Only the real ones will remember these two.
CHV.net, the acronym stood for 'Cyber Hippie Vision', a term that would catch on absolutely nowhere else. This was an extremely early example of gaming video content, with video reviews and tournaments from a pioneer in the genre that would sort of become 'Let's Play's. Everything that gaming content was in the 00's, I first saw here, but sadly it wasn't particularly influential and remains a very obscure site today (this was the best representation I could find on the Wayback Machine). From memory almost all of their content was uploaded MPG's with streaming through RealPlayer, with occasional commentary from the hosts.
I think the staff were mostly young guys in S.Korea and they would upload intro FMV's and promos for upcoming games as well. Sadly the site went into permanent hibernation in around 2002 with a post about how they no longer had the resources to keep the site up (presumably costs for hosting all that video content) and were casually seeking investors with an estimate of 1mil USD to 'continue the project'. I don't know if there were legal issues with all the gaming footage or if the internet was still too young for that sort of concern, but I got the impression that they never expected to come back and shortly after that update it was gone forever.
In another world CHV would have become what Twitch and YouTube became for gaming content, but in reality, I have never met another person who knew it existed.
With more acronyms now,
The GIA.com (or The Gaming Intelligence Agency) was another early 00's source for video game news and media. It started out as a video game fansite and passion project for a small group of contributors it would eventually become a respected outlet for reviews, information about upcoming releases and it too would pioneer the kind of 'analysis' content that would become huge with gaming content in the years to come. For many, The GIA was a watermark on videos for JP only video games or titles that were yet to be released in the west and when I finally checked out the site itself it was my first exposure to the kind of passionate community directed gaming news that was rare at the time and rarer still today. In looking for a screenshot of the old logo (which people could probably recognize without knowing about the site itself) I see now that they actually relaunched about a decade ago, only to fade away just as suddenly. For me, this is the legacy of The GIA, a site that had no ambition greater than being a place for interested people to talk about video games and the fact that this wasn't enough to keep it alive makes it a pretty sad indictment of gaming media today.
