Brendon Bigley and Stephen Hilger, Into the Aether Podcast: S7E48 - “BB’s Romhack Shack”:

Brendon Bigley: I just want more portrait mode games on my iPhone.

Stephen Hilger: Yeah, that’s the dream.

BB: That’s the dream. That’s what we’re always saying on this podcast. The whole reason we started the podcast.

Hello and welcome to Into the Aether.

SH: Jean d’Arc definitive edition in portrait mode.

BB: Honestly, it’s amazing. Just thinking about that, it’s amazing that all of the Dragon Quest games are available in portrait mode on iOS.

SH: That’s for you.

BB: And it’s so wild that they did that. Yeah, even VII. Like they have a port.

It’s so wild.

Couldn’t agree more. Single-handed portrait-mode games, if I may add.

Are you missing Polygon as much as I am? Do you appreciate in-depth journalism about niche topics with your hobby of choice? Do you like tightly edited podcasts with clear structure? Are you a fan of personality, interviews, and well-crafted story? Are you addicted to gaming podcasts because you have very little time to play yourself and/or you might just love the conversation around games more than the games themselves? Then you’re in luck.

Post Games, the new podcast from former Polygon Editor-in-Chief Chris Plante, feels like the canonical audio form of Polygon. Everything I loved about Polygon from its clean yet charming design to its niche stories to its rich journalism with personality is woven into Post Games.

I had the pleasure of providing early feedback on the first episode, which details an under appreciated game award that is damn near prophetic of seminal indie game success and stories and developers I’ve never heard of, but now can’t help but keep my eye fixed upon. Episode 0, an interview with Platformer’s Casey Newton, lends great insight into what a career in independent journalism looks like — a world Plante now finds himself in.

While you can find the show for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and any other podcast app via RSS, I encourage you to check out the show’s Patreon to both support and receive a bevy of bonus perks.

It’s inspiring to see former Polygon folks make haste with a poor situation. Seeing Nicole Carpenter’s byline appear on Game File, Aftermath, and 404 Media is thrilling. And now the Post Games podcast from Chris Plante, one of my favorite voices in video game journalism, is leveraging his decades of experience and insight (and a deep Rolodex to boot) to deliver some of the most unique stories in gaming in a wonderfully produced format.

It seems the Polygon legacy lives on.

Aftermath’s Luke Plunkett posted a brutal comparison of Polygon’s masthead from last week vs today on Bluesky. Eviscerated. A tragic, gross visual of the human cost of senseless layoffs.

Brendon Bigley, Wavelengths:

I’ve been reading Polygon since the day in launched in 2012. I was an avid fan because of its focus on people — at the time most sites were primarily focused on their own branding which led to sites as monolithic entities. Reviews weren’t by any specific writer, they were by [BRAND DOT COM] and discussed on early social media and in forums as such. Polygon broke the mold by being staunchly supportive of the individuals who made its ongoing success a reality, story by story and brick by brick until it became an institution in the space. They made videos about funny bullshit (complimentary) and reported on troubling labor practices in the game development space in equal measure because different people are good at different things, and all of that is what boiled up to being the brand. It’s why so many freelancers and ex-employees are online today speaking highly of their time working with Polygon. The boots-on-the-ground team that allowed the site to function cared about these people in a meaningful way and there was a tangibility to that care that permeated into the readership.

I can’t help but walk away from this news feeling like the very thing that inspired me to spend my time considering games and the industry around them has died a very permanent death. While I’m glad to see independent outlets like MinnMax and Aftermath continue to pave a new path forward and inspire future generations to think critically about the medium, there’s a real sense of loss here that reaches all the way backwards to Facebook’s disastrous “pivot to video” era. What we’re left with is Patreon and Memberful and influencers and IGN. That’s games media now.

And what’s left of the sites I used to love and find community within in Polygon and Waypoint and Giant Bomb and so many more is just an AI grind house serving Google of all companies. Google, who are well on their way to speedrunning destroying their own business model at the cost of everyone else’s. It’s an implosion supervised by idiots who have been grifted by other idiots who have been grifted by actual grifters.

Grayson Morley on his Backlog newsletter:

I’m a fiction writer who wandered into games criticism. I say “wandered,” but the truth is, I got some serious help early on from Chris Plante, former editor-in-chief of Polygon. When I was a nobody, and not, as I am now, nearly nobody, Plante hopped on a Zoom call with me when I was between jobs, trying to see whether I could pivot into doing some games writing. Our correspondence up until that point had been mostly me emailing him about my short story, “Brent, Bandit King,” which had won an award and was based on an article he’d written at the time for The Verge. Let me be perfectly frank: Very few people on this earth would email back a random stranger telling them they wrote a short story based on an article they wrote. Plante did. And not only that, but he offered sage advice to me when I was first getting Backlog going, a kindness for which I have no way of repaying him.

Besides Plante, I owe a lot to current and former Polygon folks like Mike Mahardy, Maddy Myers, and Matt Leone for their edits and guidance. But before I was a contributor, I was a Polygon reader, and that’s the part of me that’s mourning right now. For me, Polygon was my absolute favorite place to read about games, both on the reportorial side, thanks to powerhouses like Nicole Carpenter, and especially on the critical front, with its variety of voices, both in-house and freelance, who offered fresh takes on the art form I so love. For that to be more or less gone this morning is incredibly sad.

I don’t have a radical take to propose today besides to say that you should follow these writers wherever they go. People make the publication, and not the other way around, and when the business side loses track of that, we all suffer. I fear there will never be another Polygon, and as someone who cares about this medium, that’s a hard pill to swallow. The people of Polygon deserved better. The readers of Polygon deserved better. The industry deserved better.

I echo Morley’s sentiments. I’ve had the great fortune of meeting and befriending a handful of folks from Polygon over the years. Their empathy, care, wit, and insight only made me want to be part of their team even more. Some incredibly bright and dedicated individuals that certainly deserved better.