20 Years of RPG Site: Thank You, Celebrating, and What’s Next

RPG Site is celebrating its 20th anniversary today, June 28th, 2026. When we launched as a hobbyist spin-off of a fansite, we had no idea that the site would become a proper games media business - and certainly not that it would last for decades. There are many people to thank for that longevity - including you, our readers.

Two decades is an incredibly long time in the worlds of the internet and video games, and we're tremendously proud. If you’ll indulge me for a few moments, I want to talk about how we got here - and where we plan to go next.

Looking Back: Fandom as Foundation

RPG Site’s inception began with a simple thought: it was taking too damn long for Final Fantasy XII to come out. Mike and I had made our place on the internet creating fan sites and communities for many things: Sonic, Lord of the Rings, Video Game Music - but the most successful was always a series of Final Fantasy fansites - one for FF9, one for FF10, and finally a merged site that covered them all. 

The now brief-looking 4-year gap between FF10 and FF12 (and the repeatedly-delayed Western version of FF11) seemed endless at the time, and so I had an idea: why not expand to a site about the entire genre we loved? We’d already had successful detours for RPGs like Breath of Fire, Wild Arms, Kingdom Hearts, and The Third Age - why not cover the whole genre? 

The decision to build RPG Site when we did looks quite canny now: we caught the tail end of the explosion of Western RPGs being truly viable on consoles at just the right time. As we launched there was Oblivion, with Mass Effect right around the corner, and on the PC we saw the emergence of The Witcher. Dragon Age, Demon’s Souls, Borderlands, and the revival of Fallout was just around the corner. Meanwhile, Japan was pumping out the likes of Persona 3, Lost Odyssey, and Radiant Dawn… we even eventually got FF12. In reality, we weren’t such clever plotters - it was really all just a happy accident, dumb good luck.

At the time we were hobbyists making a few dollars here and there, but I was also slowly making my way into a career in games media proper, freelancing for the ‘pro’ websites and magazines. From there I learned lessons, and my grandest goal began to materialize: to merge some of professional games media’s values, skills, and knowledge with the passion and hyper-focused zeal of the fan sites I’d manned growing up. It is in this concept that the RPG Site of today was forged, really.

Over time, RPG Site grew - a larger but no-less dedicated team, more readers, and more support from game publishers. We attended our first E3 in 2008. Over the years, E3 in particular became a bonding ritual - team members flying in from all over with barely any budget, slumming it in low-rent motels and AirBNBs. There was an air of faking it 'til we made it, and equally a feeling that we had made it, even if we never had the budget of the big brands. I’ve got particularly fond memories of those days.

Appropriately for something with its roots in fandom, actual success sort of crept up on us. I don’t even remember when it really happened; it just sort of did. We haven’t looked back, obviously.

One thing I’ll always be especially proud of even from those earliest hobbyist days is RPG Site’s status as a training ground for new talent. These days I love trade shows more than ever, in part because I often walk around and just… see our alumni. Working communications at major publishers, knee-deep in game development, or still working in media at some of our much bigger peers and rivals. It’s probably the thing I’m most proud of, in fact: our people, past and present.

For me, everything has had to be underpinned by one thing, though: that fannish love of RPGs that brought us here in the first place. This doesn’t mean we can’t be serious about games - lord knows, there’s plenty to worry about in the medium these days - but we always try to put that love and celebration first. We always try to remember and foreground the fact that we came from fandom first. I think we still do that - and I believe we still will in another decade, or two.

The Future: Side Quests and More... Everything

Our vision for RPG Site’s future is quite similar to what has come before, and that’s because we’ve always held one core belief about growth: I’d rather grow naturally and modestly than engage in the website equivalent of pumping full of steroids with cheap SEO tricks and clickbait nonsense, which accelerates growth but in a way that’s not only rubbish to read, but often ends up being unsustainable. 

That thinking has slowly but surely driven us to a really impressive 4-5 million pageviews each month, which we’re incredibly proud of - and I want to be clear before I talk about our future that we have no intention of losing our identity in the hunt for endless growth. We like who we are and how we are, and everything we’re going to do will be done to maintain that.

