My first case with online bullying was with a website that no longer exists called 1UP.com. It was the collective website for all the media magazines owned by Ziff Davis, which were all related to computer and video games. EGM was my favorite magazine, and I was obsessed with it, so joining 1UP was an easy decision. My username there was Linkthelegend2, though it doesn’t really matter now.

1UP was actually a really cool website, and they were ahead of their time with the social media aspect. I joined in 2003 or something like that, and they had a better network for friends, blogging, message boards, and other things than sites like Myspace. I really wanted to be working for EGM one day, so as an optimistic teen, I saw 1UP as a stepping stone and good practice. So I wrote, and I learned how to write and review things. This website Neko Random really is just an evolution of my time on 1UP. I started my original independent blog when 1UP was slowly dying, and I had already given it almost a decade of my life for no financial gain.

I was modestly successful on 1UP as just a user. They had little clubs you could make, and I had one about video game trivia which was one of the most popular ones. I also won some caption contests where my little quips made it into EGM about three or four times. So this success led to jealousy, and I mean hatred-level jealousy.

Keep in mind, I was a CHILD, and some of the folks on there were my age, but a lot of the guys were in their 20s, 30s, and I’m pretty sure one dude was in his forties. Most of these toxic losers hung out on a message board called EGM NGR, which stood for Non-Gaming Related. They were the “cool kids,” and by that I mean bullies who stroked each other’s egos. And 90% of them HATED me.

It was weird being 15 and reading a bunch of strangers on the internet painting you as public enemy number one. I remember shaking and feeling sick. It had a huge toll on my mental health, which wasn’t good already. My brother Zach bullied me since I was a baby, my dad died when I was 7, and I had no real protectors or champions. To “fail” on 1UP like this with so many people felt like I had nothing for a bit. I had appealed to the community manager Kimi Matsuzaki, and she totally ignored my pleas. Instead, she essentially let the trolls be trolls.

The two worst cases I remember targeting me were someone mocking me on my pictures and making a weird meme of them (before memes were memes) on a site called YTMND. And another guy named William Glass who said I had fetal alcohol syndrome. He hilariously got mad at his sister Joy Glass for having a photoshoot for a very famous magazine popular with men and associated with bunnies. So EVERYONE, including myself, got to see this photoshoot. It’s not every day when someone you hate hands you the key to revenge. One of the web techs, Thummp, saw his bullying of me and changed his little tag under his username to Has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. That was pretty awesome.

But I didn’t let it stop me. I kept posting, doing my own thing, ignoring the trolls, and seeing my own results. I won a contest on an EGM podcast, and started my own podcast called 1uppers. One day Kimi quit, and I think a woman named Jenn or something took her place. I liked Jenn, mainly as she immediately tried to put a muzzle on the trolls and was bullied by them in response. This was BAD for them, honestly, because what did they think was going to happen? The rest of the 1UP/EGM crew took notice, took their coworker’s side, and bit by bit, the trolls jumped ship and even started their own little website forum. I secretly signed up under a pseudonym to keep tabs and see what they were saying.

So I had at least three or four years of a peaceful time on 1UP. And when I left, I left because I wanted to. 1UP was losing the game badly to IGN and GameSpot in terms of content, and to NeoGAF when it came to a message board community. While NeoGAF still exists, all of these lost ground to Reddit and Twitter when those platforms emerged. I miss a lot of my friends on there, but such is life. To any of my old bullies, if you’re reading this, I hope you grew up and became better people. For those who are still toxic losers in your 30s and 40s, I’m disappointed in myself for ever thinking your opinion ever even mattered.