Gerstmanngate re-opened

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT the whole crazy Gerstmann-gate affair was done and dusted, along come the folks at 1up to reopen all the old wounds, splurging the guts of the gaming industry like so many tins of spaghetti hoops.

Sam Kennedy lays the smack down on rival game site Gamespot, as well as its publisher Cnet, in a stunning blog post here.

As far as we can tell, thanks to the wonders of word count, the blog comes in at the length of a large feature, with 4,539 words expended on the topic. That's seven sides of typed A4, folks. Some of us didn't ever write that much in college.

The basic charge Kennedy levels is that the separation of marketing and editorial departments working on Gamespot has been slowly eroded by the departure of high-profile staff over the past couple of years - Vince Broady, a founder of the site, and Greg Kasavin, both of whom had been Gamespotters for over a decade. With Jeff Gerstmann getting the boot, the last of the ten-yeared professors is gone, and a bunch more staffers have recently let in protest at 'sweatshop' working conditions.

It's impossible to convey the magnitude of this piece in a few words, so go and check out the whole thing. If nothing else, it proves that there is still some real journalism left in games journalism.