Nielsthooft.com

GameSen

Another website, but about all videogames, and in Dutch. Also the first of its kind, though Gamer.nl, still going strong today, was launched a month later.

When GameSen started, I was still living at home, though I had my own phone line. I recently found an invoice that I sent to (now defunct) Hasbro Interactive for a banner campaign during the fall of 1999. It was worth a couple hundred guilders – not bad for a site with a couple hundred visitors.

Only a short while later I found myself in an office in Schiedam, funded with a partner’s dad’s money.

Maybe the timing was off, maybe we didn’t have the commercial insights required, maybe the site I came up with was not ‘mainstream’ enough. In any case, I decided to start a printed Nintendo magazine, just as all financial support for GameSen was pulled. At least I still have the domain name.