Happy Birthday us! On this very day five years ago, Sir Gaulian and I first embarked on our grand Victorian gaming adventures – and what a merry time it’s been.

Many of the Victorian stylings have been dropped along the way, and the ambitious Choose Your Own Adventure game I started to create using nothing but various WordPress pages was quickly abandoned (although bits of it are still out there if you know where to look) – yet we’re still going strong. Arguably stronger than ever, I reckon.

It’s interesting to take a look back through the stats and see some of the hits and misses we’ve had along the way. Visitor numbers got off to a slow start back in 2011, but the article ‘Bikini Warriors: The Sorry State Of Female Representation in Video Games’ was one of our biggest early hits, along with retrospectives on Psi-Ops and Shadow of the Colossus, as well as a look at ‘musou’ games.

2012 saw Sir Gaulian’s excellent time-travel post ‘Past Present, Future Present and Past Future‘ rack up an enormous number of hits after it was featured on ‘Freshly Pressed’, and my controversial thoughts on CoD Modern Warfare – ‘This Is Just A Modern War Song‘ – also proved popular. The following year, Sir Gaulian scored another hit with ‘The Two Dollar Coin‘, a musing on the value of gaming ‘loot’, and my review of the failings of Far Cry 2 also racked up the views.

In 2014, ‘ZombiU: The Scariest Game I’ve Ever Played‘ topped the hit chart, followed by Sir Gaulian’s wonderful ‘Stealth games can learn from human behaviour in public toilets‘, while in 2015 we had our best year yet, with total yearly page views smashing through the 20,000 barrier for the first time. A couple of posts stood head and shoulders above the rest in terms of hits, namely ‘BJ Blazcowicz, the Nazis and the Aryan race: how Wolfenstein: The New Order tackles the rise of the far right‘ and ‘Big Ant Studios is swarming America’s cultural monopoly‘, followed by a look at Amiga piracy – ‘The hand and the pirate‘ – and ‘The Gentlemen decide: the most agreeable games of the generation (Xbox 360, PS3)‘, in which we spent many enjoyable hours deciding the merits of our favourite games.

This year, meanwhile, the most popular post so far is ‘Microsoft, I’m so confused‘, which got picked up by N4G as part of their E3 coverage and accrued some, ahem, ‘heated’ comments from Xbox fans.

Here’s looking forward to the next five years – we’re hoping to make the site even bigger and better in the future. And if you want to look back to see where we’ve been, I’ve activated the Archives in the side column so you can do just that. Thanks to all our regular readers, and thanks especially to those who have been with us since the beginning. See you in 2021!

Lucius & Sir Gaulian