A Concise History of Code Redd Net

It all began on November 8, 2001, or thereabouts. Originally known as Code Redd.net, what was to become the Code Redd Net of today started innocently in ChickenMan’s basement during one of our marathon Saturday afternoon/evening gaming sessions. I had some experience in writing reviews for GameFAQs (my output during this time consisted of this charming piece) and my own personal sites (which I started up and dropped at an alarming pace and which, thank goodness, have long since ceased to exist). I suggested we start up a Geocities page and play around with its Pagebuilder feature, which required absolutely no knowledge of that tedious thing called HTML. All we needed was a name. I believe we bandied about a few ideas first before we decided upon our unusual moniker. Now, the exact details are fuzzy in my mind, but I do know that we took our name from the new (at the time, anyway) flavor of Mountain Dew, Code Red. As far as I can remember, our only justification for choosing that name was that were simply liked the soda a whole lot and we were strapped for ideas. Of course, to protect ourselves from litigation and brand confusion, however unlikely that seems now, we added an extra “d” to Redd. And that was that. We took on the aliases of Thrasher and ChickenMan to protect our loved ones from harassment or embarrassment, I suppose. Geocities.com/codreddsite was up and running, and slowly.

Reviews, always our bread and butter, were split between games and movies, though far more emphasis was placed on games than movies. Our first two reviews, Spy Hunter for PS2 and Rush Hour 2, have remained perennial favorites through a kind of affective blinding. In other words, our tastes have certainly matured beyond them, but we cannot untangle our memories from these objects. They stay with us no matter how much cultural education/exposure we receive, and that, I suppose, is in the very machinations of nostalgia, that’s how the phenomenon of mass culture works. Naturally, our reviews tended to cover only those things which we were interested enough in to rent or buy, hence the general scarcity of negative reviews (far as I can remember, we only scorched a few products, such as Die Another Day, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, Spy Hunter 2, and The Tuxedo). Our interaction with popular culture was limited to our tastes because we simply didn’t have the monies, connections, or inclinations to cover more items. I would argue, however, that this made our site more inclusive, more of an ultra-specific fan culture (which included our love for Jackie Chan, James Bond, Mr. T, Spider-Man, Sonic, and anything else we fond amusing or “cool”) which communicated with whatever audience we could muster by sheer enthusiasm, rather than by some notion of comprehensive “objectivity” espoused by the popular press. We had our tastes and we had to freedom to do as we pleased, and that was particularly pleasing to our younger selves.

Looking back now, though, for all of our inclusiveness, CRN was quite the ambitious undertaking for two doe-eyed middle-schoolers. We clearly tried to mimic the appearance of most game/movie review sites, and this was difficult because the Geocities Pagebuilder was a beast to handle back then. We also tried to provide many of the same services that they did – at one point, we had our Games and Movies pages (both of which were subdivided into Reviews and Previews), our Beats page, Staff pages, Opinions page, a News page, a Newsletter (and I have to wonder if we actually sent any newsletters out), a “Grillz” page (similar to Opinions, I suppose, but perhaps nastier in tone), Links, a Message Board, a Chat Room, and more. And not only that, we also branched out into “colonies” which aimed to exclusively cover Bond, Sonic, and Spider-Man topics. Our naïvely comprehensive approach strikes me as hilarious now, almost satirical. I wish we could say parody was our purpose, but we were earnestly trying to be a significant source of so-called “objective” commentary on media. Reading over our archives from those days, our earnestness is infectious rather than cloying.

When the original site was removed from Geocities following its closing in 2009, I nearly missed my chance to archive it. CRN was something which I had nearly forgotten about when I went to college. I made sure to let ChickenMan know about it, and we decided that a blog might be a nice way to continue on. College is a weird time for everyone. People change and move away, you make new friends and forget about others, and tastes/interests change immensely (fortunately, ChickenMan has stayed true to himself, though his insight has grown tremendously). No longer could ChickenMan and I spend our afternoons locked in a middle school keyboard lab (our “office” or “base of operations,” you might say) updating the site. Several states now separated us. Thankfully, the proliferation of digital technology made communication much easier and fluid across great distances, but it wasn’t until we had our respective degrees that we mobilized CRN once again.

Nostalgia does funny things to us, especially now, when our technology makes access to these fondly remembered products nearly instantaneous. You can download you memories now. It makes us fond for things which aren’t really “old,” or for things which didn’t interest us before (such as commercials and bad PS1 games). But if nostalgia has ever ringed true, CRN is as good an example as any other. And it moves beyond just remembering what once was; CRN has grown considerably, beyond a simple exercise in nostalgia. Our reviews have only gotten better, even though they share the same format (300 words or so of blocky, unorganized text, at my insistence), and we are far more prolific than ever before. We now review books as well, which, as ChickenMan has told me, seems like a strange fit in the CRN universe, and our extension into the social network has been nothing but a positive experience for us. We continue to grow our inclusive community.

When I look back at our old reviews, I often laugh at our prose, but not derisorily. I laugh joyfully at the words, or rather, between them. I can see the friendship which was the groundwork for CRN somewhere in the spaces. I hope this is visible to whatever readership we have or may have in the future. If it isn’t, and our readership is in fact nil, I know that this brand of nostalgia has served its purpose admirably.