Well hello!
I'm Joe Pishgar, your new Community Director! I'm here with my team, Alucard (Josh) and Sutvar (Caitlin) who will be helping out the forum community at Retro Gamer. By way of introduction, before jumping over to tech media, I worked in game development for Sony, Disney, and Microsoft on games like Age of Empires 3, Virtual Magic Kingdom, Settlers of Catan, Star Wars Galaxies, and Rise of Nations. I've been a lifelong gamer, playing M.U.L.E. on an Atari 800, Jungle Hunt on ColecoVision, screaming incoherently at E.T. for the Atari 2600, and working my way on up to Gunsmoke on the original NES. I rock out to chiptunes, watch hour-long speedruns of Mario 3 on YouTube over dinner, and really have just too much junk in the way of 8-bit figurines of gaming glories past that it borders on hording. Apologies, what appeared to be by way of introduction has turned somewhat into a confession. To the point!
We're here to help. You've likely got questions. Here's a few answers in advance.
Q. What does your arrival here mean for Retro Gamer?
A. The Retro Gamer community will continue to operate as it has always, without much change. The one major difference is that you'll have access to far greater resources than before.
Q. What does this mean for the community policies and the way things work in the forum?
A. No revolution required, no coup necessary. No big policy changes or guidelines shifts. Not going to rock the boat, toss the baby out with the bathwater, or any other euphemism for screwing something up for the sake of change itself. Over the next quarter or two, we'll likely empanel a new group of moderators from the active folks here to keep things clean and tidy at the spam level, and look into sprucing up the place with a nifty new theme. And of course, maybe adding in some new (better!) categories for retro games discussions. Sidenote: There's a few items I'd like to know, like what *technically* qualifies as a "retro" game - how far back, and how far forward? Does a Gamecube game qualify? How about Space War from 1962? These are the questions that gnaw.
Q. What, if anything, will change though?
A. Go about your business, nothing to see here! Really though, my team and I will be nudging the community here towards health and growth every so often. And we'll be making ourselves available if there's ever any complaints or issues that we can resolve. We're here to serve as your point person/s and advocates.
Q. You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
A. Open mailbox. Read leaflet.
If you have any other questions, I'm happy to answer them! For those of you interested, please do keep a look out for future announcements about moderation team opportunities, and requests for feedback on possible tweaks to the board skins/templates for better viewing.
Glad to be with you, and here's to an epic trip down nostalgia lane!

Warm Regards,
Joe Pishgar