Matt Drake
Matt Drake grew up playing games. Whether they were chess or wargames with his old man, roleplaying games with his brothers, or traditional board games with his whole family, he was a gamer from way back. And he never grew out of it.
Unfortunately, games got more expensive, and by the early nineties, Matt had a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. He figured out around 2002 that publishers would give him free stuff if he wrote about the stuff he got. He started writing for RPG.net, and then when he found out how much more stuff he could get if he wrote for a magazine, he got a gig writing for Knucklebones Magazine.
The Knucklebones thing went pretty well. On top of lots of free games, Matt even wrangled a trip to GenCon out of the deal. But at the end of 2007, Knucklebones folded, and Matt found himself depending on the generosity of strangers to get games again. Plus he was tired of writing bland reviews to make editors happy, so Matt figured it was time to do his own thing.
Matt started Drake’s Flames in November of 2007. When he started, he was getting about eight hits a week – not all that respectable. His cousin’s Myspace page got more traffic. But with time, some really cheap Internet advertising and a whole lot of blatant self-promotion, Matt was able to get people to check out his ludicrous little blog, and more amazing, he got them to come back. It probably helps that he updates the site three times a week, and his crassly opinionated reviews and semi-pointless rants seem to attract a wide range of gamers, though Matt suspects that most of them are shameless miscreants.
Drake’s Flames currently draws about 4,000 hits a week, and that traffic helps promote the two advertisers at Drake’s Flames. One is Dogstar Games, an online retailer who supplies Matt with many of the games he can’t get because he’s said too many horrible things about games from really big publishers, and the other is VixenTor Games, which may be named a little poorly, because it doesn’t sell any games at all. VixenTor Games provides high-quality, hand-made game accessories like dice towers and specialized dice bags, and it is also owned by Matt Drake. He hasn’t ruled out the possibility of publishing games, but that’s really hard, and Matt’s kind of lazy.
