Warren Ellis switches off his Engine
Maybe if I looked at the actual forums a little more often I’d have seen this coming?
EDIT (AND AGAIN): Ah, so this isn’t a nasty surprise for anyone else but me. I know I should be happy for you all, but I’m still a little upset.
To be fair, you had to wonder just how the man had time for everything else (the novels, the comics, the screenplays, the failed TV pilots…) as well as regularly updating a site filled with wonderful bits and bobs and moderating a massive and active community forum.
Here’s hoping all of the archives remain available for a while. It’s like dipping into one of those Christmas-time ‘bit of everything’ reference-style books (except, you know… good): a cross between Schott’s Almanack and Snow Crash; the Guinness book of World Records and Transmetropolitan.
The internet is interesting in that way. It’s a world where everything moves far faster than we can expect. Hell, it’s instantaneous. And in adapting to the rate of data flow and information exchange, we accellerate our own perceptions of it. In no time at all, trawling through The Engine for interesting tidbits became part of a regular net regime for many of us. I barely even contributed- it’s over my head, for the most part, a lot of the time- but it was great to enjoy a sort of all-access pass to a the inner workings of a lot of talented people’s minds.
In next to no time, The Engine became an institution. That’s the way of things online. I suspect there are very few edifices on this medium that will outlive their creators.
But here’s the upside: www.rockpapershotgun.com is new, and really very good.
How else can we mark the passing of an institution? Well, there’s always contributing to a nice, in-depth discussion about the perception of video games.
He announced it last month Si.
Rantz Hoseley has graciously taken it upon himself to start up the Engine again, but under a different name. As a main contributor to the Engine he worked with Warren and the other Mods to get a backlog of the Engine archives to move over to the new forum. The only downside to this is that it is not at all affiliated with Warren, so the general opinion is you can expect a lot less involvement from him. You can find that all at:
http://www.panelandpixel.com/
There is also a lot of activity on the engine.ning.com network, where engineers are keeping in touch and posting all of the would-be-engine-bound goodies on the forum there.
Thanks for that Brandon. For those of us who enjoy comics without really being ‘in’ them, the Engine was a truly awesome spot. Let’s see if Panel and Pixel lives up to its predecessor.