Welcome back, readers.
This is a rather impromptu edition of the roundup. It’s not something any of us ever envisioned writing. Indeed, when games media has endured other layoffs and outlet closures we haven’t immediately rushed to memorialize them in this fashion (though maybe we should have done). But when an institution like Paste Games, an outlet that has provided a home to essentially all of our favorite games critics for well over 15 years, is unceremoniously shuttered, it doesn’t feel right to let things go without comment.
Paste has been publishing meaningful games criticism for as long as Critical Distance has been collecting it. In a real sense, Paste set the agenda for good games criticism that we recorded, week in and week out. Paste was a science lab, an incubator, a test area for the kind of thoughtful, incisive criticism we have always wanted to see more of and which more conventional outlets weren’t interested in publishing, and while many people are responsible for this effort, none were so consistently involved and invested in the success of Paste Games as Senior Editor Garrett Martin. It’s thanks to Martin and a revolving team of assistant editors, like Maddy Myers, Gita Jackson, Jenn Frank, Holly Green, Moises Taveras, and most recently, Associate Editor Elijah Gonzalez, that Paste was able to stand as such a indefatigable cornerstone of games criticism through the 2020s. Losing Paste, the house that Martin built, is like waking up to discover that water no longer exists.
There’s a lot one could say about this moment. It’s saddening, naturally; infuriating most definitely. The owners of Paste Media couldn’t see or seemingly understand what kind of tidal force Paste Games had become, and so games criticism as a whole is now poorer for it. Gently, the death of Paste Games, and of games media more broadly, was/is not from natural causes.
Today, though, we’re not here to simply wail and gnash our teeth at the loss of a giant in our space. There is room for that. But there is also room for celebration and reminiscing. And, in the spirit of Steven Santana’s Reading Manifesto, there is room for reading. We will keep Paste Games alive by reading, and sharing, and preserving the work everyone who wrote there put out into the world—a body of criticism that was deeply personal, highly political, and often incredibly piercing, that comprises the story of videogames in the modern era.
So, for this roundup, we came up with not one but two lists: articles submitted by Paste writers and our readers; and articles that previously featured in our “This Year in Videogame Blogging” roundups. Astonishingly, there wasn’t as much of an overlap between these two lists as I thought there’d be, and so between the both of them we ended up with an even 140 articles to share. And since this isn’t a typical roundup but a celebration, fuck it—you’re getting ’em all. Quips will be around with the usual later today. I’ll be back in a couple hours with the monthly Patreon roundup. Long live Paste Games! Long live games criticism.