GameFAQs

• 1. Introduction

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  GameFAQs launched on the 5th of November 1995 as the Video Game FAQ Archive, a site with roughly 10 pages and 100 guides. Jeff Veasey, a programmer and gamer, built it to pull scattered walkthroughs and guides from across the internet into one place. He hosted it on America Online and mirrored Andy Eddy's FTP FAQ archive. Within a year, the site had moved to gamefaqs.com and renamed itself, though it listed fewer than 1000 FAQs and updated only on an irregular schedule. What followed was nearly three decades of expansion, corporate acquisitions, and a volunteer-powered archive that grew to cover every game system made since the 1980s. The questions worth following are how a simple mirror site became one of the internet's most-visited gaming destinations, and why its community stayed even as ownership changed hands repeatedly.

• 2. The IGN Years

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  By 1997, Veasey had struck an arrangement with the Imagine Games Network, making GameFAQs an independent affiliate of IGN. Affiliate links appeared on the home page. User contests launched during this period; the first monthly contest, held in 1998, drew 253 entries. The site cycled through several visual identities, including a pink color scheme, before settling on the blue layout that remained in place until 2004.

  November 1999 marked a turning point. On the 5th of November, the site's fourth anniversary, a search box appeared on every page. Two days later, on the 7th of November, the message boards opened in beta. The "Poll of the Day" followed at the end of that same month. Veasey later said these changes reflected his shift in focus: GameFAQs became his full-time job around this time, replacing his earlier work as a programmer. The boards he coded himself would go on to host tens of thousands of discussions daily.

  On the 9th of August 2000, the site logged one million hits in a single day for the first time. The GameFAQs Chat IRC server launched around 2001 but was removed that May due to administrative problems. On the 9th of January 2001, GameFAQs ended its IGN affiliation entirely, turning instead to an advertising banner sold to non-profit organizations to keep revenue flowing.

• 3. CNET and Corporate Life

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  CNET Networks became an official affiliate after the IGN split, running ads on every page and feeding GameSpot news links onto the home page. In September 2002, the ad banner moved from the horizontal header to the vertical sidebar, reshaping the site's navigation. On the 1st of April 2002, Veasey ran an April Fools' prank: he renamed the site "GameFAX," switched the color scheme to green and black to imitate the Xbox, and declared it the only system the site would cover. Clicking any link on the main page redirected users to the real site. Veasey reported receiving hate mail.

  On the 6th of May 2003, CNET Networks acquired GameFAQs outright. The purchase price for GameFAQs and two unrelated websites combined was US$2.2 million. Veasey announced the sale to users on the 3rd of June 2003. He stressed that user-submitted guides and reviews remained the intellectual property of their authors; CNET had purchased only the right to host them. He told users: "The GameFAQs you see today is the one you'll see tomorrow." For the next several months, the only visible change was a CNET footer on every page. The servers moved to California.

  On the 28th of April 2004, a large visual redesign went live. The message boards merged with GameSpot's boards, letting both communities share game-specific discussion pages. GameFAQs converted its board code from ASP to PHP to make the merger work. The redesign was met with general disapproval. Old board pages were preserved for users who preferred the earlier layout, and the site adopted the Smarty template engine shortly after.

• 4. Volunteer Archive

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  In 2006, GameFAQs hosted over 36,000 guides. By February 2009, that number had grown to more than 49,000 guides and over 113,194 reader reviews. By 2012, the site held more than 56,000 guides covering 21,639 unique games. Every item in that archive arrived through a volunteer contribution pipeline. An administrator screens each submission before it goes live, and the contributing author's name is logged in the site's Contributor Recognition section.

  Despite the "FAQ" label, most guides on the site are not lists of frequently asked questions. They function as strategy guides: walkthroughs, item lists, maps, and puzzle solutions. Nearly all are written in plain text. From December 2009, the site also accepted formatted guides using a markup system loosely based on Wiki markup. Authors can also submit cheat codes, developer credits, game release data, game saves, screenshots, and box art images.

  In 2004, Future Network USA published two commercial strategy guides built from GameFAQs contributor material: The Ultimate Xbox Strategy Guide and The Ultimate PS2 Strategy Guide. The site runs ongoing contributor incentives, including FAQ of the Month, Review of the Month, and FAQ Bounties, which reward authors who fill gaps for high-demand uncovered games. Winners receive a gift certificate for an online retailer or can request a mailed gift card.

• 5. Message Board Life

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  Every game in the GameFAQs database has its own message board. Certain popular titles carry additional boards for social discussion. Boards for older consoles often drop topicality rules and get claimed for off-topic socializing; these are called "secret" or "dead" boards. The site also maintains boards for regional communities, including one for United Kingdom users and one for Australia and New Zealand, as well as boards for special interests like anime, television, music, and professional wrestling.

  The numbers from October 2009 illustrate the scale: an average of 84,853 unique logins per day. By November 2006, there were more than 100,000 accounts actively in use. On a typical day, approximately 20,000 topics and 200,000 messages are posted across more than 60,000 individual boards. Users accumulate one "karma" point for each day they log in, and higher karma unlocks the ability to post more messages per day, edit posts, and send private messages.

  The boards rely partly on user moderation. Regular users can "mark" posts that break the site's Terms of Service, flagging them for the volunteer moderators who manage the community. Because of the board count, moderators do not patrol every thread proactively. On the 7th of May 2012, the shared boards that GameFAQs had run on GameSpot went read-only, beginning a separation that had been announced on the 23rd of March 2012.

• 6. Ownership and Leadership

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  After CNET, GameFAQs passed through several more owners. ViacomCBS held the property before Red Ventures acquired it in 2020 as part of a larger package that included GameSpot. In October 2022, Fandom, Inc. purchased GameFAQs and GameSpot from Red Ventures.

  Veasey ran the site alone as sole operator and administrator for years. On the 19th of July 2007, he announced he would eventually step back. Allen Tyner, who had joined the staff in 2004 under the username "SBAllen," took over as editor and administrator. Tyner held the lead admin role for close to twenty years. On the 5th of September 2014, Tyner announced that Stephanie Barnes, using the username Krystal109, had been hired as Community Manager to run contests and manage the site's social media feeds; she left the team by July 2015. On the 7th of May 2012, Tyner announced that long-time moderator Devin Morgan had been hired as an additional administrator, primarily to work on the site's code.

  Tyner stepped down from the lead admin role on the 18th of October 2023. A contributor named ZoopSoul joined Metacritic's staff in May 2025 as part of a broader realignment, and handed off Contributor Lead responsibilities at GameFAQs to a user known as DToast throughout the rest of that year. DToast now runs the site as both lead board Admin and Contributor Lead. In 2009, GameFAQs.com ranked among the 300 most-trafficked English-language websites according to Alexa, and the site has drawn positive coverage from The Guardian, The Canadian Press, and Entertainment Weekly.