Tikkabik

The title of this entry is cribbed from a Taoist expression (that was also used as the title of a Steve Jobs bio from some years ago), and it seems quite appropriate. Tikkabik.com turns 10 today.

It was in 1994 that I first registered this domain. At the time I did it, registrations were still handled through the InterNIC and cost nothing. There was a boom of domain name registration going on at the time and I figured I'd stake my claim.

At the time I registered Tikkabik.com I was working as the IT guy for a design firm in Watertown, Mass., and we were all just getting our feet wet with this whole Internet thing. It seemed like a logical progression of the business we were doing but it was still hard to predict how much of an impact it was going to have on our work, which up until then -- and for a while afterwards -- was still primarily focused specifically on broadcast and print work.

For a while after I registered it, Tikkabik.com sat idle. After all, it was -- and has once again become -- nothing more than a vanity domain. Eventually I found a niche that suited my interests: Mac games. There were already a couple of sites that were offering up general Mac game news -- Inside Mac Games (which, at the time, was primarily a periodical that shipped out on CD, but had an occasionally-updated Web component), and Mac Gamer's Ledge.

Flargh's Mac Arcade Game List was a very specific idea: a simple HTML table that listed old-school coin-op arcade games and their Mac equivalents, with links. Eventually that snowballed into a full-fledged gaming news service, complete with reviews, features and editorials. I eventually turned that into MacGaming.com, which, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, led to my current gig. This year I celebrated my fifth anniversary as a Mac Publishing LLC employee: My fifth year writing about the Macintosh full-time.