About this site

Design Room is a subscription-based website producing oral histories and behind-the-scenes coverage of the video game industry. Launched in October 2025 by Matt Leone, a 30-year games media veteran formerly of Polygon and 1UP, the site is an experiment to see if an outlet focused on longform reported stories can work.

If you saw Polygon’s oral histories on Crash Bandicoot, Final Fantasy 7, Morrowind, Panzer Dragoon Saga, and a whole bunch of Street Fighter games — or Read-Only Memory’s books on Final Fantasy 7 and Street Fighter 2 — you can expect the same comprehensive approach here, but now on an independent site free of ads, commerce links, hot takes, SEO-focused content, and the external pressures of running a large publication.

We don’t post news, host a podcast, stream on Twitch, run a YouTube channel, or have the typical heartbeat of a games media outlet. We just focus on two things: oral histories that are free for everyone to read, and bonus stories that are exclusive to paid subscribers.

We aim to do the best possible versions of these stories — spending months tracking down primary sources, conducting interviews in person and on calls rather than via email, hiring interpreters and retranslating interviews after the fact, hiring illustrators and photographers for big projects, and putting in extensive editing work to ensure every story is worth your time.

That takes funding, so we offer three subscription tiers — a free option for those who want access to our newsletter, a supporter option with access to bonus stories, and an early access option for those who want to read our oral histories first.

If anyone wants to tip the site, we also have a link open for that here.

We hope you like what you see. For any questions, comments, etc., please don’t hesitate to reach out to support@designroom.site. We’re also on Bluesky (personal account here), and for anyone looking for more independent coverage from former Polygon colleagues, we highly recommend Post Games and Rogue.