The reforging of the Rock Paper Shotgun

Lock, stock and a trip to the archives

It's often claimed by liars and fools that our website's title is a clever reference to the ancient Chinese game of shoushiling - or "rock paper scissors", as it's known overseas. The orthodox interpretation is that "Rock Paper Shotgun" is a folksy regional variation on this, with a "shotgun" instead of the "scissors". But friends, this is patently absurd. Think about it: a game that pits a shotgun against a rock or piece of paper would be incredibly one-sided. It goes against reason!

The sad reality is that the origins of our website's title have been deliberately obscured, allowing cold hard fact to slither back into legend. Behind that mockingly nonsensical moniker sleeps an eldritch truth of such gravity it would make Gandalf spill his mead. Friends, the Rock Paper Shotgun is real. The Weapon exists. Or at least, it once did - and will, for I mean to fashion it anew by combing the writing of RPS writers gone by for raw materials. And in this endeavour, I will naturally need your aid.

But first, some Dan Brown-esque world-building. In the course of my first year at RPS I have striven to reclaim the hidden knowledge of the Rock Paper Shotgun. Between shifts, I have pored over dessicated comments threads and driven our searchbox to distraction with my surmises about a relic so awful that Gamer Network's elders have concealed it beneath a defensive pizza topping of wordplay. The conclusion I have come to is that 2019's "secret history of Rock Paper Shotgun" is a total fabrication, promulgated by cowled figures in gaslamped mahogany sanctums, to stop the writers and readers of this site from grasping their own power.

Here is how I think everything really happened back in 1872, the actual year RPS was founded. One darkling day in November, the Founders - starry-browed Sir Alec Walker, Mad MC Meerjohn, time-travelling cowboy Slim Jim Rossignova and Kieron Gillen, who I gather was a magic horse of some description - were wandering in the forest fastness of Errour. Emerging from the heartwoods, the foursome found themselves upon the green and hallowed shores of Loch Arthur. From the loch's brilliantine waters issued the mighty arm of Alice O, who hurled unto them a Shotgun with a Halo of Destiny, a Heretical instrument of Unreal power fit to make the Dark Forces of Doom itself Quake in F.E.A.R.

The Founders were sore amazed, but Kieron Gillen spake good counsel unto them, saying: "Take heart, colleagues, for this mighty weapon is surely +20 frostbite with a 33% chance of a free reload per headshot."

"A talking horse - witchcraft!" shrieked Meerjohn, seizing the Shotgun and firing wildly. And there might our tale have ended, but fortunately, Sir Walker had a human writer friend who was also called Kieron Gillen and had been standing slightly to the left of everybody this whole time. And so, after burying their beloved magic horse, the Founders took up the Rock Paper Shotgun and deployed its strength to build and consecrate the only website for PC gamers that has ever existed.

Alas, the record is patchy and hard to decipher from this point on. According to one crumbling archived comments thread, the years 1873-1956 are just Alice B (RPS in peace) and Sin Vega having a capoeira match while Ollie Toms occasionally says "smashing" into a microphone. I do know, however, that at some point in our noble enterprise, the Rock Paper Shotgun was lost - possibly cast into the loch whence it came, possibly sold off to fund Slim Jim's scotch egg habit - and more's the pity, for there has never been greater need of it than today.

Our ranks are grievously depleted. The Maw grows picky and petulant, the Geoffs keighley from the heights, the Phils spencer in the shadows. Our comments system has undergone eerie mutations, now thankfully reversed, and on the far side of the campfire sits the enigmatic figure of Ian Games.

There is but one course of action: we must reforge it. We must reforge the Rock Paper Shotgun. But of which rock, which paper and which shotgun should this implement of wonder be constructed? Every RPS writer and every RPS reader will have their own answer to this question, but it falls to me, as instigator of this crusade, to start the ball rolling.

When it comes to the Rock, there are many possible candidates. One is the physical black pendant at the heart of the Stone, an alternate reality browser game that captured the imagination of a different millennium. As described by John Walker - a confusing, retconned amalgam of Sir Alec Walker and Mad MC Meerjohn, conjured by some passing wizard in 1909 - you'd use the symbols on the pendant to complete puzzles that would send you off on a voyage of primordial googling.

I would love to wield a shotgun made up puzzle game materials. It's an appealing kind of blasphemy, like making a pancake out of caviar. But I do wonder about the ballistic potential of symbol-ridden pendants. Not having ever owned one myself, I strongly suspect the original pendants were actually plastic. And even as I type these words, my eye is drawn to the resolute anti-materialism of Sin Vega's old diary about being a Minecraft hermit in a world straining beneath the weight of Nate Crowley's (RPS in peace) megalomania. Not for Sin the diamond and obsidian ordnance of so-called "civilisation". She generally made do with a humble stone axe. Very well then, our Rock shall be Minecraft's stone.

Paper is a harder one. RPS is made of pure electricity, after all. Nic has done his best to enlighten us about books, but we do not wholly understand or trust this entity called "print", whereby websites are perversely transcribed onto pounded wood fiber. However, there are times when RPS writers have dabbled in the art of tree-mulching.

As recently as 2023, Katharine (RPS in peace), wrote about the joys of physical video game manuals - specifically, The Banished Vault's accompanying booklet with its life-saving conversion tables. Still, perhaps we don't need to be that literal. For the Paper of Rock Paper Shotgun, I choose the Pipwick Papers, Philippa Warr's old internet round-up series, which rival Reddit's frontpage in their coverage of everything from snail facials and Game Of Thrones to "cosmic inflation" and videos of food-styling. The lack of a tag makes digging them all up a faff, but you can always resort to our searchbox. They're worth the effort.

Lastly, the Shotgun element of the Rock Paper Shotgun. This is also a tricky question, but for reasons of abundance, not scarcity. There are as many shotguns as there are first-person shooters. You could build a ladder to the moon with their stocks and barrels, and perhaps I'll do that someday, if they force me to write about LEGO Star Wars again.

I guess I could go for an obvious headliner, like DOOM's boomstick. But I am peculiarly compelled by the shotgun you find in Sons Of The Forest. Or at least, I'm compelled by the process of acquiring it: according to our former guide writer Hayden Hefford (RPS in peace), you have to dig it out of a grave. How exquisitely melancholy! How in keeping with the spirit of corporate acquisitions! The Shotgun Of The Forest it is.

These fragments I have shored against our ruins, but the ruins could always do with more fragments, so by all means add your own, personally selected gobbets of rock, paper and shotgun. While you do that, I'll be preoccupying myself with the challenge of combining them. Has anybody here ever actually made a shotgun? I wouldn't put it past you all.