Needless to say, I enjoy writing. And we were looking for a way that I could get more of my writing on the site in a way that would build traffic. The idea? THE DAILY VICTIM. I'd write a short piece every day, accompanied by a quick sketch from Penny-Arcade's Gabe. The Daily Victim was born. Users could rank victims and the highest-voted ones would return, along with a full-color illustration.
Halfway through the run of the Daily Victim, Gabe decided to turn his full attention to the Penny Arcade site, and after a brief hiatus the feature returned with the excellent Lemuel "HotSoup" Pew providing the art. If you're interested, HotSoup now illustrates BlankIt comics, which are a lot of fun.
I would've thought a daily feature like this would've done great traffic for us. The people who read it loved it. To this day, I still get emails and comments about the Daily Victim, more so than any other work I've written. And I always felt it was some of my best writing on GameSpy. But -- here's the cold reality of writing gaming editorial -- the traffic wasn't there. For all the work that I put into it, and the money we spent on artists, the Daily Victim never got a ton of traffic. Early in 2004 things came to a head -- I had brought aboard a third artist and had sketched up a new redesign, but I couldn't justify the resources to relaunch the Daily Victim site because of its low numbers.
If you're interested in what could have been, here's a mockup I had created of the site I wanted. The site would read almost like a blog written by recurring characters. It would've been years ahead of its time. Hold on a second -- now the weeping -- okay, I'm better now.