I was weeding through my contact database this afternoon and ran across an entry for Rich Laporte, formerly of GoneGold.com. That brought back some memories.
When I first started working at Cyberlore he was one of the first “media contacts” that I made. He was an early fan of Majesty.
Anyway, we kept in touch, would meet at E3’s, have the occasional phone call and then he just sort of dropped off the planet.
He was a great guy with a sad story and a lot of health issues that didn’t normally get in the way of his running of the site. I assume that this changed somehow.
I still think about him occasionally and just wished that I’d had a chance to say “thanks” for being such a good guy there at the beginning of my videogaming career.
If anybody has a clue as to what became of him I’d love to hear it.
I vaguely remember a thread about him over at OO and possibly one here as well. It seemed like there were some folks intent on protecting his privacy. I might be remembering wrong though, but I had the feeling that he just wanted to be left alone after some “misunderstandings” regarding the site/content.
Yeah… it doesn’t look like that’s where I would have wanted to ask. Searching their forum was at least somewhat informative though so I thank you for that.
Simply put, he shut down his site after health issues interfered with his ability to continue and he dropped out of the community entirely. When he shut the site down he did so with no notice, which left some bitter.
There’s a lot of rumor and second hand stories around, but the above pretty much covers it. And when I say he dropped out of the community, I mean he dropped out. As far as I know, he’s only once even talked about it and that was through an interview he did a few years after the site shut down.
Yeah, I think there were some hard feelings over the way in which things happened. I guess there was supposed to be an ownership transfer and both parties involved claimed the other didn’t follow through.
Keep in mind the bulk of the drama was actually over ConsoleGold, which was another site Rich owned the domain for and was sort of a spin-off of GoneGold.
There was a bit of drama over GoneGold’s demise, but the bulk of the bitterness towards Rich regarding GoneGold was because the site went down with no warning, leaving the community, and the forum staff, without a clue as to why, and trying to figure out what to do as a result. It’s like someone shutdown your favorite hangout, which you helped build, without so much as a “Later guys!” note on the door.
A lot of people were also genuinely concerned about what happened to Rich, having talked to him via email (and in some cases in real life). He’d shared his history and health issues with a lot of people, and a lot of those folks considered him a friend.
And of course there were the people who had donated to the site fairly close to the time the server went dark in a hope to get the problems with the server (which crashed all the time) fixed. I believe those folks got their money back, but I could be wrong.
Yeah… it doesn’t look like that’s where I would have wanted to ask.
It’s not really that big a deal as most of it’s blown over, but it’s one of those questions that used to get asked a lot, so people understandably don’t feel like answering it for the 100th time, especially with the emotional baggage it always carries.
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Anyway, it was a nice bit of closure when the post Alan linked was put up. Some people will never let go, but for the most part everyone’s moved on.
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And I probably never would’ve played (or known about) Majesty without Rich’s (and the GG community’s) take on it.
I still miss Rich. Gone Gold was the first forum I checked on a regular basis, it really got me into being excited about upcoming releases and reading Rich’s daily front page entries (which became less regular as time went on) was a part of my morning ritual.
Yes, it’s sad because Gone Gold was a site that seemed to be the center of the PC gaming universe in it’s prime. At first it was because Rich was so good at finding out accurate release dates, but later it was because of the active community that developed.
I essentially rely on 3 sites now days for what I relied on Gone Gold for back then.
Heck yeah, and I second what Kael said as I know Rich had to be commended for keeping his site going as long as he did while undergoing his own personal Hell (untreatable spinal pain ON TOP of his throat cancer).
So what does the Octopus Overlords site have to do with this? I spent a lot of time on GG, and do remember it just closing down with no warning, and eventually found OO (and this site). Was OO just another spinoff from GG??
