Out of the blue: How a Quake blog turned PC gaming news site has stayed a haven from 'internet enshittification' for nearly 30 years

You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? You try to scroll up on a gaming news article and the ads crowd out the text so thoroughly you have to reload. You want to find a short guide for collectibles in a new RPG, but beneath Google's flat-out wrong AI summary there's only a parade of videos well over the 10-minute mark. Pressures to survive in the attention economy have turned countless websites into labyrinths of engagement and monetization tactics. This spectre of quality decay—this "enshittification," as it was dubbed by journalist Cory Doctorow—goes beyond news outlets, social media sites, and blogs, extending to streaming TV, digital storefronts, and just about any service that exists in proximity to capital.

Perhaps that's why Stephen "Blue" Heaslip's site Blue's News is such a stable time capsule of the quaint, uncynical frontier the early internet is remembered as. Created to platform Heaslip's hobby writing in the '90s, the site was never about money. It was about something timeless, human, and more primordial: Quake hype.

"I was very into Doom, " Heaslip says, with a sort of timeworn fondness that betrays he is very much still into Doom. "I emulated some of what I'd seen people doing to follow Doom and Quake was about to come, so I created a Quake website. I was interested in experimenting with html … I did it on an impulse."

That impulse came and went in 1996, but nearly 30 years later, Blue's News persists as a general PC gaming and tech outlet with minimal changes since its inception. Its very layout brings to mind a yellowing Packard Bell CRT, and that's after the "modern" redesign. You'll not find so much as a hot take on the site, as it's an endless stream of concise, neutral news roundups and aggregated headlines. Today, Blue's social media tagline tracks its response to the shifting media world at its flanks: "No AI slop, no sponsored posts. Sorry, not sorry."

It's pure function and no filler; as the storm of enshittification rages, Blue's News is squarely in the eye of the storm. Heaslip isn't sure whether that makes him a one-man journalism outlet or just "one of the luckiest guys in the world," as his site notes. Regardless, it remains an unsullied flag planted in a landscape increasingly dominated by fewer and fewer parent companies. And for Heaslip, that's the point.

"Sometimes I question, you know, what am I doing here? There are all these much bigger corporate websites that dwarf my reach and all that. But it's sort of nice to feel like you're helping stem the tide or digging in against enshittification. The world's going to enshittify around me, I'm not gonna stop it, but I can try and revel in something that used to be better."

Blue streak

Refusing to jump in with sensationalist headlines or touchy op-eds is a steelier commitment than it might sound. It's cynical to think of journalism through the lens of attention-getting and controversy, but sites live and die by how much they are read—and what's neutral to one set of eyes is indistinct to another, easily passed over for more tantalizing reads.

Heaslip isn't blind to this pressure, he said, and recalled that it was what first pushed the site to outgrow its Quake blog origins.

"Somebody posted a list of different Quake websites and how many visits their links to them were generating. Suddenly this was like a scorecard; and wow, not that many people are coming to my website. Like, why would that be?"

That was the first time he thought of his site as something to foster and develop; the move to general news coverage was only made so that active readers who returned to the site could reliably find that something had changed in their absence. Heaslip founded one of the most resilient names in games writing in search of "something interesting."

With an up-and-running site and no prior experience writing news, he had a train in motion with tracks he'd have to place on the fly. You can still identify the site's indie edge in all its streamlined glory, but in the early days, it took some figuring out.

"I had to learn as I went along what being a journalist was—or what being a fake journalist was, whatever I was—and I learned a couple of lessons really early on. I was coming out of Usenet, I was kind of like a glorified forum poster. At one point Microsoft did something and I abbreviated their name as M$. Which is a funny 'forum dude' thing to do, but somebody came back at me and said, 'listen, you need to be more objective.' It was kind of like a slap in the face, and I was like okay, I get it: people have an expectation of fairness."

Those growing pains helped Heaslip identify a set of standards that guide the site's voice to this day. While formal education might have helped him steer clear of some pitfalls, his homegrown path kept him away from the strings of a big institution. Without them, he was able to implement a standard of his own design, accountable only to an audience which supports him directly through donations (these days via both PayPal and Patreon).

