About Us

From our Concise History:

"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 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...

"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... 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 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...

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... 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.

"...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... and we are far more prolific than ever before."

From our Ode:

"... CRN has evolved into something that offers readers perhaps a new perspective, or even one they already shared but couldn’t find elsewhere, in an entertaining and often humorous way. Though it started humbly as a Geocities PageBuilder website, and continues humbly as a Blogspot web log, I am very pleased with what it has become. Amidst a culture that deifies the next “new” thing and then moves on, Code Redd Net recognizes the classics, not romanticizing them (too much), but allowing them to have their properly earned place. And we are not content with simply giving our opinions about various entertainment media, as if they simply exist in a vacuum, but also the struggles, triumphs, and emotions of those who consume them.

"As an army of two, we realize that there will be many who disagree with us or think of our efforts as just plain silly... The beauty of the Internet is not fully realized by one who has not contributed content to the phenomenon that is the World Wide Web. A major part of that beauty is that it is a bigger revolution than the printing press. Billions who otherwise would have no ability to communicate their thoughts regarding games featuring gun-toting duckmen or a chicken that practices wushu now have that ability on a grand scale. Now running ten years strong (though weak at some points), Code Redd Net is our contribution..."