Who Are We?

I stumbled across The Long Dark back in the summer of 2018. I was immediately hooked. I loved everything about it. The solitude, the atmosphere, the music. Don’t even get me started on the permadeath. The fact that you could play for a hundred hours and lose everything just based on the casually made choice of whether or not to carry a weapon while foraging for wood… it’s just amazing. Playing TLD is what tipped me into the rabbit hole of survival games- it’s what led me to pick up a little game called Green Hell on the day it was released. That game also hit me hard -and within that first week I ended up taking up a position as the community manager for the official Green Hell Discord. That year long whirlwind solidified my obsession with the genre to such a degree that I ended up dragging both my wife and my sister down into the – often zombie filled- depths with me.

And that’s where we noticed some really weird and annoying shit.

With other genres we were able to ask for recommendations relatively simply. If you wanted an MMO, it was easy to get ideas. Need a new side scroller? Boom. A squad based PvP game? Pow! Then we tried to find referrals for survival titles – in Discord, on subreddits- and it was an utter failure. Folks were recommending shit, we’d pick the titles up… and we were honestly confused as to how the game was even survival. We’re not even talking about a “just add hunger and it’s survival” type game, but games where literally the only thing that made it survival was that you needed to not die. By that rational, World of Warcraft was survival. Mario World was survival. What wouldn’t qualify as survival??

Hashtag Survival was born from a need – and desire – to have a space where folks could find games that qualify as survival beyond just wearing the tag on Steam. (And my annoyance with a lot of Steam shit is probably fodder for a whole other post somewhere.) It was born out of a desire to foster a community around the love of games that fit into the survival genre.

And frankly after entertaining an age of my bitching on the subject, it was born so that my wife didn’t have to be the only one to suffer through my soapboxing.

-Jordan