Boing Boing Offworld launches!

It's been a little over a year since we birthed Boing Boing Gadgets with our pal Joel Johnson. Ever since, Joel and his trusty lieutenants Rob Beschizza and John Brownlee have been conspiring to launch a new Boing Boing site centered around games. It was hard for any of us to vocalize what a BB games blog might look like -- we just knew it was in our DNA. So instead of forcing the hand of chance, Joel let the idea evolve at its own pace, to let it figure out what it wanted to be. And indeed it did. A year later, it's time to blast off to kicksville with the launch of Boing Boing Offworld!

Piloting the rocket is Brandon Boyer, the former news editor for Gamasutra and longtime contributor to Edge magazine. Brandon is a quintessential happy mutant, following the fun without getting lost in the hype or sucked into the snark. We are thrilled that he signed up for the program.

Boing Boing Offworld is a hub for gaming culture that cultivates the joy of discovery, sense of wonder, and celebration of innovation that all of us, and you, thrive on. Offworld will mix no-nonsense game reviews with profiles of designers, game industry news with level-headed thinkpieces, HOWTOs with actual games you can play. And of course, community! Gaming is a social phenomena. We hope you'll feel at home Offworld! (The comments feature should be up-and-running shortly so until then, please feel free to discuss here.)

We have a quite a few happy mutants to thank for helping light the candle. Thanks to the unstoppable force of Federated Media: Jason Ratner, Mugs Buckley, Matt Jessell, Corrine Kasman, Josh Mattison, Jonathan Schreiber, and the whole gang for their ongoing support. Special thanks to FM's Jason Weisberger, gentleman and friend, who noticed that a launch window had opened. Thank you to OMD's Adam Fiskand and McCann Erickson's Ori Zohar for working with FM to bring the idea to Intel's Tim Takeuchi. Thanks to Joel Johnson for the flight plan and BB Gadgets' Rob Beschizza, a true Renaissance 2.0 man. Deep gratitude as always to our man in the Jefferies tubes, BB sysadmin Ken Snider.

Finally, thank you to our launch sponsor, Intel, who made this mission a go. We couldn't think of a more perfect partner.

Welcome to Boing Boing Offworld! A new game awaits...

• [LeavingHalfway]

  I think Chris meant having a offworld.boingboing.net subdomain, but I could be wrong. I’d kind of like to see it there as well, but hey, I like BoingBoing and don’t see the need for an entirely new domain.

• [claud9999]

  Hey, can you guys make sure that if you x-post an article in offworld and boingboing, that you categorize it as such (or somehow identify as such in the text?) I read gadgets and the main blog and the x-posting is annoying and I haven’t figgered out a way to feedrinse it away for more efficient rss-ing…

• [Bavi_H]

  Consider showing the date/time of each post on the main Offworld page.

• [Cloudform]

  Didn’t see any credits for the design–who did the CSS and graphics? Looks great!

  The Grim Fandango level design docs are a treat, as it’s one of my favorite adventure games!

• [David Pescovitz]

  CLOUDFORM, I love the design too! It was all Joel and Rob’s vision. Who knew, right!?!

• [grimc]

  Boing Boing: All your productivity are belong to us.

• [Rob Beschizza]

  I DRINK YOUR PRODUCTIVITY. SHSHCHSLSLHLHLLLPPPP.

• [PhiCancri]

  The moistness is overwhelming.

• [tiff]

  Hooray! Congratulations Brandonnn ^V^

• [Anonymous]

  Maybe it’s just my 40-year-old eyesight, but I find the text font on Offworld to be extremely difficult to read, even headache-inducing. I assume it was a design decision to carry over the pixelated-looking logo, but please please switch to a clearer font.

• [Glitterfire]

  Wow I was just hoping for a “boingboing gadgets” thing. This is great =]

• [Rob Beschizza]

  Cloudform, I got to do the HTML and CSS. Thank you! Joel was the driving force behind the look and feel, though, esp. the savage front-page metadata cull.

  The markup got a bit mangled MT-izing it, but we’ll be neatening it up soon! I dare not even touch the validator.

  Rob

• [Gareth Branwyn]

  If Offworld can do for gaming sites what BB Gadgets did for gadgets sites, BB world domination is assured!

  LOVE (love, love) the name and the tag line.

• [Scuba SM]

  I have adopted the party position in celebration (and in hope of cake).

• [David Pescovitz]

  DEIDZOEB @26, No pouting. Of course we’ll cover non-electronic games now and then too!

• [Rob Beschizza]

  Oh, also, while the logo text is hand-pixeled, it owes a heavy debt of inspiration to Null Pointer, a font by Tom Murphy: it’s essentially a pixel font-version of same.

• [hotkey]

  Looks interesting, but the RSS feed doesn’t seem to work. And I _need_ RSS!!

• [SC_Wolf]

  A new life awaits you in the Off-world BoingBoing! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!

• [Joel Johnson]

  RSS will be fixed shortly! Totally my fault.

• [pKp]

  Yeah, needz RSS nao.
  The first post are good, especially the L4D test. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time…Boingboing’s awesomeness combined with vidjagames = win.

• [hotkey]

  RSS is working – all is good in the world again!

• [Deidzoeb]

  This is another instance where the default meaning of the word “game” without modifiers has come to mean something played on a console or PC or otherwise electronic?

  I don’t want to be the kind of old codger who shouts, “Hey you electronic kids, get off my tabletop pen and pencil lawn!” … but I’ll be over here pouting. Hoping that Offworld will sneak in occasional news of board games, card games and non-electronic games.

• [Nawel]

  I’m far from being a gamer -like one video card, one console and two gamepads away- but I wish you guys good luck with the blog.

• [A New Challenger]

  Sorry I’m late.

  I suppose I should have seen this coming, given the sporadic outbursts on bbgadgets. Delightful!

  Hopefully it will be a triumph, or at least we’ll get a neat gun out of it.

• [phoenix]

  HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER! :D

• [Chris L]

  I’m excited. But why the whole new address and not just connecting it to the main BB site like Gadgets and TV?

• [David Pescovitz]

  Chris, absolutely. We’re adding a tab on the main navigation bar, it’s just not there yet due to a tech glitch. Thanks!