Between 1998 and 2008, I ran Psychokiller Corporation — a website that was, depending on the day, a film criticism outlet, a tabletop roleplaying hub, a fan community, a translation project and an events coverage operation. Álex Hernández-Puertas joined later as a key collaborator and the site grew considerably from there. In the early years of the Spanish web, before social media flattened everything into the same format, that kind of sprawling, personality-driven site was how the internet actually worked. You built something because you were obsessed with things and you wanted somewhere to put that obsession.
The core of the site was reviews and commentary — film and tabletop RPG, two worlds that overlapped more than people gave them credit for. But Psychokiller Corporation was also where we covered Sitges Film Festival with the attention it deserved, tracked the Lord of the Rings phenomenon from the first trailer to the last extended edition, and ran dedicated sections on GURPS Matrix — a full tabletop adaptation of the Matrix universe that we designed ourselves — and Superheroes INC, the Spanish superhero roleplaying game that deserved far more attention than it got. We also ran the Spanish translation of Dork Tower, John Kovalic’s comic strip about tabletop gaming culture, which gave the site a regular publishing rhythm and a readership that came back every week.
Two of the more technically ambitious projects were CardCrawler — a dedicated tool for managing and trading collectible cards from the Call of Cthulhu card game — and a semi-official online edition of De Profundis, Michał Oracz’s epistolary roleplaying game in which players communicate exclusively through in-character letters, slowly descending into Lovecraftian horror through their correspondence. Our version functioned as a matchmaking platform, connecting players who wanted to start a game with others willing to descend into the darkness with them. Running that online, in the early 2000s, before anyone had a framework for what play-by-post even was, required a certain kind of commitment from everyone involved. It also attracted exactly the kind of player you’d want for it.
The forums were where the community actually lived — the place where the conversations that started in the reviews kept going, sometimes for years. By the time we closed it in 2008 to move on to other projects, Psychokiller Corporation had been running for a decade. That’s a long time to keep something going out of pure love for the subject matter.
