(Ed’s Note: Since GameAxis Unwired is no more, I figured it would be appropriate for those who worked on the magazine to say their farewells. Here’s former writer “Shoeless” Wayne Santos with his piece)

The Times, They Are a Sort’a Changin’

I was actually in the middle of writing up an interview with David Jaffe when I heard the news about GameAxis Unwired. It felt a little bit like an old friend suddenly announcing that they were going into retirement and it was a little difficult to accept because this same old friend helped me to get to where I am today.

When I first started writing at GameAxis, it was 2004. Halo II hadn’t even come out yet. The magazine itself was about the size of a newspaper and a little on the thin side. I was just a contributor then, but that didn’t last very long. The magazine got bigger, shrunk down to proper magazine size with glossy covers and more pages and I went along for the ride as a staff writer.

Over the course of those years, I got to do a lot of stuff I’d only ever run through my head as fantasies. I got to go to E3, an activity I now dread, but without GameAxis, I never would have seen first hand how crazy and unmanageable the experience is. I got to interview figures in the industry like Bill Roper proudly espousing the soon-to-be-epic Hellgate: London, blissfully unaware that in the span of a few months, the game would implode on itself. I even managed to meet—and befriend—one of my idols, Ragnar Tornquist, sitting down with the man who made one of my favorite adventure games, The Longest Journey, and tell him how much I loved it and his talent.

All these experiences and many others were part of what I look back on now as a “Golden Nerd Age,” where the original crew of GameAxis toiled, fretted and argued every month about what was going into the next issue. But the reason we put so much stress into it was because we all loved games, and we all wanted to make sure that the games and issue we were passionate about had proper representation. We may have been a bunch of people who were theoretically professionals in an industry, but that didn’t stop people from salivating the first time a PS3 showed up at the GameAxis office and everyone wanted to see what MotorStorm was like.

Of course, we’d all be a little underwhelmed by the actual launch of the PS3 as time wore on, but it was moments like that which really solidified that GameAxis was run by a bunch of gamers that still cared what was happening to an industry that had brought them so much joy.

A few years later, I left Singapore and returned to my native country of Canada. I still contributed to GameAxis, but there were other opportunities now too. IGN, High-Def Digest and others were all interested in people that loved and wrote about games and the fact that my experience in game journalism came from Southeast Asia wasn’t a factor at all. Now Canada finally has its first national video game magazine, and I’m sitting here, as a Reviews Editor of all things, still doing the same thing I did when I was at GameAxis all those years ago. I write about games. I think about them. I talk to people in the industry about them. Nothing much has changed except for the places and the people I do it with.

And at the end of it all, GameAxis isn’t really dead. The magazine itself is, sure, but the website is still there; the same website I was a part of when they decided to update it more regularly, add in more reviews, news and comments from readers.

It’s been a long road, but if any magazine in Singapore had a good run and deserves a rest, GameAxis is it. Some of my fondest memories of the magazine are Ismet and I and playing Guitar Hero too loud while people tell us to at least wait until the office day is over before we rock the house down. They were good times.  GameAxis Unwired, you will be missed.