Round Table: Celebrating Our First Anniversary

A year ago today we launched this website. We have had a lot of changes in the last year, but we have tried to keep the SEGA news constant and I hope we have. Now that we are at our first year, I wanted the staff to talk about their experience with the site and what they want to see for the future.

ShadiWulf

I remember when SEGAbits first started like it was yesterday. George was getting upset with The Kartel taking over SEGA Nerds and wanted to start his own SEGA site. At the time I wasn’t fully confident in my HTML skills so Ingolme built the site and George designed it. Although I did help with SEGAbits redesigns. The current featured bar was coded and designed by me. I also skinned the forums.

A lot of has changed in just one year. SEGAbits is a pretty big site now; we get A LOT of hits. That is why I made the SEGAbits 2011 survey. I wanted to see what people thought of the site, even people who weren’t registered. The survey was a success; over 100 people filled it out. I want to personally thank everyone that filled it out! Thank you so much.

It’s not just SEGAbits that has changed a lot in one year though. I have also changed a lot in one year. I have been taking design classes and have learned a lot about design. A quick list of some things I didn’t know when SEGAbits first started include typography, harmony, information structure, balance, using contrast in the right way, compatible colors, unity, and simplicity.

We have been working on and off on the next SEGAbits redesign. Sadly we weren’t able to get it done in time for our one year anniversary, but I promise SEGAbits will be getting a redesign sometime this year. My goals for the SEGAbits redesign are for it to be easy to read, have harmony/balance, simplicity, and to provide a pleasant user experience with an eye pleasing layout that most websites lack.

When the new layout goes up I hope everyone enjoys it. I am very thankful that I am able to be a part of SEGAbits.

-nSega54-

As a new writer to SEGAbits, it’s hard to talk much about my involvement in this monumental year, but I fully congratulate the rest of the staff for creating the site and for this great achievement. Even in the couple months I’ve been here, the feeling of growth has been undeniable, and this is thanks not only to the staff, but to the thriving community that they’ve established.

It’s so nice to see that SEGA, a company that’s been through its share of rough spots, still has, after all these years, such a devoted fanbase, the type of fanbase that makes a site like this possible. You guys are awesome, and it’s always a treat to get to interact with you through your comments on our articles and of course our very active forum community.

It’s a pleasure and a privilage to be part of such a great website and community, and I look forward to continuing to be a part of it as we move forward into 2011.

Thanks a lot, everybody. We sincerely appreciate it.

MadeManG74

The most important thing about SegaBits for me, by a good margin, is the community. The site was always a way to hold together the great Sega fans that had come to know each other over the years so that we could discuss the latest news, the classics, and develop increasingly obscure and nonsensical running gags on the forums.

I had my doubts about an entire community coming together and lasting as long as we have, but this tight-knit group of like-minded guys and gals have managed to remain here for a year with no end in sight to our shenanigans.

Congratulations SegaBits, and a big thanks to all the staff and all the posters on the forums.

cube_b3

I’ve known Master George and The Mafia (in joke) for a few years now. It really has been an amazing experience watching George evolve from a writer to the editor-in-chief. He’s really put together a great fan site, and to quote SEGA’s 80s marketing tag line:

“Welcome to the Next Level”

In addition to bringing the latest SEGA (& Affiliated) News & Reviews, we are expanding on our original content with cool features such as Barry The Nomad’s “5”, -nSEGA54-‘s “Sequel Saturday”, and our Weekend Round Table. We will be starting another awesome feature starting this week, prepare yourself for “Tuesday Tunes”, where we play some of the best SEGA tunes and fan covers.

Also expect to see a lot more reviews of upcoming games, forgotten classics and under-appreciated gems from the Dreamcast-Scene.

