Blogging may have been one of the biggest phenomenons to hit the World Wide Web. It may have been the biggest. Even this website started once as a blog. However, there are very few that really break out and get the worlds attention.

The poster child for doing things their way and simply getting the world to listen, Destructoid.com simply started as the brain child as Yanier ‘Niero’ Gonzalez; a few stunts with a helmet and scaring the gaming media, has become one of the outlets of independent information.

We sit down with the mastermind to get a better idea of how he feels about his brand, Mr. Destructoid, and gaming journalism. Like the legend that precedes him, Niero keeps it as real as they come.

The Gamer Studio: It’s fascinating that Destructoid has worked itself from the blogosphere to one of the major players in the videogame industry. In a world where there are a million blogs started daily, what do you think made yours stand out?

Niero: Destructoid is very lucky -- we're thankful for every moment we get to live out this dream. I think a few conditions played into our advantage. For one, we got started at the HD gaming boom. I wanted to be there for the new console launches and was clinging to every press drop like we all were, but I was extremely suspicious at the same time which came through in the editorial voice -- a lifelong fan taking a few more risks than the vanilla gaming press usually does with our editorial. I had been wishing and hoping all my life to have a video game *anything*: job and blogging seemed possible. Also going for me: I'm kind of a weird dude. I showed up at E3 and terrified the head of the ESA, sending Gamepolitics into a frenzy and then the rest of the journalism press was polarized by it. They wrote us up. That was almost 4 years ago. I think a lot of what worked for us in the beginning still makes us relevant and worth people's time today. It's still just a group of outsiders looking in -- raw, uncut, unfiltered. We're independent so we can cut through the red tape as needed.

The Gamer Studio: Raw & Uncut is a great tagline for your brand, but the editorial voice had to come from somewhere. What gaming publications would you say influenced you as a writer and even as a gamer?

Niero: The usual suspects -- as a kid I grew up reading Nintendo Power and loved the Sushi-X articles in Gamepro. I remember canceling my subscription to Nintendo Power after devotedly collecting them for five years when EGM was scooping them on their own products and providing more critical views. That was the first time I realized that I was being marketed to. There were only happy things being written in NP. In high school I wrote profusely for a magazine called the Elan about everything but videogames. I loved English class. I'm not a native English speaker, there was no Great American Literature lying around my house so I discovered that later and I loved it. I liked how Twain and Hemmingway wrote in plain, simple English but still communicated great sarcasm, wit, and humor while being effective critics. As far as game journos go I later came to admire guys like Shoe, Gerstmann, and Crecente for sticking their necks out there for their publications. When I started reading Kotaku the duo of Florian and Eliza were my favorites, but they were let go or moved on shortly after. I would find myself laughing out loud daily but I could sense they didn't always jive with management at Gawker. Working to keep wild people like that on a site must be challenging, I thought, so that would affect how I would build and choose my team. (They both later worked for Dtoid for a little bit and I got to meet them in Japan which was a neat experience.) My favorite games writer is probably Seanbaby. I thought man, these guys aren't just games writers -- they're entertainers. The game news is replicated across a billion game sites and I choose to read it from them. They make it fun. My site needs to be fun to read and accessible. I didn't know anything about blogs so I started to look around and saw that people like Perez Hilton was notorious for his format -- every story has a header photo with some text (or semen!) overlay. So I borrowed from that goon, too. I learned the most successful bloggers were chronic and relentless in their updates. So that's the anatomy of a Destructoid story circa 2006. Later I would build a unique team that would bring in all kinds of other flavor in a similar spirit.

The Gamer Studio: Branding is powerful, and that is something I am sure you realized when you guys did the Robot stunt. Where do you feel, in 2009, this brand is going, and how do you plan on expounding on your success?

Niero: did work at an agency for a few years, so some of my experience as a graphic designer played into this. We've had a lot of fun with Mr. Destructoid, but it's not just a catchy logo anymore. If someone says "Destructoid" wrote it up and people know about us they might say "uh-oh" because they know it will be an unfiltered viewpoint. We can be brutal sometimes, that I admit. But it's all from the heart. I think when we love something it just makes it's gotta be really, really good. Why do I sound like an abusive husband? haha!

The Gamer Studio:You say Mr Destructoid isn’t catchy anymore...are there any moves to revitalize the logo?

Niero: Oh no, I mean it's still catchy, but it's a legacy thing for us now. We don't plan on changing it any time soon. It's still fun as ever to get in the helmet and party. I meant that now it's more about the work to live up to the name. That's what's keeping it fresh -- we're always changing the editorial mix and trying different things.

The Gamer Studio: Unlike some blogs who try to be punchy for hits, and others who try to be bland, Destructoid plays the game the way it wants to. Do you attribute this to your success?

Niero: We definitely do. It also goes into our staffing practices -- I've found all our writers through the community in one way or another. I want real people talking about games. That's who our reader is. We also promote stories from our commutity on a whim and try to do offbeat stories as well. We work hard at also doing original editorial and video that you can't get anywhere else.

The Gamer Studio: Have you tracked your popularity...and when did you notice the wave that created the numbers that are in your community today?

Niero: We started with a sitemeter hit counter. It used to help me get motivated but it can also be demotivating as those traffic dips come. I remember looking at it when Joystiq and Kotaku linked to us for the first time and watching those traffic spikes. When we got our first Digg I saw it peak before the server caught fire. These days I force myself to only look at the 30 day Google Analytics. It messes with your head too much if you try to track progress by the hour.

