For about four years this site was orange. A big scuffed orange highlighter, a clapperboard logo, a font that looked like it had been left out in the rain. It suited what the site was, which was a place I put film clips and the occasional list, mostly so I had somewhere to send people from TikTok. It did fine. It was also, if I am honest, the sort of thing you build in a weekend and then never quite get round to finishing.
In June I threw it away. Not the articles, not the URLs, not the four years of people arguing about Heat in the comments of a video, but everything you could see. New code, new design, new name for what the place is. It is now the cinephile's arcade, which sounded grand when I typed it and which I have decided to stand behind. This is what that involved, and what fell over.
Why the orange went
Because it was loud and the films are not. Most of what gets written about here is cult, British, seventies American, or all three, and putting Bob Hoskins next to a fluorescent highlighter never felt right. The new site is near-black with one red. The red is the dot in the logo, which is meant to be a camera aperture and which one friend described as a very confident full stop. I will take that. The type is a serif for the big words and a monospace for the small ones, which is a fancy way of saying it looks like a film title over an end credit, and that was the point.
The games
The thing I actually wanted to build was the games. Wordle proved that people will come back every day for a small puzzle if the puzzle is good and the share card is smug enough. Film is the perfect subject for it because everyone thinks they know more than they do, including me.
So there are now eighteen of them. A daily frame you have to name from a single still. A tagline game. A quote game. A grid game called Cinedle that is Wordle in a trench coat and I am not going to pretend otherwise. This or That, which is sixty-two head-to-head matchups and the thing people play most, because it turns out the internet will always click on Shawshank versus The Godfather. Top Trumps with forty-three cult characters, which took longer to make than anything else on the site and which I would build again tomorrow. And four proper arcade games, one of which is a pixel-art platformer I made instead of sleeping.
What broke
Everything you would expect, plus three things I did not.
The first was the daily games repeating. Each one picks its puzzle by the date, which is elegant until you notice the pool for the frame game had ten entries in it, so anyone who played every day saw the same ten frames on a loop for the whole summer. Nobody complained, which is either kindness or a sign nobody was playing every day. The pools are getting bigger, starting this month, and the next job is making the site remember what you have already seen so nobody gets a repeat before the pool has grown.
The second was that every article on the site had "Film Fanatics" in its title twice. Not visibly, but in the bit of the page that Google reads. So for three months, if you searched for anything we had written, the result said Film Fanatics, Film Fanatics, like a nervous introduction. One line of code. I found it by accident while doing something else, which is how every bug I have ever found has been found.
The third is that I put four game cards on the games page for games that did not exist yet, with a little "coming soon" label, thinking that would motivate me to build them. It did not. It just made the page look like four things were broken. They are coming off the page until they exist.
What I got right
The film pages. Each of the sixty films we keep coming back to has a page that pulls together everything on the site about it, the essays, the games it turns up in, the clips. They are the most on-brand thing here and, naturally, the pages nobody finds. I am working on that.
And the speed. The old site was slow in the way that things built by one person at midnight are slow. The new one is fast enough that the games feel like games rather than web pages, which was the whole test. If you tap a poster on This or That and the vote bar fills before you have finished deciding whether you meant it, that is the bit I am proudest of.
What is next
More frames, because the frame game is the one people message me about. A daily strip on the homepage so you can see what you have and have not played. Multiplayer that does not ask you to sign in before it shows you what you are signing in for. And more writing like this, which is to say writing with a person in it, because the internet already has enough lists of the thirty best horror films and I have written several of them.
If you played the old site, thank you. If you are new, the games are here, the films are here, and the orange is gone. You are welcome.