Ready Up is one year old and what a year it’s been. The management team of Dan, Simes and myself built the site in the early weeks of November 2007. My contribution to the process was to say “It can’t be grey. Grey looks crap. How about red? That’s jolly” and helpful things like “I don’t like that font”. The site launched and the first post was written by Simes. Now Simes is an amazing human; Dan and I live in a kind of constant awe of of him. He’s very clever, a precise chap. There’s no nonsense with Simes and he always manages to say things just exactly how they are with all the unnecessary chatter stripped away. In his test post he said it all and so our inaugural blog became the site’s motto.
Since then we’ve gone from strength to strength. The team grew larger as we found more and more gamers with passion, talent and eloquence to join us in creating a really great community site. Some of our staff writers have taken on responsibility for the new emerging sections of the site such as our Xbox Live Arcade reviews and our community contact with our thriving forum. One of the great successes of Ready Up and a section that we are all particularly proud of is the Ready Up Juniors. Our Juniors Manager Laura Rich has worked tirelessly to create a great body of work with the Ready Up kids stopping only to give birth to our newest Ready Up Junior, Rhys.
Over the last year we’ve written about our every thought and feeling on gaming, we’ve reviewed over 120 games, we’ve made several mini documentaries that have appeared on the cover disk of magazines and been screened at the Edinburgh Festival. We have also travelled the length and breadth of the country to festivals, game launches, previews, private viewings of games in development and we’ve run a couple of our own events including the Video Games Live Preshow and Europe’s first chance to play Guitar Hero World Tour. Every day I have worked on this site has been a pleasure and a privilege.
Thanks to our staff for all their hard work so far and here’s to many more years together. Thanks to our sponsor Retro GT for their trust, support and their extremely high quality clothing. Thank you to the publishers and PRs for their staunch backing and in particular to Leo Tan at Capcom, the whole team at Barrington Harvey and Tommy and Mike Tallarico from Video Games Live who’ve all been real friends to us. Lastly thanks to you the reader for your interest and support. Keep gaming and we’ll keep writing about it.
Here’s a look at our first year in a little gallery. Click on the thumbnails to see the full size versions.
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