On January 12th, 2011, at the dawn of the pony fandom and juuuuust before it would paint the internet pastel pink, a fan named Strawberry Spice registered the blog that would eventually become Equestria Gaming. After a quiet first few months, the site officially opened on April 3rd — thirteen years ago today! Over the next decade-and-then-some, we've seen a whole heck of a lot: the first steps of the fandom, Pon-E3, the rollercoaster ride that was the life of Fighting is Magic and Them's Fightin' Herds, alllllll the way on down to the end of Friendship is Magic and the beginning of the next generation of My Little Pony. So many periods of high energy power posting sandwiched between lengthy radio silences, the coming and going of more than a dozen staff members, and no less than three changes of ownership in five years. It's been a wild ride!

2023 was a record-shattering year for Equestria Gaming... and not for any reasons worth celebrating. Except for the five month window in 2016 when the site was actually dead, it has become the low-water mark of the site's history, with a whopping three whole posts and an almost half-year-long outage of our inbox and the arcade. You could very well make the argument that, as of last year, there was barely any difference between uptime and outage to begin with — we rather infamously stopped checking the inbox, and over 90% of the games in the arcade hadn't worked in years. For all intents and purposes, it seemed like Equestria Gaming had finally, at least in spirit, joined most of the other G4 sites from the early days in the digital afterlife.

Well, we say that it doesn't have to be that way, and it won't! Over the past few months, the winds of change have been blowing behind the scenes here at Equestria Gaming, and today we're proud to announce we're re-launching the site! Read on below the break to find out what we've been up to, where Equestria Gaming is headed, and how you (yes, you!) can be a part of it.