THE RECORD
GameLit Origins
In September 2017, a small group of authors gave a name to a kind of story that had been growing without one. The name was GameLit — and SciFan Magazine, this site's own ancestor, was there at its beginning: one of the word's four coiners was the magazine's publisher, and the magazine's tenth issue became the new genre's special edition. This page gathers what the record shows — the definition the founders agreed, the charter that still stands, and the evidence, preserved in the Internet Archive, that backs every word of it.
A name for stories that play
By 2017, a generation of novels had grown up around games — stories where rules, levels and mechanics are not decoration but the engine of the plot. The shelf had one famous label, LitRPG, and it fit only some of them. The wider family needed a wider word.
On September 4, 2017, that word emerged in a conversation in LitRPG Rebels, the Facebook group run by Zachariah Dracoulis, among four authors: Zachariah Dracoulis, R. M. Mulder, Dustin Tigner, and John Ward. The word: GameLit.
GameLit: A story with gaming elements essential to the plot. Often includes features of Science Fiction, Fantasy, or Science Fantasy. While all LitRPG books fit within GameLit, not all GameLit books fit within LitRPG. This is an open genre. There are no official groups, gatekeepers, or rule-makers.
gamelit.org — live within weeks, unchanged for years
The definition did not stay in a chat thread. A home was built at gamelit.org — by Tigner's own account he grabbed the domain himself, before the definition was even put to a vote.
The Internet Archive's first capture: September 22, 2017 — 18 days after the coining — already carries the complete charter (the definition, the Science Fiction / Fantasy / Science Fantasy line, the LitRPG sentence, and the open-genre declaration), exactly as quoted above.
The homepage stayed byte-for-byte identical in archive captures from September 2017 through June 2019, and the definition still stands word for word in the most recent capture, July 12, 2026 — nearly nine years on. Tigner has looked after the site throughout; the current page points readers to him.
Four authors coined a word in a Facebook thread. The page they built for it has now outlasted almost everything else from that autumn — unchanged.
A month of debate, then no gatekeepers
The founders opened the discussion; it grew into a private working group — the GameLit Council — of more than two dozen authors. For a month, through what Tigner describes as thousands of messages, the Council debated a single shared definition and a plan to launch the genre.
“It took a month of all-day-long debates with over two dozen authors to come to this definition back then, September 2017.”
The definition the Council produced is the one on gamelit.org. The launch plan paired the website with a magazine special edition. That magazine was SciFan.
SciFan Magazine and the special edition
SciFan Magazine published ten monthly issues through 2017 — Issues 1–10, January to October — alongside special editions including April and May 2017 LitRPG editions. Publisher: R. M. Mulder.
On September 11, 2017 — one week after the coining — the magazine's website carried Jared J. Fleming's story post Casus Belli – Part 1, tagged, for the first time anywhere on the site, #GameLit. An archive capture of the front page preserves that tag.
Issue 10 — Beyond Science Fiction & Fantasy, 206 pages, cover-dated October 2017 — was the magazine's GameLit edition. Announced September 23, 2017 by Mulder (designed to pay special tribute to the oppressions they have faced, and the strengths these authors possess); published in the last week of September 2017; the magazine's release post September 29, 2017 billed it as our special #GameLit Edition.
Issue 10 at a glance
- TITLE
- SciFan Magazine Issue 10 — Beyond Science Fiction & Fantasy
- COVER DATE
- October 2017
- PUBLISHED
- September 26, 2017
- LENGTH
- 206 pages
- ANNOUNCED
- September 23, 2017
- RELEASE POST
- September 29, 2017
The last issue
In August 2017, the publisher announced openly in the magazine's community that the April and May LitRPG special editions were being withdrawn (they had not performed).
The GameLit launch did not go as planned; the Council disbanded in its aftermath, leaving GameLit with no official group. After Issue 10, SciFan Magazine published no more — no Issue 11.
The magazine's website went dark; much of its archive disappeared. Whole posts survive only because the Wayback Machine copied them first. Some pieces were never copied: the magazine's own index of its issues is gone; Issue 10's story texts live on only in surviving print/digital copies.
The SciFan archive is being rebuilt now, post by post, from Wayback captures — each recovered article backdated to its original day and footnoted as restored — on the magazine's WordPress home.
See it in the archive
Every document below exists. Each screenshot was taken from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine; each link opens the archived page itself.
Exhibit 1 — The charter, eighteen days after the coining
gamelit.org as the Wayback Machine first recorded it, September 22, 2017 — the complete GameLit definition and charter, already live.
Exhibit 2 — The founder's account
Dustin Tigner's first-person history, What is GameLit? — the LitRPG Rebels thread, the Council, and the month of debate, in a founder's own words. First archived July 11, 2022; the history stood unrevised in the archive through 2024.
Exhibit 3 — The definition, still standing
gamelit.org as captured on July 12, 2026 — the 2017 definition, verbatim, nearly nine years later. The page also points readers to Tigner's article (Exhibit 2).
Exhibit 4 — The magazine's front page, release week
A Wayback capture of SciFan Magazine's homepage, October 6, 2017 — the post list carries Casus Belli – Part 1 #GameLit, the word's first appearance on the magazine's own site (the story was posted September 11, 2017).
No screenshot filed; the archived page itself is the exhibit.
Exhibit 5 — The restored archive
Recovered pages restored to the magazine's WordPress home.
SciFan Magazine's Quarterly LitRPG-Exclusive Editions (2016–2017 archive page)The magazine's Booklist (2016–2017 archive page)The Issue 10 announcement — SciFan™Con 2017 is Happening Next Weekend! (restored, September 23, 2017)
A note on what the archive can and cannot show
The founding conversation was inside a Facebook group; the Wayback Machine cannot see inside Facebook — no capture of that thread exists. The coining's date and four participants rest on the founders' own records, corroborated in every particular the archive can check — venue, participants, month — by Tigner's published account. Everything else (the definition, the charter site's dates, the magazine's posts and special edition) is independently preserved in the archive at the links above.
The word outlived the magazine
2018: GameLit Expansion Pack (#GameLitXP) anthology — stories by Brian D. Anderson, Stan Faryna, Patrick Hodges, Dimitri G. Knight, R. M. Mulder, A. E. Scully, Anthea Sharp, Terry Spider, and James Wymore, organized by Mulder. In an October interview Mulder recorded that it held the #1 Bestseller spot in its Virtual Reality category for five weeks; its pages carried the debut of his DarkForce sequel.
Reader resource: GameLit Insider, a website and social feed devoted to finding the hottest new stories trending in the popular new genre known as #GameLit, a free resource for readers.
The charter page never went away — the definition still stands at gamelit.org today, the same words, open genre, no gatekeepers.
In January 2027 SciFan marks ten years since the magazine's first issue — the archive, the stories and the name it helped launch are all in print again.
Celebrating 10 Years of SciFan… And Beyond?