A Photo of Where GN Started

I thought I'd share this so people could appreciate where we are now with some more perspective. I took this photo in 2013. GamersNexus officially started c. 2007 or 2008, depending on how you count it, but 2012-2013 was when I started changing course to focus more on computer hardware and less on purely gaming. Everything was started in my bedroom. You might notice there's no bed in there -- that's because, by this point, GN had gotten enough initial success that I had moved the bed into the dining room and brought in another work table to the bedroom. I'm pretty sure I wasn't making a profit yet, but it sure felt like things were moving in the right direction.

I worked alone at this point, though had contractors (like Keegan, Andrew, Patrick, and some others) who contributed articles or logo art remotely. Keegan was going to shows with me at this point, I think, though wasn't officially a camera person and acted more as a reporter at the time. 

In this shot, you can see the Rosewill... Thor V2 or Throne (not sure) on the left, featuring an NZXT 1250W PSU that we still use today, alongside an NZXT Phanteks 820 on the floor. That system in the 820 is the initial case review test bench, and was the first official GN test bench ever. It seems commonplace now, but I had never considered the need to buy a completely separate "test bench" set of components until around the time of this photo. Before then, I used my personal system for all testing, but this proved problematic as test data accuracy was suspect and it was also just a huge pain in the ass. I'd have to build and unbuild my own computer in different cases every few months, and that sort of sucked because it created downtime.

You can also see a Thermaltake Armor in the bottom right, my first "lighting" (that bendy lamp) atop some other case -- maybe Antec, not sure -- and what looks to be either our Sony A300 or Sony A55, whatever was out at the time. That was used for photos, I had a different camera for initial video. The rest of the room was a mix of old personal things, which were slowly being forced out and into storage in other rooms or the attic, and necessary computer hardware for the job. I later took over another room in the house to become the studio (which also featured our cooler test bench and initial fold-out "build table," which allowed me to remove the folding card table from the middle of this room and clean up the tables a little bit. Andrew and Keegan ended up working in that back-left corner to do video edits. A few years later, Patrick began working at the right-most table. I worked at a desk slightly left of where the photo was taken. The distance from one person to the next was about 2' at least, maybe 4-5' corner-to-corner.

I used to have to do all my builds on the floor, because there just wasn't space for other stuff. As things got more flooded, I came up with better solutions for packing everything in (you can see them in part 1 of our moving vlog), but this came with the struggle of having to re-arrange a house into a business. It was sometimes hard to act on a necessary change because that means restructuring how you live, but it was obviously worth it and did pay off.

I'm happy to say that things haven't really been this messy ever since, but I'm also happy that it was like this. I was very proud of this build space and was excited to get new hardware to write reviews on, even if it meant changing everything about daily life to do it.

Thought I'd share some GN history and give you all perspective of where things started!