, let somebody else review it.
The Games Ingredients Now
This version of The Games Ingredients is different.
It is no longer about reviewing games from the outside.
It is about creating them from the inside.
It is about:
- game design
- development experiments
- mechanics and systems
- unfinished ideas becoming playable
- old influences becoming new experiences
The interest has not changed.
It is still about understanding games and discovering what makes them work.
I am simply approaching them from the other side now.
From Rubber Keys to New Worlds
This is not a new site.
It just looks like one.
The Games Ingredients is still here.
Only now, instead of reviewing other people’s worlds, it is beginning to create its own.