Design Room is six months-old (and we're having a sale)

We just passed our six month anniversary, so it seems like a good time to check in, give an update on how things have been going, and preview what's coming next. Before we get into that, though, some news:

We're having a sale!

Starting now and running through Friday at 5 p.m. Pacific time, we're lowering the cost of an annual subscription to our Supporter tier from $70/year to $50/year. Read all our paid subscriber-exclusive stories, get the ability to comment on articles, and help fund more freelance work for the price of what a game cost in the '90s. If you haven't signed up yet, there's never been a better time.

We also now have pages on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, so you can follow us wherever is convenient. (Though the YouTube channel is, for now, more of an archive than something with regular updates.) And if you don't already subscribe to our newsletter, you can sign up here for free to get updated whenever we publish a big story.

So, why support us? Let's look back on what we've done so far.

The first six months

I launched this site in October 2025 because I love oral histories. I did a bunch of them when I worked at Polygon, and I feel like the format is one of the best ways to look back at video game history.

It's also one of the toughest ways to make money, since these stories can take months to put together and don't tend to be sustainable alongside traditional display ads. So, I figured, one way to make them financially viable might be to build a subscription site around them.

So far, that's resulted in...

• Shadow of the Colossus – We launched with a 10,000-word oral history on Team Ico's PlayStation 2 masterpiece timed with its 20th anniversary. We interviewed 14 people including team leads Fumito Ueda and Kenji Kaido, hired former Japan Studio illustrator Takashi Oga to do the header art, and posted three bonus stories like this one on how people felt about The Last Guardian's decade in development.
• Nick Suttner interviews – As a companion to the Shadow of the Colossus story, we got an assist from an old friend and published two previously-unseen interviews that Nick Suttner conducted over a decade ago for Boss Fight Books, putting another 10,000 words about Team Ico on the site.
• Sensory Overload – We did a series looking at games that incorporate music into their gameplay in interesting ways, with original art from Wendy Murphy.
• Rez Infinite – I talked to Tetsuya Mizuguchi and the team at Enhance about my favorite VR tech demo to date, and why they're still teasing a follow-up nine years later.
• Sound Fantasy – For our first freelance story, Ben Bertoli conducted a rare three-hour interview with Toshio Iwai, the director of Nintendo DS music game Electroplankton, about working with Nintendo and his canceled SNES game Sound Fantasy. Iwai also gave us previously-unseen high quality footage of Sound Fantasy's Beat Hopper mode, which you can see on our YouTube channel.
• Otocky – We ran a bonus story talking with Iwai about his 1987 rhythm shooter starring a flying "sound warrior" and his connection to The Pokémon Company's president and CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara.
• Sayonara Wild Hearts – I talked to the team at Simogo about the creation of their game's best stage — even if they don't see it that way — "Begin Again". They also passed along a bunch of early-development screenshots and audio clips showing how they built the stage and composed the song behind it.
• Mirror's Edge – For our second freelance project, Lewis Gordon spoke to nine team members about DICE's innovative 2008 first-person runner for a 6,000-word story, digging up bonus stories on a lost sequel and musical inspirations, and we tied it all together with original art from Rollerdrome concept artist Kim Hu.
• The Beatles: Rock Band – We collaborated with Read-Only Memory to post an excerpt from Blake Hester's book The Oral History of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the Music Game Boom, looking at how Harmonix and MTV tackled the biggest license in music.
• Capcom Craze Club brochure – For a quick little bonus story, I dug up a rare Capcom comic making fun of SNK for copying Street Fighter back in the '90s.
• Lobo – I stumbled onto a story about the censorship of Ocean's canceled, Killer Instinct-inspired fighting game, and we posted a bunch of never-before-seen art from the game, including a very '90s piece designed to be the game's box art.
• Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP – For the 15th anniversary of one of the best games on iOS, I talked to the team about catching a wave at just the right moment, with a header illustration by deadlyyucca so accurate to the original game's style that people thought it was a screenshot... until they looked closer and saw the birthday cake in the middle.
• Final Fight Revenge – As a sort of bonus chapter to the Street Fighter history book I wrote a few years back, I put together a 5,000-word oral history of Capcom's infamous U.S.-developed Final Fight fighting game, with never-before-seen development art showing what the game's assets looked like before they were compressed to fit on Saturn.

Looking over the list, I'm generally happy with the site's output so far. I see a few gaps where things fell through or got delayed (the original plan was to launch with a Kingdom Hearts story), but this gives a good sense of our goals — doing a mix of big stories and specialist trivia, focusing on rare interviews and stories that aren't being told elsewhere, digging up new development materials, etc.

I've struggled on occasion with getting stories up at a consistent pace. I always knew this would be a challenge, but as someone who spent a couple decades at sites that published multiple times a day, it's a bit tough feeling out that tug of war between doing the best stories possible and publishing on a regular schedule. I'm generally inclined to give stories as much time as they need, but that's not typically the best way to run a subscription business, so it's something I think about a lot.

Shadow of the Colossus has been our biggest traffic-driver, followed by Mirror's Edge, The Beatles: Rock Band, and Sayonara Wild Hearts, which is about what I would expect given the popularity of the games covered.

Financially, the site has done... ok. Not well enough to consider it a success, but not poorly enough to consider it a failure. I'm not taking a salary for now and I'm putting every dollar that comes in back into freelance assignments and logistical costs. That isn't sustainable forever, but if you're a paid subscriber, you should know you're directly funding more writing, artwork, translation, and copy editing.

The next six months

One fun part of running a retrospective site is I already know a good chunk of the stories we'll be publishing between now and the end of the year. I don't want to speak too soon on most of them, primarily out of a fear of jinxing things, but we have a very large story coming in May or June and plenty of big stuff scheduled to roll out over the rest of the year.

If you've kept up with the site so far, you can expect a similar mix of elaborate, magazine cover-style stories on big-name games and obscure trivia that will make a few people very happy. We're digging into ambitious experiments, hardcore favorites, indie breakouts, a couple canceled games, even some pinball.

We're going to experiment with a few things, but the biggest change coming up will likely be that we're going to run more freelance stories. 

Over the past six months, we published two freelance projects. For the next six months, we have 12 assigned. Some big. Some small. Some safe bets. Some long shots. One that's been in the works since before the site launched, currently exists as an 8,000-word draft, and is still months from being done.

Don't hold us to posting 12 exactly, since most of these are still in the reporting phase and some might not happen, and who knows what else might pop up. But hopefully this will get us closer to that consistent pace I have in my head without requiring many compromises.

That's it for now

To close things out, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who's supported the site so far — whether as a paid subscriber, a reader, a developer who has shared their time, or someone who likes social posts yet has no intention of reading the stories.

If anyone reading ever wants to get in touch, pitch a freelance story, talk about a game you worked on, suggest stories you'd like us to chase, or send any other feedback along, feel free to contact support@designroom.site at any time.

Thanks for reading.