By early 2005, I’d been working on some other stuff outside the game industry. I got a call from Simon Whitcombe, a genial publisher at Future in San Francisco. He’d dreamed up some whacked idea to go get Next Generation, dust it off, and relaunch it as a B2B brand for the US market. Would I be tempted to do the honors?

Next-Gen.biz launched in the spring of 05 and was an immediate hit. It quickly became the daily read of choice for game industry execs and, traffic-wise, slayed the competition. It wasn’t just a U.S hit. Readers came from all over the world.

Meanwhile, Edge in Britain was still a great success, except it hadn’t really bothered much with the web. When our friends in the UK Edge office said, “We should do a really splendid Edge website,” someone pointed out that we already did except it was called Next Generation and published out of the U.S. So we carved out a kinda weird arrangement where Next-Gen became Edge’s earthly representative on the web. The fates of these two brands were once again entwined.

Mutual Appreciation

There’s a lot of goodwill between Future in the US and the UK and, well, there’s also some friendly rivalry. That‘s always the way with these things. So, despite much encouragement from the bosses, actually getting the editorial guys down to a situation where we’d sit down and work out a way to merge Next-Gen and Edge properly was going to take an act of amazing selflessness and genius on our part. Which, of course, never happened.

But what did happen was that I called Tony Mott, the editor of Edge, for one of our semi-regular chats. “Tony,” I said. “We can’t have two brands doing the same thing. One of us will have to forgo our brand. It’s a crazy situation. Let’s flip a coin for it.” Tony, not unreasonably, pointed out that this approach might not play to the board and their tedious insistence on responsible, pragmatic decision-making. He also pointed out that Edge was the senior brand; that rebranding print is a lot more work than rebranding online; and that, in any case, Next Generation was the offspring of Edge in the first place. We tossed the coin anyway but that was just for kicks. He’d won the argument .

In an unprecedented display of good sense, management bought it right away. Now we had to figure out how to create something that reflected the pedigree of the magazine and of Next Generation.

Also, we needed create something international. This website will never be from or about one country. The editors are based all over the world. We have editorial contributors in London, Paris, Melbourne, Shanghai, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York and, um, Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Building the Dream

The Edge team in England wanted to do the design. The tech guys in San Francisco wanted to do the technology. People who, in the BS lingo of the day, were "invested" in the project wanted to do the things they’re good at. We picked a small, trans-Atlantic team, and got to work.

Edge’s design team is headed up by an incredibly talented fellow called Darren Phillips. Doesn’t know shit about the internet or at least, didn’t until we showed him how it all works. He picked it up soon enough.

Mark Kramer’s San Francisco team knew way too much about the internet, and certainly knew enough to feel really nervous about some print guy designing a website. Turns out good design is universal. With a bit of tweaking, we got the crayons and the screwdrivers to work together, and this site is what they made.

We wanted to create the same offering in Edge-Online.com as we had done with Next-Gen.biz. That is, fast-breaking, relevant news, gotten, as much as possible, from direct sources. Also, in-depth analysis and features with real game industry people having a say.

We also wanted to give the game industry something they hadn’t been offered before – a proper forum to share views, listen to experts, argue the toss. We wanted to make this site as much like a really good business convention as possible. So you can knock around and gossip in the hallways, or you can go, sit down, and listen to someone smart talk about the things they really care about.

We wanted to create a place where people who love Edge could wrap themselves into the brand while they interfaced with the rest of the industry. Edge means something to people, as do all great brands. This is what we’re offering here. The best games journalism in the world. The most senior games executives talking directly to you. A place where you also can have your say. A place that is also your version of Edge. It’s a work in progress. We wanted to launch at E3 (like I say, the coin-toss conversation with Tony happened less than three months ago), so we’re introducing some amazing functionality in August and September. But this is what, we think, you want.

That’s why Next-Generation had to go. It did its job, brilliantly, and then it made way for something better.

Welcome to Edge-Online.