It's a Departure

"Although we've come To the end of the road Still I can't let go It's unnatural You belong to me I belong to you" Boyz II Men, "End of the Road"

With that sage wisdom in mind, it's time for us — Griffin and Justin, who have, for the purposes of this introduction, fused into a singular, fraternal hivemind — to announce some big and bittersweet news: This Friday will be our last day as full-time employees at Polygon.

We've written our own individual letters below, but understand that everyone's attention span might not sustain them through both; especially now that you know we're leaving, and our relevance to you slips away like so many grains of sand through the hourglass. So, here's a TL;DR, as the kids say: We're leaving to focus on our other projects, and to have more time to live functional human lives. We're gonna keep doing Monster Factory on some kind of recurring basis, as well as a couple other of our pre-existing Polygon projects. Our departure is completely amicable — so, SORRY, beef-hunters. No beef to be found here. This exit is strictly vegetarian.

Now that we've spoiled all the big surprises, here's our individual takes. Thank you all so much.

GRIFFIN

Okay, so!

This is a bizarre thing to find myself writing, and I hope you'll forgive the dramatics — I've been working in the games industry full-time for a decade now, and the idea of leaving it is, while necessary, still pretty surreal to think about.

This might not come as big a shock to those of you who have seen my output on our video channels slow down a bit over the past year or so. If you only know me from my work here, that absence might make more sense if you knew that I have my fingers in a lot of pies elsewhere. All of them, actually. Each of my individual fingers and thumbs are deeply submerged in ten big, discrete pies. I have several podcasts I do every week with my family. I perform live shows across the country as part of those podcasts. We made a TV show last year — six whole episodes! I've been doing some voice acting work on the side. We're writing a graphic novel adaptation of one of our podcasts, The Adventure Zone, which I've also taken up composing original music for.

I've been enormously fortunate to follow through on all those opportunities on top of my full-time position here at Polygon, but it's always been a tricky balance to strike up. Over time, the part of my life that used to be a part-time, few-hours-a-week thing has turned into something much bigger, and much more demanding than that. A few years ago, those "side projects" turned into a full-time job in their own right, and then that balance became nearly impossible to maintain.

Then, a little over a year ago, my wife and I had a baby. I love him more than anything, and he completely knocked that balance right off its axis.

I get a question pretty frequently from folks familiar with all my work — all my wonderful pies — which is always some variation of, "How do you find time to do all these different things?" The answer, for some time now, has been simply: "Poorly!" I find the time poorly, taken from places where that time should not be taken. Early weekend mornings spent recording a podcast. Lunch breaks spent editing said podcast. Hours out of the work day spent composing music. At night, at 2 a.m. cutting together a Polygon video.

Things get done like that, but not as well as they could be done. Not as efficiently. And certainly not in a healthy manner, mentally and emotionally speaking.

It's always been important to me to not factor in time with my family in that balance. That time is the fulcrum upon which the scale does its work. It is non-negotiable. But in balancing my work time at Polygon, and my mounting work time on the pies, it became apparent that something would have to give. And so I started talking to Chris Grant, Polygon's EIC, about potentially leaving the site.

This was two years ago.

I could say something here about how oh, the timing just wasn't right, and oh, we had to firm up our video strategies before I left, but looking back, the truth of the matter is that I was scared of leaving, and also convinced I could somehow unlock the 25th, 26th and 27th hours hidden in every day.

That first thing is still true. I've been working in the games industry my entire adult life, and, as much as it's had its ups and downs, imagining waking up on a Monday and not being a part of it anymore is understandably pretty terrifying. But the second, fortunately, is a fantasy I no longer harbor.

I mentioned earlier that my departure is on unconditionally good terms, but I would go further to say: I have loved working here. I'm so proud of what Polygon has become, and can't imagine what my life would have been like without being a part of it. Co-founding this site and watching it change, and grow, and find its voice has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.

I'm especially super proud of what our video team is doing these days. For reasons beyond my comprehension or recollection, I was tasked with rethinking our video efforts four years ago. They were dark days, filled with uncertainty and reckless experimentation, and boy howdy, just so many failures. Today, our video output is so unique, and bizarre, and just universally delightful. I adore this team and am so excited to continue watching the stuff they make. (If you haven't already, SMASH that subscribe button.)

Also worth noting: Our footprint isn't completely going to disappear from Polygon. We're in talks to continue doing Monster Factory on ... some kind of schedule, though we're still ironing out exactly what that's going to look like. We're also going to keep doing Awful Squad on an ad-hoc basis, and are in the process of figuring out a way to keep doing Besties, mostly because I refuse to let Chris and Russ win the tontine we all paid into years ago.

