Top 12 Fallen Tech Sites

1. Voodoo Extreme

Voodoo Extreme’s name was derived from one of the first 3d accelerators for the PC at the time: 3DFX’s “Voodoo Graphics”.  The site was one of the first and coolest sites about PC gaming and gaming culture.

The main thing that made Voodoo Extreme one of the best places on the internet at the time was the personality of Billy “Wicked” Wilson.  Some call his style journalistic honesty, and others call it unprofessional, but Billy just called everything like he saw it, and put it in such a colorful way.   Billy is the originator of “honey-roasted gaming news” and common acronyms like “PYAITK”.

At the end of each news day, Billy would leave his loyal readers with a snippet of wisdom, much like a virtual Yoda for our proverbial Luke.  Here’s a few snippets of the wit and wisdom of Billy:

Welp, another one bites the dust.  AGN has shut down, a site which, at one time, was headed up by our good buddy Jeremy “Binky Dinkums” Alford.  Dammit, that alias is a keeper too…Binky, drop us a line, just so that I can say “Binky let us know”…he’s good people, it’s too bad to see AGN go down, but these things happen in the web biz.  Good luck to the others that were working at AGN!  And speaking of Binky (ok, this has nothing to do with that, I just like rolling all of the shit into one paragraph <grin>), on the topic of Sweet Dick thinking that everybody and their grandmother attempts to race him on the streets of Salt Lake City, I must admit, there are times when some cricket dick pulls up next to me in his Honda Civic with a 15″ inch tip (which, no doubt, adds 5 horsepower to his 38 horsepower car…ok, maybe a tad more stock, but not much) — sounding like a f’n lawnmower on steroids, where I feel that it’s my obligation to put the smack down and let the Gremlin’s 8 cylinder spank him like Pee Wee Herman polishing his love dragon at an adult film festival.  It’s just, I doubt that, at what seems like EVERY stoplight, another new person is looking to race, which is basically how a day in the life of Sweet Dick sounds (“yeah, I raced a Mustang, Corvette, and a Supercharged 4Runner today”)…yeah, yeah, tell it to the judge.  Tomorrow, we’ll talk about Sweet Dick hiding under his girlfriend’s bed, when her husband came home at night (she’s now divorced, but oh boy, some of the stories).  Ahhhh, crazy kids. 

Billy “Wicked” Wilson in graveyard in New Orleans

I’m not sure how I overlooked it before, but our new guy Ryan (“TheMystic”) is from the Chicago area…chances are he’s nailed Sweet Dick’s woman at least once before (because, as I’m under the impression, it’s a requirement if you live in the Chicago area…plus, it’s a tax write-off or something).  I heard a rumor that it’s windy or breezy there in Chicago, or something like that (joke, dammit).  Of course, Sweet Dick also told me that it really isn’t that windy, so I would say “yeah, you think they’d give it a nick name like ‘the breezy town’ or something if it really was windy there” (as he knows that I like to bitch about anything weather related, and that he’s been trying to get me to head over there sometime with him — of course I know this isn’t the REAL reason behind the cities name, at least historically, but it def. wits it these days).  To be honest, he has probably the only long distance relationship that I can think of that actually works, hell, he’s been with his little hooker for like 7 years now.  They have the type of relationship though that, if they lived together, I doubt they’d be together for more than a couple of months (I’m sure you know the type).  Next time he goes out of town to visit her (as I know he doesn’t check the site much when he’s out of town) I’ll tell you the story about how he had to hide under her bed a few times when her husband came home early (yeah, she was married, but hey, that’s how good relationships start).  In all honesty, she’s a great girl — I hated her way back when, for obvious reasons, but she turned out to be very cool (um, once she got divorced, which wasn’t a huge shocker).  She was a real bitch though until her mom died, which sparked the joke “now if her dad died, she’d be ever more cool”…that went over like a lead balloon.  I have no idea what sparked this long ass blah about Sweet Dick’s hired help, so please just excuse me.

Billy did have some personal problems and eventually left VoodooExtreme.  The site just wasn’t the same after Billy left, but was big enough to get the attention of IGN, who purchased the site and rebranded it VE3D.

Billy passed away on March 15, 2005, but remains in many people’s minds the father of the modern gaming blog.  The original format that made the site famous has been dead for nearly 10 years, but it was the fire that influenced many tech writers (including myself), and thus the current tone of the internet.