If you're a regular visitor to the site, you'll already know that of course, but as something that's been a huge part of my life, both professionally and personally for almost five years, naturally I wanted to mention it here.
For anyone who's wondering, it was a very tough decision to make (and for site co-founder Jason Arber in particular), but ultimately we were frustrated that we could no longer sustain the level of content that we had managed up until fairly recently, thanks to home and work commitments. It just seemed better to call it a day rather than leave it limping along with sporadic updates. In actual fact we felt that Pixelsurgeon could have really developed, but when you're not able to pay contributors, and you want to stay true to your indie roots, it was always going to be tough to make those changes. You risk turning into something you never really wanted to be, and in the end I'm really proud of what we did over the last few years, considering Pixelsurgeon was a hobby and we earned nothing from it (apart from the odd t-shirt sale).
My first contribution back in 2002 was a (unwieldy and indulgent!) review of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (
check it out here), and a few months and reviews later, I became the first music editor, and later a senior editor. My last review, just a couple of weeks ago, was for
Fink's marvellous second album, and in total I wrote 135 reviews and conducted 34 interviews.
Early on I remember Jason telling me that Pixelsurgeon was like an excuse to try things that he'd never have the opportunity to do otherwise, and I couldn't agree more. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to interview musicians, movie directors and even comedians that I admire. I have/had no desire to be a journalist, but to me it was just very inspiring talking to these people. So our payment was in these opportunities, plus numerous cds and gig tickets, and the occasional movie premiere of course. Not a bad deal really!
Not only that, but it's been a massive help to me on a professional level; particularly since I went freelance in 2004. It really has been amazing over the years meeting so many people who considered themselves fans of the site, so props must go to Richard May and Rina Cheung who helped make it happen with Jason in the first place. I'm very happy to be able to call them, and many more of the site contributors my friends now, and proud to have played a key role in taking the site beyond its original design-centric audience.
It was also immense fun doing the Audiosurgeon podcasts last year - I'm no DJ but I loved selecting all the tunes and mixing them up! Again, we just couldn't justify spending the time it was taking us.
Another highlight was of course getting to speak at
Semi Permanent 2005 with Jason and Rich at the Barbican in London. Must have been a bit strange for the audience who'd been sitting through one awesome showreel after another, and there we were telling people about our CMS system (amongst other things), but hey we enjoyed it!
At some point I'll retrieve all my reviews and interviews from the site, and perhaps archive a few of them here. For now, thanks to everyone who visited the site, sent us news, cds, gig tickets or anything else over the years. We had a lot of fun, and we hope you maybe had a little bit with us too. No doubt I'll be posting news elsewhere in the near future - thanks to you kind folks who've already invited me to get involved with other projects.
As a final aside, this means that my main email address will cease to be sam@pixelsurgeon. From now on please get in touch via
hello at sam-gilbey.com
