He asked about it awhile ago. I thought long and hard about it, since it’s a pretty weird thing that I was initially very against. But times have changed and, overall, the audience has been way more accepting of this sort of thing. So I started thinking about why it is that I had such a knee-jerk reaction to it and couldn’t come up with any great reasons to prevent him from doing it without also clamping down on everyone else’s external stuff in the process. I’m not interested in being one of these bosses that says stuff like “DON’T EVER STREAM VIDEO GAMES UNLESS YOU’RE STREAMING THEM ON OUR OFFICIAL CHANNELS” or “DON’T DO ANY GUEST APPEARANCES ON OTHER PODCASTS WITHOUT CLEARING THEM ALL THROUGH ME” or anything heavy-handed like that. Times have changed, those are sort of ridiculous stances to take.

So while it’s not something that I’d probably do, I didn’t necessarily want to stand in Dan’s way if it’s something he really wanted to go out and do… provided that they aren’t trading on Giant Bomb’s good name in the process (which, given the way the developers announced this thing, is something I should have been more explicit about beforehand. Lesson learned, I guess). In that sense, it’s not unlike anyone else’s external ventures, like me with my old band stuff, Danny O’Dwyer’s YouTube channel, all that PAX wrestling stuff some of us have gotten into, or Dan’s books.

Obviously, since this is a game, it’s a bit different than that. We won’t be covering the game. We… probably wouldn’t have covered it anyway since it appears to be a re-release, but this more or less cements it. Maybe that puts us in a weird spot, but I figured I’d at least let him give it a shot and see how it goes. I’d rather wiggle around, try a few things out, and get some stuff wrong than just stay on the same unyielding track because “that’s how we’ve always done things around here.” Personally I’d put it somewhere between “the time I rapped on-stage at the press conference where Konami announced Def Jam Rapstar” and “the time I signed a release form and got captured for potential use as a crowd member in one of THQ’s WWE games” on the “is this OK or nah” scale. We’ll see!