What's up with your website's name?

This is a pretty common question, enough that I can milk it for some blog content. The short answer is this, I’ve been nickelpro for as long as I’ve been on the internet. My site is nickelp.ro because nickel.pro got sniped by a domain squatter before I could get to it, back when .pro TLDs cost waaaay too much money. The domain has grown on me over the years, since .pro is supposed to be for professionals and I’ve never been much of a professional anything.

But why nickelpro?

Well, for starters, I lied! I haven’t always been nickelpro, my first ever handle was the much more mature and measured ioublood. It was the most intimidating thing my 10-year old mind could come up with back in 2004. That tag served as my nom de guerre for pwning noobs on Warcraft 3.

It was also the tag I used when first dipping my toes in less-than-kosher online activities. No one reading this will have been involved with the Xbox 360 hacking scene back around 2009, but I was and for some reason I took pictures!

I mostly spent time hanging out in IRC channels run by much better hackers than me, but I had a small role in popularizing a couple hacks and if you Google “ioublood” today you’ll find some cringey posts of teenage me trying to pose as someone who knew a lot more than I actually did.

Neat, but why nickelpro?

Ben Foddy and Zach Gage gave an excellent talk at GDC this year about taking credit for your work, instead of hiding behind a studio or company name. In 2005 I was eleven years old and work attribution was of immense importance to me. Specifically, my best friend Elliot and I had been making state-of-the-art stop motion videos of our shoes walking around on their own. Magnificent stuff.

We intended to present this work to the students and faculty of Northport Middle School via the weekly student run broadcast, internet streaming before it was cool. The question arose, how should we credit ourselves? Come up with a cool production company name, or just throw our names on it? We split the difference.

Nick Elliot Productions.

NickEll Productions.

nickelpro

In 2007 when Gmail went public I registered the username on a whim. When I outgrew ioublood, nickelpro became my persona by default.