The Gamer Studio: Some would say gathering writers from your community is a dangerous move. You went the opposite direction. Why did you decide to run with writers from the community, instead of trained/experience journalists?

Niero: As if I could afford to choose! Hah, I had no choice. Still, it worked to create something special. I'm not qualified to run this site either and I think our readers like it that way. I wanted the site to feel like a video game club. Game clubs are not made up of scholars. They're made up of regular people that have longing to share it with other people and meet other people with similar interests. A lot of classically trained game journalist I've met want to grow up to be Lester Bangs, which is fine, but they're writing for themselves. I staff people that write for our readers. Since I primarily hire up from the community they know who they're writing for. As a publisher I've become obsessed with building a jelled team. To me its all about building a family that works well and respects each other. When we fight internally (and we do often!) it's always for a common goal. Our community is made up of incredible people.

The Gamer Studio: What were the hurdles of picking and finding your team through the community?

Niero: As an unfunded nobody start-up you can hire ten people and nine will drop. If you find one good person you're in luck. We've had a lot of turnover. Its difficult finding people to work on your labor of love. I'm extremely lucky in this respect. I take less risks with very young people. It takes emotional maturity to be a good blogger because the feedback in the comments can really be difficult to process without some life experience. It takes toughened skin to put your opinion out there and stand by it when people anonymously come on the attack. You know you've found good people when things go bad and you can all come out of it with your heads screwed on right.

The Gamer Studio: Some say Gaming Journalism has faltered throughout the years, and it isn't as hard hitting as it once was. In your eyes, are there publications/writers who write the good stuff like you were drawn too when you were just a reader?

Niero:That conversation has so many different facets to it. Let's break it down: For one, there was a lot of crap to be called out way back that would never fly today. People could BS in a completely different way and get away with it. Today the world is smaller. PR companies are steering their clients away from that kind of behavior. Companies that get the web know that they will be picked apart by the blogs so they're a little more guarded in their hyperbole. You can't doctor photos or FMV video without a thousand websites on your neck. The gaming companies have learned not to call bad press on themselves, I think.

In terms of faltering, I guess (as a whole) there's more overall people writing in the public eye that could contribute to that. Is there crap out there? Sure there is. The gaming industry is also way bigger so there's more to cover so more hands had to come into it but the old guys in games journalism are still around. Do those guys do worse jobs? Is their writing that much better? If that was true none of the new guys would have a readership. Things change, people change. A new generation may prefer something else. I think people that say that stuff are speaking for their agendas and personal tastes. I've seen the direct opposite in demand. If the golden standard of games journalism was print journalism, that's dying. Gaming sites continue to grow. People are busy -- a short format like blogs are more popular now. In ten years blogs might be dead and we'll be doing long-format twittering about games. I still read Edge, Game Informer, etc. but I've got a thousand new blogs in my RSS and promote articles from the community daily -- some which have gone up on Digg. I think it's a little renaissance in games writing. It's more accessible than ever for readers and writers.

The Gamer Studio: It’s interesting, not many people get to live out their dreams.When you were younger, did you envision life turning out this way?

Niero: No way. I'm an art school dropout. What I thought was in store for me in life was wandering between corporate jobs trying to find a way to work in my quirks. I was an illustrator for a newspaper right after school, then a web designer for a computer company. Eventually I ended up doing advertising for a few airlines at an ad agency and, if I was lucky, a client would let me sneak something fun into the tagline sometimes. Then I'd run home and grind 80 hours into Steam or an MMO. I thought gaming was something I was going to end up doing within cracks of my life, you know, between work and when my wife wouldn't mind me geeking out. Instead I made it my job and found a nerdy girl to hang out with. Absolutely could not have predicted or wished this to turn out any better.

The Gamer Studio: Did the experience in art help you when coming up with a catchy color scheme? Also as a web designer, do you do all the code work yourself? I consider my self a bit of a code buff and always find this stuff interesting.

Niero: Indeed. It's funny I ended up in this publishing position -- it's an amalgam of everything I've ever tried to do professionally but eventually hated or failed at. I won all kinds of awards as a teen for illustration -- I was a Ford Scholarship winner in the arts and also a Silver Knight in Miami-Dade. I helped design a playground as my thesis; it had a big dragon slide with a mansion at the base. I wanted to run my own gallery as an adult and be a commissioned illustrator or painter. I came to realize that most artists that make it big are natural socialites. I didn't want to talk to anyone about my art and just hanging it wasn't going to get me funded, so I thought well, maybe I'm not good enough for this. So I took a job drawing cartoons for the newspaper. I was eating ramen every day. Luckily my friend Tom took to HTML and lent me one of those O'Reilly books with the koala on the cover. I saved up and bought a 200MHz PC (before I bought a car, my parents were livid) and it came with Corel PhotoPaint 8. I started building web sites with that and coding HTML with notepad. I couldn't get Photoshop so I never learned it. Somehow it was enough to get me a creative director position at an ad agency though. I've traveled the world with my caveman skills. Ten years later this is how I still build sites. I'm a total hack. I still use Photopaint 8. I'm surprised it runs on Vista. At some point I guess I'll have to learn other stuff. I picked up a little PHP and CSS but I'm a very terrible programmer. It's Tom that does all the database code and I (break) the front-end. I'm saving money to replace myself from doing the code and design so I can get back to the writing. I can't write CSS to save my life. Ask my readers -- the site is buggy; I'm lucky some of them think its cute. We just hired a new guy to help. He's a ninja and cannot wait to retire my code.

The Gamer Studio: So what do you see Destructoid growing to in the future?

Niero: World domination. I may settle for less, but you've gotta have goals.

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