Blade Edge

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About Drew Sikora – Computer Game Development: GameDev.net

Joining the community in August of 2000, Drew was elevated to the team of Staff members around June of 2001, where he took over the creation of weekly polls (which for a while he also did analysis of), managed a game mods resource and forum, and started up a weekly newsletter called GDNet Direct. He also continued to write articles, including his first series called You Got Game.

The weekly newsletter GDNet Direct was a brainchild of several community members, including Drew, and was originally launched in HTML format with a similar theme to the main site in late January 2002. The format was quickly changed to plain text for ease of editing, and remained so until late July in 2004, when a design contest was held in the community for an HTML template. The winning design featured a blue and white theme not unlike the current page theme, although that version of the site came almost a year and a half later. some original content was put into the newsletter for a short time, but submissions were minimal and the newsletter returned to simply collecting the events of the past week. Bi-weekly issues were also tried for a short time, but the format returned to weekly only after a few months. When the HTML template debuted, a text version continued to be created for email users with HTML disabled. With the workload effectively doubled and very little auto-generation of content, Drew was weighed down and in June 2007 the HTML newsletter was canceled, leaving only the plain-text version that goes out today.

In 2002 Drew attended his very first developer conference, the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA. The experience was amazing, especially having a press pass from GameDev.net to go around and see as much as he could. He wrote reams of coverage and his Staff associates quickly labeled him a “conference covering robot”. Since then Drew hasn’t missed a single trip out to California to attend and cover GDC. In 2007, Drew attended the brand-new Online Game Developers Conference (now known as ION) in Seattle, which was his first non-GDC developer conference. Since then he’s also routinely been to IGC, MIGS, VGExpo, AGDC and the NY ComicCon.

In September 2006 Drew became Executive Producer, in charge of the content and community of GameDev.net, as well as working with companies and other media on business ventures. This was part of a site-wide Staff reorganization to allow the site owners and original founders more time to follow their current pursuits, which had pulled them away from the site. Drew, Melissa “frizzlefry” Astle, Oluseyi Sonaiya, John Hattan and Richard “superpig” Fine formed the core of the Operations Team, which now handles the day-to-day running of the website. The owners/founders became similar to a board of trustees and oversees the high-level aspects and direction of the site.

Since then, Drew has worked hard to rejuvenate the site, which at that time had fallen nearly dormant from a content perspective, and it was beginning to have an effect on the still thriving community.  Leveraging his many industry contacts to start bringing in more content to publish, as well as working with event leaders and various community members, by mid-2007 the site was updating weekly with fresh content again. A publishing calendar was created to let the community know what new content was coming. The event calendar was filled with dozens of events for the entire year. A news team was created that has kept the front page news section constantly filled with new daily information, including the popular Daily GameDev.net feature started by Trent “mittens” Polack in late March 2008 along with Drew’s own feature Weekend Reading.

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