There is no end to my gratitude toward the many folks who've allowed me to have a career in this industry for nearly a decade. I'm so grateful to those of you who've read, watched and otherwise supported my work, even when I was writing some of the most sesquipedalian, unreadable games reviews to ever be penned back in my Joystiq days. Your patience with me during this time was simply heroic.

Also, of course, I owe Polygon editor-in-chief Chris Grant my life. Which is not to say that he saved my life by pulling me out of a burning building or something, but rather, that the life I have now simply would not exist if he hadn't taken a chance on me as Joystiq's weekend editor back in 2008. He's been the best boss I've ever worked for by a country mile, and will continue to be a dear and beloved friend.

This decision has been a long time in the making, but that hasn't made it any less difficult to make. Even now, the thought of walking away from Polygon is a scary prospect — but it's a decision I'm making confidently, in pursuit of a happier, more manageable, less anxious life. I imagine there will be some for whom my departure comes as a disappointment. All I ask is that you consider the following: It does not matter how happy your work makes you if work is all that there is. I am not fleeing Polygon, but rather, stepping back from the precipice of that unhappy reality.

I have loved doing the work I've done at Polygon. I hope you have enjoyed it, too.

JUSTIN

I'm writing this on 7:36 a.m. of the day that this announcement has been made. Griffin and Grant have been on my case to write it for ... a while, and I've kept finding excuses, stalling in a manner that must have seemed suspiciously like laziness or the byproduct of a poorly maintained schedule. It was, of course, both.

But also, it was neither. There was a part of me -- and I'm having this realization as I write it -- that knew writing this little note would make this monumental, insignificant, terrifying, sad, joyous thing I'm doing just a little too real.

If you had told me 15 years ago I would be leaving a full-time gig writing about video games, I wouldn't have been able to conceive of it.

Once I found out that people got to do this for a living, it was all I thought about. I loved video games, but was equally obsessed with the people that created media about them. Bill Donahoe, Chris Slate, Ryan Davis, Seanbaby, Jane Pinckard, Luke Smith, Sushi-X, they were all rock stars to me. I still have a very clear memory of attending my first ever GDC event, seeing John Davison and Jeff Green in the span of five minutes and needing to hide in the bathroom for 20 minutes until I regained my composure.

When I was a kid, people from West Virginia didn't get to do jobs like I have now. I started writing about video games for the local paper when I was 12 years old. I had an intense, singular focus on being a games journalist without the first idea of how one goes about getting that job.

So for years, I wrote for myself. I created and maintained no fewer than three different blogs with a readership of, statistically speaking, nobody. I pitched myself to every major gaming site and magazine and was ignored by all of them. But I kept applying, kept pitching, and was eventually ignored by almost all of them. After a few years, I was able to cobble something that looked like a resume in dim light, and things got a bit easier.

The call that changed my life though came from Chris Grant, the EIC of Joystiq who remembered liking my submissions when I had applied for a job (six months prior, didn't get it, natch). He was reminded of my existence after I emailed him trying to get Joystiq to post about some videos I had made about a laserdisc lightgun game featuring prop comedian Gallagher. I owe Gallagher so much that I'll never be able to repay.

Chris changed my life, giving me not only one of my very best friends in all the world, but a job that I'd wanted for as long as I knew it existed. I will always be grateful to him. I'm similarly appreciative to both him and Ludwig Kietzmann for giving me a guest hosting spot on The Joystiq Podcast that set me on the path to this exact moment. I'm so thankful to my wife, Sydnee, for supporting me in this endeavor when a person of weaker will would have begged me to let it go. And, of course, I will always appreciate the listeners and readers that started supporting me back in those early days when "Fire Justin McElroy" was such a common refrain that it became memetic.

I'm not sharing my story to try to elevate myself in your eyes, but to give you hope that if you doggedly put yourself in a position to be helped enough times, eventually someone kinder and smarter and more talented than you may give you a chance. That kind of grace and fortune is the only reason I find myself in my current position and why I'm so stunned that I'm walking away from it.

The only comfort I can take is that maybe, by leaving Polygon, I'm making room for someone else to get their dream job. That's nice to think about.

I've rewritten this three times now, and I'm still unsatisfied. I suspect it's because either (1) I lack the words to capture the immense sense of gratitude and trepidation I feel while writing it or (2) my three-year-old daughter has been blasting "Boys and Girls of Rock N Roll" from The Chipmunk Adventure about 18 inches from my head for the last 90 minutes. On a loop.

And so, I'm abandoning the effort to capture my sentiments with the written word. Ask me to express them in person and be prepared for the warmest, most grateful, most tears-of-joy-soaked hug you have ever received.

Take care of yourself. Make good choices. I love you.