Vox sold Polygon on Thursday, which means I’m looking for work.

I spent a little over 13 years there, which — on top of almost 10 at 1UP and another 10 doing fan projects and contract jobs before that — makes it more than 30 years since I decided to fill thank you notes with Mortal Kombat 2 impressions and start writing about games. So it seems like a decent time to reflect.

Sitting here almost a week later, it’s still a little fresh. The stories that have come out make it sound like Vox didn’t intend to sell Polygon but chose to when it was approached. I don’t know if that’s true, but that crack in the door makes it hard not to wonder what could have been if things had shaken out differently.

You can’t spend too much time dwelling on that, though. It could have gone the other way and ended years earlier. The thing I keep reminding myself is I was lucky to be there in the first place.

For me, Polygon was a 13-year lifeboat.

When I left 1UP in 2012, games media already felt like it was in trouble. I’d worked for a site that was celebrated and beloved, yet hardly ever turned a profit, and that just seemed like the way it had to be. You’d work somewhere for a little while then jump ship when it went under, and repeat the process for as long as you had the stomach for it.

When Polygon came along, I didn’t expect it to last long. It was exciting and well-funded, but that sort of thing had failed before. I remember the site’s initial editor-in-chief, Chris Grant, mentioning early on that the site had a three-year runway, as a way of driving home that it was going to be around for a while. Three years was considered ages.

I signed on not because I saw the company as stable, but because we wanted to do the same kind of work. They saw the value in spending weeks on bigger stories about what was happening in the game industry. They liked a story I’d written at 1UP about EA’s canceled Steven Spielberg game LMNO, and that’s not the kind of story someone with the wrong intentions would care about. So I gave it a shot.

It’s always better to be somewhere on the way up than on the way down, and those early days were a nice change of pace from the last few years at 1UP. We had a lot of ambition and amazing product and video teams, and when those groups teamed up they produced beautiful work. True to the team’s word, they gave me a lot of time to work on stories that I enjoyed immensely. I wrote a feature about Halo 4 user testing that was the top story the day Polygon launched, a feature about Lionhead’s canceled Milo & Kate that was similar in a lot of ways to LMNO, and an oral history of the best game ever made: Street Fighter 2.

After that, the site went through a number of phases. I’m not sure where I’d draw the line on all of them. There was the time Vox pulled back on features and documentary-style video. There was the time when it flattened the org chart and let everyone choose for themselves what they wanted to write.

There was a nice long stretch in the middle where I had a decent budget to spend on whatever I wanted with very little oversight. Everyone should have an opportunity like that. I got to write books on Final Fantasy 7 and Street Fighter 2, produce a documentary on PlayStation’s 25th anniversary, investigate serious topics, and work with dozens of my favorite illustrators. I never sat down and calculated what I spent on the Street Fighter stories, but it was probably in the realm of a year’s salary if you factor in the hours spent, and I’m not sure that would have been possible anywhere else.

Then, for me at least, it finished with a role working on the Special Projects team, which consisted of organizing packages and sponsored projects, and basically being a support service for the rest of the site. I viewed it as paying the company back for giving me so many opportunities over the years. With the Polygon sale, that debt feels paid.

Polygon was never perfect. It chased trends and traffic and sponsorships. The site ended up being something quite different from what it began as, and each iteration had its plusses and minuses. But both Polygon and Vox were great to work for. Very little executive meddling, at least as far as I saw. Seemed to care about doing good work.

The company made good on the promise from the early days of letting me do the work I wanted to do, more or less the whole time I was there. Earlier this year, I published a 3,000-word feature about a seven-second audio file in a 2002 Xbox game very few people played. That feels like a good one to go out on.

Where does that leave things? Well, I’m kind of writing this to help myself figure that out. I’m tempted to start an independent site, though I see a number of challenges. For one, even though I’ve been doing this a long time, I’ve never been particularly public-facing. I’ve always focused on the work I wanted to do and the work that was best for the company, not so much on building a brand or community. I’m also not convinced the type of work I enjoy most translates naturally to a crowdfunding business.

The standard games media Patreon or Substack success story typically revolves around newsletters or quick-turnaround audio or video, in part because it’s a cost-efficient way of producing large amounts of content. I’m not sure how evident this is to people who don’t work in media, but between reporting, transcription, editing, fact checking, legal reviews, illustration, design, etc. it probably costs something like 100 times more to put together a substantial 5,000-word reported feature than it does to produce an unedited hour-long Zoom podcast. And I’ve always been a proponent of valuing people’s time over producing as much as possible.

That’s not to say all YouTube channels rely on unedited Zoom podcasts (nor that places like Game File and Aftermath don’t do outstanding bigger stories). There are amazing examples like Noclip, Archipel, and People Make Games that have found ways to produce excellent documentary work. I’m just not sure I’ve seen an equivalent version focused specifically on feature writing.

Maybe the math makes it naive to consider such a thing. I’d like to keep doing this in some form, though.

I’m kicking around an idea for a site focused on video game oral histories, similar to those I did on Final Fantasy 7 and Street Fighter. I feel like I’ve developed a good style for them, and that seems like a premium enough type of written content that people might pay for. It’s definitely not a sure thing, and there’s a decent chance you’ll never hear about it again after this. But it’s fun to think about.

I’m also talking to some folks about potential full-time jobs. And I still have an itch to do more documentary work. I get jealous every year when the new issue of A Profound Waste of Time shows up and start thinking of doing something like that, as well. Or maybe it’s time to leave media altogether. I’ll start making some decisions soon. If anyone has thoughts or advice, please reach out.

For now, it’s time to say goodbye to Polygon and thanks to all my former coworkers. I loved working there, and will miss it dearly.