With that said, I wanted to reveal some things you’ll see from us over the coming months as we move to grow and celebrate our 20th anniversary.

Respec: A Side Quest

Starting this week, RPG Site has a new sibling: Respec.net, a website about… video games. And game culture in general, to be fair. Were you expecting something else?

It’s also a website without barriers - we’ll cover everything, of any genre - so long as someone on the team is sufficiently interested in it. If you like the way we approach game coverage on RPG Site and have wished we had a review for a non-RPG in the past, Respec is now your answer. The official launch is coming in the next two weeks, but we've got a version of the site live now and we wanted the RPG Site audience to be the first to see and beta test it. Forgive us any bugs you see, please.

I think of Respec as two things. First, it’s a continuation of the RPG Site philosophy and content model in a more general setting, allowing us to branch out without cynically ruining RPG Site’s stated scope. You’ll see many familiar faces from here over there, and obviously the site looks quite similar (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?). You'll notice similarities in the design, in how the site is organized, and even a cheeky RPG Site shield hiding in the logo.

But Respec is also a continuation of some work I did elsewhere, at Gamer Network’s VG247 and Eurogamer. Gamer Network was an independent business that went through a couple of big corporate acquisitions, and for both better and worse it is now part of one of the biggest corporate machines in games media. Working in that ecosystem was interesting, exciting, and challenging in an ultimately rewarding way - but myself and a few other recent Gamer Network leavers wanted to see if we could recapture some of what we loved doing there when it was an independent family business on a new, independent brand. The success we have at RPG Site shows us this is still possible - so here we are.

That is Respec. We’d love it if you could support it with the same eagerness you do RPG Site.

Support us Directly, with Ad-Free Browsing

Something you guys have asked for consistently for years that we’ve never quite got around to building (since RPG Site is all custom-code and sometimes even keeping the site running is a challenge!) was a way for you to support us directly. I’m pleased to say that as part of our celebrations over the next several months we’ll be launching a Patreon for you to directly support the team - and it’ll hook directly into the website.

This means that backers of RPG Site will soon be able to enjoy the site’s suite of news, reviews, features, and guides completely advertising-free. In addition, backers will be able to enjoy a selection of new and exclusive features, special community access, and even the odd physical bonus. Meanwhile, the core site won’t be impacted - the same stuff will remain available for free, ad-supported, as always. But if you’ve wanted to support us as independent games media directly, you’ll soon have the chance to do so.

The Best RPGs of All Time, as told by the people who made them

This is one especially long-form feature you can look forward to over the next several months as we celebrate 20 years. We’ve spent some time gathering comments and thoughts from friends of the site across the industry, asking them to reveal the RPGs that are the best or most significant to them, and why. 

There are some truly incredible names joining us in this journey - developers and names you’ll recognize behind many games you’ve loved, and even some upcoming games you’re hotly anticipating. Here they reveal their inspirations and loves - perhaps helping to add a few things to your backlog in the process. This one still needs a little longer in the oven (and if you are a developer friend or reader who would like to take part, please get in touch) - but look forward to it soon.

GOTY Backfill and Review

As we get towards the end of the year, we’ll be working internally among our contributors to pore over RPG Site’s picks for Game of the Year over the years (did we get it right? Did you, in the user poll?) as well as to fill in a few of our earlier years where we didn’t crown an outright GOTY winner. 

We’ll also be running additional polls around finding out what your favourite RPGs of the site’s existence are - and all this will run in tandem with our usual year-end GOTY content.

Onwards

So, that’s it. Twenty years. Time flies when you’re having fun. Fun - loving games and having an obsessive love for a particular genre - is and always will be the backbone of this website. I really hope you keep reading, and that we can keep this up for many years to come.

All that remains is to say: Thank You.

Thank you to our incredible list of contributors past and present. Thank you to every game developer or communications specialist who has thought of us and given us time, understanding that speaking to a core niche audience is vital. And thank you most of all to you, for reading. As one old RPG adage goes, there ain't no gettin' offa this train we're on. Onwards.

- Alex Donaldson, Co-Founder and Publisher // June 28th, 2026.