That freedom might have taken the site down a darker path; if you've been on any unmoderated forum for long, you know what I mean. Take, for instance, a site like gossip-column-turned-conservative-propaganda-pusher Drudge Report. It's a Bizarro World inversion of everything that makes Blue's News so placid, sharing its spartan web design, focus on headline aggregation, and no-nonsense ethos, but with a hard conservative slant.

Heaslip says that some moderation has been necessary to keep Blue's News so genial, but for most situations, classic internet wisdom never expires. Don't feed the trolls, for one.

"The internet is filled with hot takes. If anything, maybe I can be refreshingly free of hot takes," he says. "I don't disallow myself editorial comments, but I feel like I want to be like the Greek chorus. I want to say the thing that everybody is thinking. It became my mission to be more fair and more objective."

He's careful not to "make any claims to be Edward R. Murrow," but Heaslip thinks this approach helps keep things civil, adding that it's easy for online forums to devolve into "echo chambers." His stripped-back commentary has helped Blue's News retain a degree of trust few surviving news outlets enjoy today.

"I understand why people don't want to trust everything they read … it sort of feels like we're living in a post-truth world where you can formulate your own take on something and create your own reality. I think that's happening in a lot of areas, and it happens in gaming journalism. What's supposed to be your take on that, as the audience? It's gotta be disturbing. It shakes your ability to trust anybody who says anything."

His concerns aren't lost on me. I care about my work and think the media commenting on the games industry can be impactful—if we were all perfectly satisfied with the state of things, we probably wouldn't be journalists. But Heaslip has had his heels dug in against the tide of spicy takes for nearly three straight decades. That steadfastness, even in something as simple as sending out the headlines day after day, is emboldening.

Old but gold

In 1996, Heaslip's favorite game was Doom (you can find his custom maps on Doomworld). He'd just gotten engaged to his fiancee, known online by the handle MrsBlue. He posted dozens of PC gaming news stories daily.

In 2025, Heaslip posts dozens of PC gaming news stories daily. Last year was in fact his site's busiest for posts yet, clocking in at 12,313 stories. He's celebrating 29 years with MrsBlue. Doom is still a favorite, though he gives due props to Portal and Half-Life 2. And yes, you can still find his custom maps on Doomworld.

With over a billion site views since its inception and hundreds of thousands of news stories under its belt (94% of which have been written by Blue himself), Blue's News' legacy is more than simplicity or longevity. It's unparalleled consistency.

Despite a single-digit staff now comprised mostly of emeritus titles and bolstered by contributors, the site has only gone 22 days without at least one post since July of 1996. Twenty two days out of 10,530, as of this writing. That's a 99.8% hit rate. When Heaslip broke his arm in a car accident in 2021, he continued to pump out articles using his free hand and voice recognition software.

Even when a representative from MTV approached him back in the '90s about buying out the site, his immediate priorities didn't budge. "It wasn't like it was going to make me rich, and it wasn't like it was going to make me happy … any question like that led me to say, 'once that happens, when can I start a new website?'"

Left and right gaming news sites are dying, coming back, getting acquired, and trading around staff like a hellish game of musical chairs. Through the dot com bubble, through Gamergate, and through US government officials decrying the medium as garbage, Blue's News has kept a steady pace.

Blue's News doesn't live in showstopping release coverage, explosive view counts, or burning criticism of big-name games. Nothing so boom and bust. It lives in every small moment captured and sent out to a remarkably loyal niche. As much as Mr. Blue gives to the site on a daily basis, it's what he gets back with every upload that keeps him going.

"At certain points, I can't say why I continued. The world evolved and a lot of external money came into a lot of websites. It was just very difficult for me to continue to compete for everybody's eyeballs with the rise of other websites," he says.

"What had once been a bigger deal started to diminish a bit, but I really started to learn that I was getting something out of it myself besides financial success. The act of [writing], the relationship with the readers, staying in the flow of the news, it all suits me very well. In the end, I get a lot out of doing it."

Maybe the enshittification of the internet was inevitable. He thinks anyone who's been around since the early days knows a lot of the gruesome hallmarks of today's internet were already in place, just not on the scale we see today. Maybe, then, whatever the web seemed to lose over the years—an air of "sincerity," as Heaslip put it—is still around too, easily stumbled upon out of the blue if you just go looking.