We hit a fun and interesting milestone last week, one that perhaps only we at the Goonhammer offices really care about, but one I felt was worth sharing. At some point last week, we published our ten thousandth post/article. As of this writing, we’re at ten thousand and fifteen, actually.
Now we probably hit 10k posts before that number said 10k; we have, on occasion, deleted a few, but I think having ten thousand articles out there live on the site is the more impressive number to look at. And in case you were wondering, our ten thousandth article was this week’s Mayday, Miss Marcy! – a weekly column where Marcy answers questions from readers like you about the hobby and navigating some of the issues which can pop up. This week she gives recommendations on basing sand and lower-budget horror games.
What about her first post? Well there are two good candidates here. The actual chronological first post is this one by Liam “Corrode” Royle, a battle report about Ademch vs. Admech armies in late eighth edition 40k.
Here’s the thing, though: The images don’t work. When we first started the site, we were still using imgur for our image hosting. This was partly because we were also posting images on Something Awful, and that was the preferred way to post images there.
So instead I’m going to talk about our second post, which was posted the next day:
Throwback Thursday: TheChirurgeon’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Game
This was my first post on Goonhammer dot com, a battle report I wrote about a game I played the week after NOVA 2018. I was on a business trip up to Boston and had time to spare, so I lugged my metal, 3rd edition Night Lords army over to Campbell’s house for a game of 40k. NOVA was my first tournament since 3rd edition, and both Campbell and I were firmly what you’d have called “narrative” players at the time. Which is to say, people who did Not Think Much of Competitive 40k. Suffice to say, those views have changed quite a bit since Goonhammer started.
Campbell and I played a game with one of the then-new narrative missions from Chapter Approved 2017. This was a mistake, as my fast army was in no way equipped to do things like “destroy buildings,” the core mechanic I’d be focusing on. Even if they were, they weren’t interested in doing so – the most notable point in the mission was one of my meltagun raptors missing the building he was literally standing on with his Meltagun, doing zero damage. Goonhammer: Complaining about dice since day 2.
At the time I was living in New York City and Campbell in Boston, and Goonhammer was in its nascent stages; a WordPress site we’d hastily slapped together as a place to post battle reports so they wouldn’t get lost in the scroll. Those early posts were mostly battle reports and a post on writing better battle reports which I still stand by and might revisit at some point soon. We were doing posts periodically – whenever we’d play games, but pretty quickly I suggested we settle into more of a regular cadence, and try to get out a post like, every Wednesday. Then people wanted to post more, so we started aiming for Mondays, too. And I could review new narrative products, why not?
In those days, the pickings for 40k content were pretty slim. You had Bell of Lost Souls and Faeit 212 for news and rumors, 3++ is the New Black and 1d4chan for tactics, and Spikeybits for downloading malware onto your computer (so that part hasn’t changed). We weren’t really on anyone’s radar, but the space also wasn’t particularly crowded, either. Seventh edition left 40k in a state that could charitably be described as “hurting” and eighth edition led to a massive revitalization in not just interest in the game, but interest in competitive play.
If you want to know what our first “big” article was, well then I’d say it was this one:
Chaos Space Marines and Vigilus Ablaze – The Goonhammer Review – Part 1 (Units)
That’s James “One_Wing” Grover and I, arguing back and forth about Vigilus Ablaze. It had just come out, and we both had Big Thoughts on the book and all the cool new toys in it. Vigilus pretty much gave every army in the game some new stuff to work with, fundamentally changing how the game played for the back half of the edition. In retrospect it was a mess, but a pretty glorious one. This was I believe the first post we had that Did Number, getting shared around and topping a thousand views. Actual view counts are hard to come by these days – we lost the stats on articles when we redid the site in late 2021 – but I remember this being the first article where we were like “wow that did well, we should write more stuff.”
We slowly expanded, going from “posting every week” to “posting multiple times every week” to “posting every day” to “posting 6-9 articles every day but Sunday,” and that’s how you get to 10,015 posts in a period of about 7 years. On average, that’s about 3.2 posts per day though our early years definitely drag that average down. We also became a company in February 2020 and started paying our writers not too long after that.
These days it’s a totally different beast. Still a labor of love, but we have two apps – Tabletop Battles and Administratum – a merch store – multiple full time employees, and a Video Channel on YouTube. It’s a totally different beast these days and I’m super proud of what we’ve managed to build here.
On that note, while you’re here, I should point out that if you like what we do and want to see more of it, you can support us on Patreon. The support we receive from readers like you helps us pay our writers, cover our server costs, and develop our apps.
Goonhammer is a creator-owned business. Every dollar we make goes back to the people working to make the site run and fill it with thousands of posts. In addition to the satisfaction of knowing you helped support what we do and keep Goonhammer running, you’ll also get cool custom benefits, like the ability to turn off ads on the site, custom features in Tabletop Battles and Administratum, and access to exclusive content like our Discord and Patron-only podcasts.
It’s been a hell of a run over the last seven years and ten thousand posts. Here’s to ten thousand more.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
