Why we are making Jank

What I want from Jank is simple. I want to find the good PC games, and write about them with an honesty and thoughtfulness that only independent ownership can allow. An oasis where good writing on games can live in peace. I want Jank to be a little tropical island you can visit, where you will always find me in the shallows, trousers rolled up, spearfishing for something interesting. Like Tom Hanks in Castaway.

Except I'm not a shill for FedEx. So I also want to fire autoplaying videos into the sea. I would like churn to take a backseat to quality scribbles. And if the noise of deals posts could please diminish into nothing, that would be nice. Perhaps paragraph-long headlines could also get straight into the bin? No worries if not. At the very least, I would appreciate a place where I can safely shit on Call Of Duty when annually called upon to do so, a high horse upon which to laugh at Leslie Benzies' latest disaster. What? You mean having your own site allows you to just do all that? Cool. 

We aren't trailblazing in this. All around us independent games journo outfits are springing up like pockets of insurgency on the world map of some kind of fucked-up grand strategy game. Media megacorps loom over the land like wealthy uncaring barons, razing audiences with the irreparable napalm of invasive advertising, then laying off their best workers when profits inevitably nosedive. Rebel factions like Aftermath and Remap have manifested in far-flung provinces of a steadily fragmenting web, roused by scarred veterans of Kotaku and Vice. Even in the same week as we have revealed Jank in the UK, a gang of US writers have launched an independent site called Mothership focused on gender and identity. The scramble to survive is global.

Countless newsletter mercenaries roam the hills, podcaster fiefdoms rise and fall, and all the while outsider bandits like Electron Dance and No Escape have been nurturing their own raider camps out in the wilds for years - often boltholes of sense from the recurrent terrors of social media discourse. Modern games media is a countryside in chaos, is what I'm saying. And you, reader, are the disgruntled peasantry in this analogy. Eat your muck.

But what if the muck tasted nice? It is into this wartorn world of rascals that we wheel out Jank. If I'm going to earn an extremely low wage writing about games, it may as well be under a banner of my own making. But there's no reason we can't write well under such pressure - we've been doing it for years.

Graham and Jonty might put the Balkanisation of the games media less dramatically (I like committing to a metaphor) but we all agree there are a lot of existential worries when launching a site like this. Will we find time to keep our flag aloft between our day jobs and freelance work? Will we muster any subscribers at all? Can we (should we) compete with the behemoths of IGN or PC Gamer? Both of whom make money not only from ads on articles, but also the big showcases that come attached to their names. Jank does not have a Jank Show. It doesn't have 38 full-time editors. It has three bruised veterans and a blog roll. And so we join the rest of the hit-and-run reprobates out in the wilderness.

It's a tough place and a tough time to run what is effectively an internet postcard about bleeps and bloops. But I'm confident in our ability, our experience, and our skeptical squinting eyes. Graham, Jonty and I have forgotten more about videogames than many will ever know. We've done this job for so long, our bullshit detectors are shockproof, our keyboard hands nicely calloused. Look forward to the obligatory roast I've already written about why AI cannot touch us (it is because AI cannot touch even a single hair on a dog, nor feel resultant happiness) but robots are not our competition. Our human friends and talented colleagues at other publications are our desired targets (love you, RPS! Let's fight). Any reader who has followed us across publications and podcasts will share this confidence in our tiny guerrilla war of words. You too know good writing when you see it. You'll see lots of it in these woods.