I discovered Giant Bomb in the mid-2010s. When Ashley was in law school she was, as is typical, hired as an intern in DC for each of the three summers we lived in Charlottesville. The internships kept her quite busy, and commuting from Charlottesville to DC isn’t realistic, so for those times we lived apart.
Charlottesville is an insular sort of place. I was working remotely for my company in Boston full-time, enjoying the benefits of a Boston salary in laid-back rural Virginia and doing well before there was any argument over whether someone could be a productive employee at home. It was a difficult place to make new friends unless you were affiliated with UVA, which I wasn’t, so for those 12 weeks I lived a lonely existence: working, playing video games, and driving around listening to the soundtrack to Miami Vice. I was a stranger in a strange land.
In the late evenings I would go to a 24-hour gym. It was on one of these outings I started listening to podcasts. Naturally, I wanted to try to find a podcast about video games. Here I discovered Giant Bomb, a podcast from a website about video games.
My earliest Giant Bomb memory is Jeff Gerstmann and Dan Ryckert getting into an argument (but you never know if Dan is really arguing or just doing a bit) about the movie Terminator 3, and how Terminator 3 is a better movie than Terminator 1, which is objectively not true. That clip is, thankfully, immortalized on YouTube. Here is where you may say “what does Terminator 3 have to do with video games?”
And the answer is: “nothing, but it has everything to do with being the Giant Bombcast.” (In the same clip Dan also makes an earnest argument that Super Mario Sunshine is a better game than Super Mario 64, which is why Dan saying anything always begs a question of whether or not he’s doing a bit.)
Now that I’m almost 40 I have listened to a lot of podcasts, and not just Giant Bomb. In fact, I stopped listening to the Giant Bombcast after Giant Bomb was sold to Fandom, because what made Giant Bomb so compelling is a thing Fandom was never ever going to be able to deliver. The Giant Bombcast never really felt like a podcast. There were a few times Ashley would listen to it in the car with me on a road trip (which I’m grateful for), and it would be half an hour of the crew talking about fast food, and she’d say: “I thought this was a podcast about video games.” And I would say, “this is a podcast about friends.”
These guys: Jeff Gerstmann, Dan Ryckert, Vinny Caravella, Brad Shoemaker, Alex Navarro, Jason Oestricher, Matt Rorie, and Drew Scanlon, were less a podcast and more a group of cool guys whom you had an exclusive privilege of being able to hang out with once a week. People say “if I could have been a fly on the wall” – that was the wall! For a few hours a week you could be whisked away from whatever was bothering you in that moment and transported into a room where experts and friends talked about stuff you loved. Giant Bomb was a sort of magic, and no business owner would ever take the time and put in the work to figure out how the trick worked.
But anyone who listened, watched, edited, and contributed to that community knew.
I would be lying if I didn’t say the Giant Bombcast got me through some difficult times. It did. They made their listeners part of their lives, literally and figuratively, and they became part of mine. They have grown up personally and professionally, and so have I. The cast changed over the years, Ben Pack and Abby Russell were especially welcome additions, but it was the core group that I remember most. When I can, I still listen to Jeff Gerstmann because he has children the same age as ours, and because he just knows (and cares) so damn much about a hobby I’ve been passionate about for over 30 years. I don’t think I have ever done anything else for over 30 years, besides “exist.”
Since COVID I have witnessed an accelerated decay in the humanity once afforded to us by any company. It’s already been covered that Giant Bomb was a long-term (beyond Fandom) victim of the ever-twisting knife of shareholder value. I agree. I don’t need to cover it here, other than to say that I’m disappointed and sad that any corporation could not find a place to have fun for the sake of it when corporations make endlessly wasteful decisions all the time for the sake of it. That, or some other AI-enabled experience that nobody asked for except CEOs. Many other monuments to gaming have been dismantled, as if joy was a bad word. These days, I mostly play old games, because they know what it means to be fun. Now we’ve forgotten. Fun is what I am about, and it is what Giant Bomb was about.
Giant Bomb: thank you for all you have done for me and for this medium that has touched millions. I am sorry to see you go.