Last Updated on by Samuel Franklin
Gamer Fit Nation was a platform dedicated to the intersection of gaming and fitness, fostering a community around the shared interests of gamers who also valued a healthy lifestyle which was closed in 2016 after 6 years on the internet. While there are some alternative resources and communities now as the exercise gaming market has grown through the likes of HealthyGamerGG (focused on mental health which I highly recommend), Gaming Fit and Fitness Gaming none have quite offered the same blend of content, news and real world impact as Gamer Fit Nation which is explored in detail on this page.
For the third instalment in Games Finder’s gaming archive series of posts we’ve opted to tackle the unique online magazine of Gamer Fit Nation (gamerfitnation.com) which opted to blend gaming and fitness into a single domain. Launching in early 2010 unfortunately Gamer Fit Nation has since shut down and is no longer online with the last article published on 30 August 2016. While the exact reasons for the shut down are unknown it’s likely the rapidly changing internet landscape and financial difficulties and changing audience preferences resulted in the end of the website.
Like many gamers fitness and video gaming has always been a difficult balance to achieve during my personal life and I always found the Gamer Fit Nation website to be useful in offering unbiased, accurate and varied published content. For example articles like “Tetris May Help Ease PTSD” and “How to Get Fit Like Nathan Drake” uniquely combined video games and fitness. More importantly in the case of Gamer Fit Nation there was a number of significant events like the video game cease fire that left an impact on the gaming industry as a whole and me personally that are worth highlighting here for the internet archive.
Table of Contents:
– The History of Gamer Fit Nation
– Notable Gamer Fit Nation Events
The History of Gamer Fit Nation
Launching several years before the existence of GamesLikeFinder the website started as a forum in the early days where gamers were brought together to discuss their own challenges and successes with maintaining a good lifestyle alongside their video gaming hobby. Like many websites in the gaming industry (Games Finder included) evolution over time is key to long term survival which eventually pushed GamerFitNation.com more towards a blog and news website, an example of which is shown below courtesy of the WayBackMachine Internet Archive.
In its final form Gamer Fit Nation tackled gaming fitness with easy meals (some of which were related to video games and needed an acquired taste), workout routines, fitness technology and general workouts. This paired with more traditional gaming editorial content, Esports, interviews, game reviews and first impression articles. In time the lifestyle section also included celebrity, cinema and gadgets for a full spread of lifestyle content. Written content on GamerFitNation.com was also often paired with video content of interviews, fitness challenges and fitness demonstrations.
Notable Gamer Fit Nation Events
Not content with being just another video game review website the team behind Gamer Fit Nation was responsible for a number of key events and information reveals.
Of these though the most notable was the calling of a video game cease fire to honour and respect the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. After the event Antwand Pearman (CEO at the time) appealed to gamers of the world to cease playing all online shooting games. The event itself was reasonably successful with tens of thousands of participants and ultimately was used to counter the harsh criticism directed towards violent video games which tends to spike after such as unfortunate real world event. This received significant media attention, including coverage from mainstream outlets like ABC News and NBC, and video game specific media like Polygon and Kotaku, among others.
Additionally in 2012 Gamer Fit Nation was behind the Dancetopia 2012 event in Harlem New York ( held at the Twenty-first Century Academy for Community Leadership) which aimed to promote health and video games with an event open to everybody that featured dance games of the era such as Dance Central, Zumba and Just Dance with giveaway prizes.
Lastly, on the exclusive content front the website was responsible for revealing that a sequel to Shaq Fu was in the works in 2014. The final game was eventually released in 2018 after a successful Indiegogo campaign raised $458,884. Titled Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn the final game which resembled a 2D side scrolling beat em up with elements of traditional fighting games but was met with mixed reviews from critics. This included 4/10 from Eurogamer, 3/10 from PlayStation LifeStyle and 3/10 from Destructoid although user reviews were slightly favourable with a Steam release achieving a mostly positive (7/10) rating.