It didn’t have to be this way. Not really. Even with dozens of bad decisions that drove the whole enterprise into the ditch, there still could have been something to show for it. There could have been a web site, a forum, and a history of articles. A record that we existed.

Instead, there was a grand crumbling – the founder unexpectedly leaving, a terse non-explanation provided by the company, an ensuing corporate power struggle, a sudden staff sign off, and then…well, nothing. The Nintendo Enthusiast was razed, its forum Thanos-snapped from existence, its content silently integrated into Destructoid (at least it’s somewhere) with no demarcation of its provenance. Any reader who stumbles upon the work would think it had been at this completely different site all along.

And now? Even the foster husk has been sold to the highest bidder.

It’s all gone. How on Earth did our passion progress come to this? Like a 40-something crushing beers with college kids before realizing that a mid-life crisis looks a lot like a mirror reflection, it was probably the aimlessness that did us in. You see, those of us who founded Nintendo Enthusiast had an idea: make a place for quality content that wouldn’t insult its audience for the sake of clickbait. Good luck finding money in that. Behind the scenes, the mission morphed and, in truth, never took shape. It went something like this:

OK, so maybe this can’t just be an editorial outlet. We can invest in developers and cover the actual creation of indie games. Y’know what? Nah, we’ll make a social media platform (that looks like a re-branded N4G), instead. OK, so that was a terrible idea and we’ll expand, instead. Buying up undervalued gaming sites seems like a good place to start. What’ll we do with those? We’ll just sell investors on the number of prospective eyeballs we have for advertisers. On the other hand, we could start doing our own gaming conventions. What’s that, even E3 doesn’t matter anymore? OK, e-sports! That’s the future. …but man, these NFTs…

Expand, expand, expand. All breadth, no depth. When the investor money came, it was never poured into writing. Enthusiast employed the Huffington Post model – have so many writers that you couldn’t justify paying all of them. I was a site founder, but only a writer, and typically found out about the shifting focuses a good 6 months after the Next Big Thing^TM was already in the works. Of course, by that time, someone somewhere had already decided to move on to something else newer and bigger. That’s where the money always went; waiting for it to “trickle down” to us hack scribes was an exercise in futility.

The corporate side had long ago left behind the writing side. In its later years, the Nintendo Enthusiast was, at best, a vestigial limb – the original proof of concept. For us, the writers, it was proof that we cared. For corporate business interests, it was merely a proof for where the seed money started.

Now there’s scant proof of the site ever existing.

This would normally be the part where one inserts a hopeful anecdote, an uplifting story that leaves the reader with a hint of optimism to balance the gloom and doom.

When that glint of hope arrives, I’ll let you know.