You're just jealous -you- didn't think to get here twelve days ago.

The Side Mission is the vision and pet project of Chris Vandergaag, a Vancouver-based writer and editor. He contributes regularly to tech/gaming sections at The Georgia Straight, and Canoe.ca.

The Side Mission isn’t completely a solo effort, however; talented people have helped breathe life into it:

LOGO/VISUAL DESIGN
Paula Grasdal

CORRESPONDENTS
Aaron Malkin
Vanessa Marshall
Sue Breisch

We’re here to talk about video games and the culture in which they reside. We love games. Playing them and talking about them and collecting them and, when they’re original NES game paks, blowing on them. We love gaming and always will. Probably. Maybe next week we’ll become obsessed with building tiny ships in bottles. But probably not.

We also love culture. Culture is awesome. It’s so deep.

The Side Mission caters to gamers who believe their gaming tastes to be more ‘adult’ and refined than they used to be, AND to those blatantly clinging to their youth. For we find these traits cohabitate nicely… why, they’re often found in the same person…

The Side Mission is not just another gaming news and review site. There are already dozens of review and news websites, most of which are financed just a little better than this one (ign is a unit of Fox and Gamespot is CBS… they get advance copies of everything, they can send reporters to Japan to spy on Shigeru Miyamoto while he eats breakfast, etc.) and so only idiots would try to directly compete with gigantic media outlets and offer identical services, because they’d do a much poorer job of delivering those services.

So, while The Side Mission will occasionally recommend software and talk about the industry and ask readers to rate things, and while I am an idiot, I’m still going a different route.

Basically The Side Mission exists to:

• be different.

• talk about gamers as well as games.