Release Date

Sometimes it can be fun when nobody's paying any attention. Take the first six months of Hit Self-Destruct, when I'd do things like invert every colour on the front page for one day without any explanation, or imply that I was ending the site forever. If I had stopped doing Hit Self-Destruct back in those days, I would have lied about the reason. I'd say that I was giving it up to realise my dream of being a community manager or having my own MTV show. Now, though, chastened by the existence of an actual readership, it doesn't seem appropriate to say anything other than Hit Self-Destruct is actually ending, this month, five posts from now.

There's no community manager job and there's no MTV show. There's no obvious change in circumstances that would force me to stop doing this, and I'm not giving it up so that I can do something else. Hit Self-Destruct was always something that would end eventually, and this is the ending.

Registering "Hit Self-Destruct" -- third choice of name -- in October 2007, I went in with no expectations or any sense of obligation, other than that I had accumulated enough thoughts about video games that could be exorcised in about four decent blog posts. There's a lot that has been surprising about how Hit Self-Destruct has turned out since then. Certainly, one of those things is that writing about video games on the internet for free could be one of the more fulfilling things I've ever done. And given that, the biggest surprise of all is that I'd ever want to stop doing it.

I never did Hit Self-Destruct full time; never even got to think about video games full time. Very few of the other demands on my time are as important to me as Hit Self-Destruct, but I can't quit any of those. I can't give Hit Self-Destruct as much time as it deserves (or its readers deserve), and so I can't make it as good as I want it to be anymore. This is a depressing reason to stop doing something, but, on the other hand, it allows me to leave at a point where the body of work here is still fairly consistent.

I think that I've probably accomplished about as much with Hit Self-Destruct as I reasonably can. If I kept going, I do not believe that the posts would get any better, or that there would be any more of them. Under those circumstances, I'd rather not do Hit Self-Destruct at all than see it slow to even more a crawl, past the point where anyone even cares if it's still going or not. This is how it ends, then.

There are five posts left until Hit Self-Destruct is done. I won't be done, at least I hope not. I have no idea what I'm going to do after those five posts. It won't be Hit Self-Destruct and it won't be a regular blog about video games, but after writing for this site every day of my life for almost two years, I now can't imagine ever not writing something, or not wanting an audience for it. This was so much fun to do, and thank you for that part. No more MTV jokes: if you were a Hit Self-Destruct reader that makes you a good friend of mine. I appreciate your attention and hope that you'll consider giving it again to whatever I come up with next.

Whenever that will be. I don't know what I'll do until then; I might play a video game. Or maybe I'll try something else.