Return, and Begin Again
I'm Thomas, and I'm a writer. You might've seen some of my work before now, but I won't take it personally if you haven't. I've never been great at self-promotion.
Almost exactly 24 years ago, I fell backwards into a freelance career in the gaming enthusiast press. (Some blackmail was involved. Remind me to tell you the story sometime, if you haven't heard it.) I've been in the field ever since, as a strategy guide author, critic, reporter, and journalist, with a couple of stints in QA and production along the way. Video games were, and are, an exciting medium to cover, for all the associated industry's constant missteps.
In games, movies, and everywhere else, I tend to prefer the weird end of the pool. I like a few big mainstream games (I am in fact infamous in some circles for how much I like Resident Evil), but I really enjoy finding random diamonds in the rough. Nothing's as interesting to me as a game/movie/etc. that I've never heard of before in my life.
As a result, I've covered independently-developed games whenever I thought I could get away with it, for sites such as GeekWire, Retroware, GameSkinny, and the late, lamented Indie Games Website.
Those opportunities didn't come up as frequently as I'd have liked, as games coverage on the Internet is primarily driven by SEO. The articles that make your website any amount of money are the ones that cover the stories that everyone is already searching for. The rich get richer, while the rest compete for whatever crumbs of discovery are left. Nobody likes this except the c-suite. We try to work around them.
Despite how sporadic it was, I'd done enough coverage over time that my public-facing email and Twitter DMs steadily filled up with random game codes, usually sent as cold pitches from small developers and various indie-friendly publishers. Some looked good, others didn't, but their sole unifying factor was that I had nowhere that I could discuss them, aside from yelling out my window. Most of my indie pitches were rejected on reaction by almost every editor I spoke with. My inboxes slowly turned into a graveyard for other people's dreams.
Then, in early 2024, I was in a Slack chat with the owner of the geek comedy site Hard Drive, where I was able to pitch him on the idea of regular indie-game coverage. He went for it, presumably because he had nothing to lose at that point in time. I proceeded to put out a total of 71 columns for Hard Drive's Minus World vertical between April of 2024 and September of 2025, under the name "Game Night."
It was an interesting challenge. I'd never written a regular column before, although I've had a couple of false starts, and it turned out that covering a new game every week was more work than I'd thought. Fortunately, I got some help along the way from several other Hard Drive writers, such as Johnny Amizich, Nick Coffman, Bex Kane, Amity Gilmour, Testament Crux, and Corey Arder. I also have to give it up for my pre-reading team, which includes Russ Thornton, Mads Garcia, and Alex Yohai.
Then Hard Drive was bought out by a new company, which pulled the plug on "Game Night" (and damn near the rest of the site) in mid-September 2025. This was my personal capstone on a dark period in which online games writing as a whole has been steadily burning to the waterline; I had permission to take "Game Night" to other venues, but that didn't do me a hell of a lot of good, since Hard Drive had been the only venue crazy enough to run a column about indies in the first place. Everywhere else was shuttered, enshittified, under a budget crunch, had laid me off recently, or in one unique case, all four simultaneously. Meanwhile, the game codes started to stack back up.
That's where this newsletter comes in. Welcome to "Cheating at Solitaire:" second verse, not quite the same as the first.
More games are coming out at once than at any previous time in the history of this hobby, which makes independent curation more important than ever before. My goal is to put a spotlight on the smaller, weirder end of the games industry, by checking out as many indies as I can and coming back with my report.
My plan, knock on wood, is to put out a column a week in 2026, covering whatever new indie games catch my eye. Naturally, this column will never knowingly include games that were made, wholly or partially, with generative AI. I'm only interested in human products, made with human tools.
If you're interested in supporting the column, which is to say me, I won't lie: I could use the help. If you'd like to throw a few bucks into my hat, you can subscribe to the column via Ghost for $5/month. Alternatively, tips are happily accepted via Ko-fi.
If you're interested in other business inquiries or submitting your own game(s) for consideration, you can reach me via my new column-specific email: multimedia.superstar at protonmail dot com.
Thanks for reading. Let's see how this turns out.
