April 23, 2019

False Gravity won’t believe what happened next!

This editor helped create Polygon, and you won’t believe what happened next!

DZ, Me, Dave Tach, Cory Williams (from left) at the Polygon 2013 E3 party.

I’m leaving Polygon. My last day will be June 27. If you’re looking for a veteran writer, hit me up!

It was only two and half years ago that I talked with Chris Grant about what kind of program we wanted to build for creating longform features about video games. And then we did it. Tangential trivia: My last day will be exactly two years to the day after I published this award-nominated feature about Arkane. Irony.

We also created really great video documentary series like the documentary of Polygon’s creation, Press Reset, and Human Angle, a documentary series about people who make video games. I spent months of my life producing those two series, and I couldn’t be more proud of the results, and the teamwork that brought them to life.

We also also helped dozens of other writers create some of their best work. I’m reminded of some of our best features when they re-appear on the Polygon front page, or get linked, months later, on Facebook or Twitter. Charlie Hall’s Watchdogs piece, for example. Or Matt Leone’s History of Street Fighter 2. Tracey Lien’s treatise on the marketing of video games for girls. Chris Plante’s epic profile of BioShock designer Ken Levine. Those are just a few examples.

All of these stories were team efforts. All of them are timeless works of quality journalism about people who make video games. And I worked as hard with each writer on each one of those as I worked on my own stories.

When we built Polygon, Vox Media asked us to make the best-written, most beautiful longform feature articles on the web. We hit that mark and then some. Put simply: We crushed it. I leave with my head held high.

Now it’s time for me to move on and focus more of my time on the work I want to create. In the short term I have some stories to finish for Polygon, some personal writing projects to get busy with and Take This, Inc. to tend to. Long term, I don’t know yet, but it will involve telling stories of passionate people doing interesting things. If you have opportunities or ideas about that, let me know.

To Matt Leone, Charlie Hall, Jake Lear, Tyson Whiting, Ally Palanzi, Jon Douglas, Warren Schultheis and all of our contributors and freelance writers, illustrators, photographers and editors, thank you for all of your hard work and enthusiasm creating Polygon features. You are all amazingly talented individuals and I look forward to seeing what you do next.

To Chris Grant, Justin McElroy, Brian Crecente, Arthur Gies, Russ Frushtick, Griffin McElroy and Chris Plante, thank you for the journey. There is literally no one outside of the eight of us who will ever understand what it took to build what we built. It was an honor to share that experience with you.

For those of you who supported everything we did at Polygon, who read and watched our feature stories and encouraged us to keep swinging for the fences, I thank you. Your love and encouragement kept me going through a lot of hard days and long nights.

I’ll update False Gravity with news on whatever I get into next.

You can reach me on Twitter.

Or email.

Here’s my LinkedIn profile if you want to see my awesome resumé and stuff.

And hopefully you’ll be reading more from me around the web (or elsewhere) very, very soon.

/Fingergun

-R

P.S. There will be those cynical few who consider my departure an admission of some kind of failure that they, watching from the sidelines, predicted long ago. They will say, “I told you so.” And that’s OK. They’re right. They did tell us so. But that was the easy part.

Throwing rocks from the gallery at those who are trying to do something ambitious is no great accomplishment. I’d rather be the one who rolls up his sleeves and tries to accomplish something inspiring, even if it may fail. Even if it won’t last.

But there is no failure here, just change. I’ll never be ashamed of the ambitious dreams we built at Polygon, and I’ll never be afraid to try again. Hopefully my modest successes will inspire others to do their own great, ambitious things and build their own dreams.