When we were considering weekly topics for our grand anniversary, this question of “what’s kept us going?” seems like an obvious one to include. In a world where blogs come and go (so quickly sometimes, it’s hard to keep up!), longevity is something of a “golden egg.” Did it just happen that the three of us here ubiquitously found ourselves the magical goose that could produce such a thing and just the right time? To a degree, believe it or not, that may be the case.

I began my own journey online back in 2009. That year, I completed two firsts: joining Facebook and writing a blog post. The former was at the behest of an old friend and doing so opened up a world new world of interaction. The latter was only thanks to my real-life library job, and it wasn’t my idea. A co-worker suggested that our department start a blog to highlight and share the work we were doing. A previous project-related blog this person had created had done quite well, so why not expand the notion to include more people and more projects? I dove headfirst into our new blog, and the seed was planted. While I found the process of putting together a post quite satisfying, the writing was what hooked me. It brought me back to my creative writing days in high school where story and creativity where the driving factors behind the writing rather than presenting facts. The work blog allowed me to write *almost* anything I wanted. Forming my own personal blog a couple years later gave me the full freedom to write whatever the heck I wanted. It turned out that “whatever the heck I wanted” to write about the most was video games.

I think it’s safe to say that the three of us here share the same passion for gaming. It’s what brought us together in the first place, and it’s what keep us here, together, sharing. I could probably also argue that maybe this – writing for Virtual Bastion — has become something of a habit, or maybe we’re each addicted to writing in the same/different ways, or maybe it’s just the most comforting way we’ve found to share our gaming interests with the community at-large. If you’ve followed the site for any length of time, you’ll see that we are each very different players with different backgrounds, different ways and means of gaming, and different tastes. It certainly helps that our preferences strongly overlap in regard to what we play and have played – having pasts that were at least somewhat rooted in the world of Nintendo was something that brought us together in the first place. Over time, as we got to know each other better, we discovered other similarities that kept us going online and continue to draw us together today. We have created enough of a Venn diagram in that the three of us are as comfortable collaborating as we are veering off into our own gaming lanes. And it all happens within this space we’ve created for ourselves, and for you, the readers.

It’s easy to bolster ourselves here; outreach is far more challenging, but it’s why we started in the first place. We wanted to create and foster our own community here, while also contributing to the gaming community itself. Both have change a lot over the past decade, and though we’ve changed, too, we’ve also maintained our voice and our passion for sharing everything we love, and some things we don’t, about gaming. It’s a spectacular hobby through which we found each other and countless online friends. That shared vision and support has helped us want to maintain what we’ve made. No matter the changing gaming landscape, our varying preferences, or the shapeshifts of the gaming blogosphere, we are here, once as United We Game, now, and for now, as Virtual Bastion!

Lede image captured by author during gameplay of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (© Nintendo).