Daniel Vooks interview
Daniel Vooks from Vooks.net on the evolution of Australian video game websites.from
Daniel ‘Vooks’ Vuckovic has been running Australia’s go-to website for Nintendo news and coverage since 2000.
You launched the Vooks website in 2000, right? What can you tell us about the state of Australian video game websites at the time? Were there any other homegrown sites at the time? Was there an official Nintendo site? Paint us a picture.
“There weren't a lot of choices for gaming sites in the early 2000s, or if there were, they were really hard to find. The internet back then was a lot more siloed—it wasn’t until 2003 or 2004 that things really started to pop up as magazines began to slow down.”
“After that, there always seemed to be at least a handful of local websites at any one time. People would run them for a while, drop off, and then another one would take their place. At one time there was at least 4 or 5 GameCube sites. A lot of local sites were super niche with big ‘we cover everything sites’ left to the internationals.”
“Usually, forums were attached to these local sites, and that’s where most people got to know each other and spread the word about where to find news. There were official sites—Nintendo had one—but they didn’t have much. Aside from magazines and whatever news you could get from the guy working at EB Games or the local game store, there wasn’t much to go on.”
These days anyone can launch a website with drag and drop templates. How difficult was it back in the day to build a site and do all the technical stuff? And was that something you did all on your own?
“Websites 20 years ago were super simple—they were usually just HTML and CSS pages, with little to no dynamic content using JavaScript. I learned all of this myself. I used Vooks as a way to learn how to become a web developer, and it’s what I still do as my full-time job today.”
“Back then, you bought books to learn these things. I eventually went to TAFE, but most of it was self-taught through just doing it—and Vooks allowed me to do that. Having an actual site and a purpose to use these skills on was invaluable. I did my website to learn, and by doing the website I had a reason to learn it.”
What inspired you to launch Vooks, and what was your expectations for the site back in the day?
“I really started Vooks just as a way to learn how to make a webpage. It kind of just spun out of control from there—I really had no expectations. In high school, the site was also just a place for us to hang out and chat on the forums, and other people eventually found it. When other Nintendo sites shut down, people would migrate over as well.”
“There was also a lot of animosity toward Nintendo in Australia. Nintendo was super popular in the '80s and '90s, but by the 2000s, things were a bit rough. The GameCube wasn’t doing too well overall, and in Australia, it was doing terribly. The N64 fizzled out, while the PS1 and eventually the PS2 dominated the market. Xbox also took off really strongly. It always felt like the established media never covered Nintendo seriously. And because Nintendo Australia’s own online efforts were barebones, that's where we hopefully stepped in to bring local Nintendo coverage.”
“Nintendo is often covered as an afterthought. The entire time the Wii was popular, the established and legacy media whined and moaned about having to cover ‘waggle games’, so yeah, we just took all their traffic.”
Where did you go to for info to populate the site back in the day? Did you rely on larger overseas sites, local PR, other sources?
“Official sites, sometimes the big sites would cover a local press release, or even the newspapers sometimes would have news. Locally, Nintendo wouldn’t even acknowledge that online sites and media were real unless you were a magazine or newspaper—good luck getting anything out of them. Lucky that has changed, we have a wonderful relationship with them now and it's still something that blows my mind to see our words used in their marketing. On the TV even! Makes me feel like a kid.”
Australia was pretty late to adopt Broadband technology, what sort of impact did that have on the development of a local online community?
“Oh massive, on the one hand online play was pretty much restricted to PC gamers for the longest times, finding local ISP run servers (none of which happens today) because playing overseas just had too much ping. Xbox Live would help get that off the ground for consoles, but also the lack of fast, or cheap broadband meant that Aussie content creators (before that was even a phrase) really were delayed getting into the YouTube, video and streaming scene until a lot later. We did a lot of video content in the late 00s but really small stuff, because it would take days to upload video, and video was recorded on potatoes at the time.”
Social media didn’t start to really emerge locally until the end of the 00s, what sort of impact did that have on websites and the associated forums. How did you respond?
“Facebook was probably the first big one to start eating away at local communities, then things like Twitter, where people could go and interact—for better or worse—with more people on a global scale. Forums were a huge part of my life; most of my actual in-real-life friends to this day are from the Vooks forums. We kept the Vooks forums around for a while, but eventually, people just stopped using them, and we shut them down when the software running them became a security risk.”
“These days, it does seem like a lot of communities have retreated into forums or Discords, although they’re not great for archival reasons or searching at all.”
The internet is all very temporary. A decade's work can be wiped from the servers when a site is sold or shut down. You’ve worked online for over two decades now, has that ever bothered you, and what can you do to mitigate that?
“Not to be all philosophical, but as I get older, I realise nothing is forever—and I try not to get too down when my favourite things eventually disappear. Honestly, though, the internet is one of the most fragile things out there, and it's up to people to take control of their own content and save it.”
“Even just trying to find information to reply to this interview, nothing is around anymore, and that sucks—but I also get it. I don’t think it serves anyone when an entire site disappears after being sold or shut down. People are writing terrific things, and for them to just live on as a saved PDF on someone's Google Drive means that knowledge and information are locked away. We need to get better at saving the good stuff.”
“I hope if I ever stop doing Vooks, I can just leave it up, sitting on the smallest hosting and it’ll last forever. Least that way it ever is useful to anyone, it can be.”
What’s something most people don’t know about the history of Australian video game websites.
“Probably just how many there were—so many Nintendo ones, so many sites come and gone—and yet some of those people are still in the industry today. But a lot of them aren’t either. What starts as a pet project when you’re young, single, and childless, full of ideas, turns into something you can’t just keep doing.”
“Right now there are a handful or two local sites left, all hanging on by a string, there used to be a lot more and always somewhere to ‘find your people’.”
There’s very little online info about any Australian video game websites back in the 90s. Are you aware of any sites from that far back?
“Seeing as I was only fourteen when I first started, anything from the 90s is probably just a bit too old for me, probably the only thing I can think of that may have been around that far back were the Hyperactive forums or perhaps the Whirlpool forums which really only have had a loose gaming discussion. ISP also ran a lot of forums and chat rooms back then, they really fostered a lot of early online discussion as well as running servers for local players. Much like kids do now with Fortnite, you used to pop onto Counter Strike or Quake to chat to your friends - if your internet didn’t suck.”
What’s something I should ask you about?
“If you want to know anything about Nintendo in Australia from the early 2000s until now, I can probably remember it—so ask me before I get too old and start forgetting. But don’t ask me to try and figure out Nintendo; it’s been 25 years, and I understand them less and less each day. That’s part of the fun of covering them—you never know what they’re going to do next (for better or worse).”
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