Hi! Welcome to 4gxg.com. This site was built around a simple rule: The players come first. While many great and exciting games already exist, they all have the interest of business placed before the interest of the player base. 4GXG is here to make sure that the gamers always have a place where they know they come first.
Why "4GXG"???
This idea began on May 16th, 2007. I originally called it Project X, because I thought it sounded cool. This is a highly used name though, so I wanted to rename it. I tried Project G, and found that this name was taken as well. So was Project Gamer. So was Project Banana. I got desperate and tried GOOCNY, which was part of an authorization string in the URL for a private Picasa Web Album. It wasn't taken.
Then, my friend Jeremy, also an avid gamer, told me that the name was too hard to pronounce. So I finally thought, "Well this is going to be a site for gamers, by gamers, so let's try that title". Alas, it wasn't taken, but some scammy bloke who owns that URL wanted $6000 for it, which I would much rather have put into the awards pool. So I decided that some variation of an acronymn would be best. I'm very much aware that the true acronym should be 'FGBG', but doesn't '4GXG' look a bit cooler?
A little bit about the founder
My name is Ray Liu. Some players may recognize me from various conventions as well as my internship at Decipher, Inc. during the summer of 2002. I also used to frequent sorcery.net's #lotrtcg chatroom as Psy-Jedi.
I've been playing card games most of my life beginning with Magic back when I was in the 7th grade. I was introduced to Decipher CCGs for the first time with Star Trek CCG around the same time. I didn't enjoy the intricacies of that game as much as Magic at the time. After a year or so I sold my cards and faded away from card games for a while.
Then in the summer of 1999, I was at the San Diego ComiCon when I walked by the Decipher booth and was drawn in by their latest CCG, Young Jedi. Though simple, I really enjoyed the game play. I was also a huge Star Wars fan at the time so the game was a perfect fit for me. After dropping gobs of money into the game, I got back in to Star Trek CCG, and then into Star Wars CCG (possibly the best card game ever).
One November night in 2001, a month before The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring hit theaters, I was at a Star Trek tournament and thought to myself, "Liv Tyler is hot, I'm going to buy some packs of this new Lord of the Rings game and get her card." Amazingly enough, I ended up pulling Gwemegil (Arwen's sword, featuring a nice picture of Liv Tyler) out of my first 3 packs. From that point on I was hooked.
I met a whole force of great people during my college years playing Decipher's games (especially during my internship between my junior and senior years). During my senior year, I started to move away from gaming and took up poker (and other various college activities).
Beginning in 2006, I started playing Magic the Gathering again. During the a catastrophe that Magic players came to dub "Hulk/Flash", I decided that games, rules, erratas, etc. should never be in the hand of a few designers, especially if those designers weren't even avid gamers themselves. And thus 4GXG was born.
Looking for a job?
If you're passionate about gaming, and you have time to dedicate to a cool project, shoot me an email at rayliu@4gxg.com. Who knows? Maybe this thing will take off and you'll have joined a successful startup!