I'm usually a GameFAQs poster but I wanted to jump into this topic as I've got some experience others may find valuable.

I started playing on an Atari 2600 in the early 80's and I've owned every major system released in the U.S. since. I've been at this hobby for about 30 years now, and for all those years, all I wanted to do was review video games. I was a decent writer through high school and got into journalism in college, but all I wanted to do was tell people what I thought about games I played. Who doesn't, right? Well, here's how I did it.

First, I went to college and got my journalism degree. You might think it would be easy to just sit down and write, but you've got to have the education as a base. Otherwise, you are just another faceless Internet person with an opinion and a message board account (i.e. less than nothing). What I learned in school, working at (and eventually running as EIC) the college newspaper was absolutely instrumental in getting me into the industry. I'd go so far as to say that if you want to write about games and don't have a college degree, either get one or find a new dream job.

Next, you have to be willing to do stuff you don't necessarily want to do - and for no money at all. I first started writing about games as a FAQ/guide writer - for free. I'd pick a game I was playing and enjoying, and I'd sit down and write a full guide for it. This is not quick or easy work. Even small games are huge projects, and if you don't do the job right, you may as well not do it at all. My first guides were for Time Ace and Transformers: Autobots/Decepticons on the DS. Small time games, right? Each guide was about 80 pages and two weeks worth of work. Keep in mind no one hired me to write these - I just picked games I liked, wrote the guides and submitted them to GameFAQs.

As I continued to write guides, I began to get noticed. Other sites contacted me about using my guides on their sites, which was my "in." "Sure," I'd say through e-mail, "You can absolutely use my guide on your site. Say, are you hiring at all? No? How about freelance work?" This is how I got my contract with IGN. The contacted me about a guide I wrote, and through e-mail, they ended up hiring me as a freelancer to write some pretty important guides. I was contracted by IGN to write guides for Bioshock, Mass Effect, Eternal Sonata, Punch-Out!!!, Too Human, Fable 2, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and a few others, and those guides got thousands, if not millions, of views. Hell, I recently found out my Bioshock guide was translated into German and Spanish! Crazy! This was EXTREMELY time consuming - taking up to a month of daily work on a game and averaging guides in the multiple hundreds of pages - and all I got for it was name recognition and a free copy of whatever game I was writing about. I had to stop taking these assignments as life got more complex. A full time job and a wife don't leave you eight hours a day to play games and examine every minute detail, so I had to stop taking these freelance assignments, as cool as it was to tell people I wrote for IGN.

Around the time I began writing for IGN, a smaller site, The Gamer's Temple, contacted me about using one of my free guides. I gave them the old, "Sure! How about a job?" line, and they agreed to take me on for a game review or two. Finally! I was going to be reviewing games! This was for no pay whatsoever; all I got was a free game to play and a forum to let others know what I thought about it. I had done some minor reviewing for my college paper and another site that basically stole my work (screw you - you know who you are), but this seemed like the real deal. All that hard work for no pay had finally paid off!

That was almost eight years ago. Since then, I've written nearly 1,000 reviews for The Gamer's Temple and I can't ever see myself stopping. Sure, I have a wife, baby and a full time job, but my reviewing gig has some amazing perks. I still don't get paid, but I get all my games for free and often weeks or months before the rest of the world can buy them in stores. I've been invited to some amazing press events - the Prototype 2 party in Las Vegas and visiting Vicarious Visions to see Skylanders: SWAP Force months before release were highlights - and I get to have a platform to tell everyone what I think about the latest games. Metacritic has been a wonderful thing for me as my reviews get the same weight as the bigger sites and more and more people see them every year. And telling Gamestop employees, "No, I don't need to preorder (upcoming game). I've already got it," will never, ever get old.

Do I have the highest profile job in the industry? No. Am I under any delusions that my tiny voice somehow makes a difference? Definitely not. I have a fun side job that allows me to combine two things I love - gaming and writing - and it comes with some major bonuses I would never give up. Sure, I'd love a job offer from a major site that would allow me to work in the game/writing industry as my main occupation, but if it never happens, fine. I'm plenty happy with life as it stands now. I hope my story helps someone out there looking to get into this industry, and if you want to contact me my email is vinzclortho37@hotmail.com. Thanks for reading!

TL;DR: Want to review games? Get a degree, be willing to take crappy jobs for free and keep at it. If you are any good, something may come of it.