Barry the Nomad

I’ve been writing for SEGAbits since April, and I have to say it has been a lot of fun! Not only do Sharky and George allow writers the freedom to pursue continuing features and reviews, but they also helped me in building a bridge between SEGAbits and the SEGA Junkyard blogs and SEGA Memories blog by way of “The SEGA Network”. While the aforementioned blogs have their share of non-news posts such as “Segata Sanshiro has awesome hair” and “what’s the deal with VMU caps?” , hardly worthy of a proper news post, other times there are some very worthy blog posts that deserve more show. Thanks to SEGAbits I’ve been able to bring Gagaman’s videos to readers, as well as share many stories usually found only on the blogs. The SEGA Network also highlights other SEGA blogs definitely worth checking out.

Aside from the SEGA Network, I was proud to write one of the first reviews of the iPhone’s Sonic 4 to hit the net. I also started my own weekly feature, “5 Things” and am currently pursuing some unique interviews for 2011. Thanks to the many games to come in 2011, SEGAbits has a lot to cover: Sonic Anniversary, Sonic 4 Episode 2, Binary Domain, Virtua Tennis 4 and Rise of Nightmares just to name a few. You can bet I’ll be there! Here’s to many more years of SEGAbits!

nuckles87

The people of SEGAbits are a group of people I’ve been following for awhile. After The Kartel took over SEGA Nerds and condemned it to a slow, sad death, I was happy to see a few people from the website break off and create what was essentially what SEGA Nerds used to be.

Since then, it’s been a pleasure to watch the site slowly grow and find its identity. We even got to go to E3! How many other sites get to do that in their first year? We’re going again this year too, that much I can tell you, and the coverage is going to be better.

A website like SEGA Bits is important. For all of its history and everything the company is doing today, SEGA deserves more than the minor lip service it receives from the gaming press, something which is often followed by how Sonic’s games such these days. SEGA bits celebrates SEGA’s legacy and lets it be known that SEGA as a company still produces lots of wonderful product, even if they no longer have a console to sell it on. Over the course of the next year, SEGA bits will be taking steps to try to raise awareness for just how awesome and revolutionary many of SEGA’s products have been, and will also be raising awareness regarding games a lot of SEGA fans simply don’t know much about.

To be this good takes AGES.
To be this good takes SEGA.
Given time, SEGAbits will become damn good in its own right.

George

I remember getting whined out for not launching SEGAbits during January. I was making promises about launching it before 2010, but all those didn’t happen. We finally launched the site on February 6th, 2010, and to my surprise many people followed the site on the first day. Here we are a year later, I never expected the site to last this long.

When starting the website, an important thing I wanted was having easier integration with the forums and front site. We used the help of WP-United to merge logins, thus the user only needs to have one account for both forums and front site. I’m glad to say we have kept this feature intact. I would like to expand on it by offering Facebook, Twitter and Google Account login options in the future.
Something that has been missing on the site has been video content. We plan on introducing more of that in the upcoming months. I have a few features I have wanted to do that will be article and video based, so that should be fun. The last promise I want to do for the 2nd year is get the Podcast back up and running. Something I have been asked about for the last 6 months. We will reboot it, it will be faster and stronger. This is a promise.

What do you want to see SEGAbits do for their second year?

Sharky

Segabits, it costs me both time and money and what do I get in return? Complaining people telling me this and that isn’t good enough. So exactly like my girlfriend then! Na, you’re alright!

But seriously, I remember it as if it was only last year (oh wait) that me and George were busily preparing the site, discussing and designing content, layout, logo and even what we were going to call the damn thing.

But it goes back further then that, I met George many years ago and as Sega fans we both hit it off and became very good ‘e-friends’. I have some good memories of talking to him for hours on end about all kinds of things and on the TGS and E3 events sitting up all night finding as much info as we possibly could on every game Sega announced.

Then I got involved with the SegaNerds project and when a position opened up I put in a very strong word for George and by the end of the week he was a writer too! Not long after we were even doing podcasts.

Then I left SegaNerds after an… internal disagreement, shall we say. Then when SegaNerds was sold to The Kartel and frankly went to the dogs, George and I began discussing creating our own Sega blog where nobody could tell us what to do or to sell our site to some money hungry wanna-be internet business men.

So Segabits was formed and its been a heck of a ride and I’ve met some awesome people along the way! So here’s to another year, no, another 10 years of Segabits and of course the company that made it all happen, Sega!

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