Wind Wakers: Creators from The Escapist use KC as a launching pad for new worker-owned media outlet Second Wind 

Adventure Is Nigh Group Photo. // Courtesy Second Wind

Second Wind is a new worker-owned video-focused organization built—and operated—entirely by the former video staff at entertainment publication The Escapist. For a team of international creators, Kansas City serves as a launching pad for their next act.

On the surface, Second Wind’s mission is to produce gaming, movie, and TV content that is informative, interesting, and fun. The people holding it together share these passions but now answer to their readers/viewers, instead of corporate overlords.

Hardened followers and newcomers came out in droves to subscribe to the Second Wind YouTube channel within moments of its inception, making it clear that this employee-driven effort has strong support. Similar publications, like Defector or the more recent Aftermath, sprouted from similar places and have been on the rise in the last few years, too, though. As they find success in their pursuit of ambitious and fair futures, it’s becoming increasingly clear that audiences don’t just want to see more employee-owned outlets, they need them.

Escaping The Escapist

Second Wind’s story begins with Nick Calandra, a Kansas Citian who took over as editor-in-chief of The Escapist in July 2019. He captained the multimedia ship through a sitewide relaunch period, with a strategy to scout and uplift voices in the gaming community via opportunities they may have previously missed out on.

On November 6, 2023, he was fired by the leadership at The Escapist’s parent company, Gamurs Group.

The Australia-based entertainment mega-corporation—which oversees brands such as Dot Esports, Twinfinite, We Got This Covered, GameSkinny, and many more—purchased The Escapist, along with other publications, like Siliconera and Destructoid, from Enthusiast Gaming for C$6.8 million (around USD$5 million) in September 2022.

“As a long-term, avid reader of these publications, I have been following their progress for some time,” Gamurs CEO and founder Riad Chikhani said in a press release at the time. “This acquisition is not only of strategic significance for the company, but given my affinity for the brands, it gives me a lot of satisfaction to bring such well-respected news websites into the Gamurs Group portfolio.”

Gamurs hit some of its publications, including The Escapist, with a round of layoffs, the following March. Calandra was fired eight months later, with other members of the video team, such as Jack Packard and Jesse Schwab, let go and fired alongside him.

Details on the video crew terminations remain light. Calandra, at least, claims Gamurs offered him severance pay in return for an NDA signature—a proposal he denied.

Gamurs did not publicly announce a replacement editor-in-chief within the week of his firing, and it’s unclear how video uploads were expected to continue with far fewer staff to edit, create art, and publish content on the YouTube channel.

“I was let go for ‘not achieving goals’ that were never properly set out for us, and a lack of understanding of our audience and the team that built that audience,” Calandra alleged in an X (formerly Twitter) post. “I’ve watched many colleagues let go for the same reasons, and today was my day!”

A few hours after his post, Sebastian “Frost” Ruiz, host of the Cold Take video series on The Escapist, resigned from the company. Seconds later, movie and TV columnist Darren Mooney followed suit.

After that, longtime Zero Punctuation host Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw resigned, effectively bringing his massively popular video game review show to an end after 16 years. Each exit brought a larger blow to the staff lineup than the last.

The stream of resignations continued. Livestream and content creator regulars Amy Campbell, Will Cruz, Jesse Galena, and KC Nwosu quickly exited The Escapist following Gamurs’ actions. The Escapist eventually lost the entirety of its video team, with some others from the freelance creator crew joining in on the mass exodus, too. As it turns out, a company built on elevating voices tends to stick together.

“Speaking personally, I think the decision to fire Nick made absolutely no sense to me,” Yahtzee explained a few days after his exit, “because Nick was the driving force behind The Escapist’s last few years and its turn around. He took a site that was basically nothing and rebuilt it into something that it currently is with a whole new community that was extremely invested.”

He continued, explaining that The Escapist was consistently working on new shows as it moved forward into what seemed to be a “massive growth period.”

“So, when he was fired, I, personally, didn’t want to continue what we were doing with anyone else, frankly,” he added. “He was the vision behind it. It seems everyone else that resigned was of the same view.”

Solidarity at Second Wind

A collective walkout on this scale doesn’t happen often, and although it signals an immense bond between those leaving, it’s also a significant leap of uncertainty. Perhaps a career future shrouded by fog was better than one overshadowed by Gamurs. After all, with key members seemingly ousted with no official warning, what’s to stop the faceless corporation from delivering the same fate upon others?

Trudging through a bad situation can be a painful slog if you don’t have direction. So, Calandra, on November 6, the day of his firing, plotted out a path ahead.

“The people are what made the new version of The Escapist what it was,” he said in an X post, “and what we make next will carry that legacy on and be unshackled from people who only care about infinite growth.”

As the aftermath of the fallout with Gamurs continued to reach audiences on social media, Calandra repeatedly teased an announcement. The former Escapist team didn’t hit the ground before the next moves were promised, but the page turn wasn’t sold as something new or different.

Instead, it would be a metamorphosis of the same personality-driven content that had bolstered The Escapist since the mid-2000s. Just a hair more than 20 hours after the former editor-in-chief publicly announced his firing, Second Wind was born.

Calandra, along with the vast majority of those who resigned, revealed Second Wind with a fire-bird logo draped in red and black. For Second Wind, the phoenix is more than a mythological creature with a fun, fiery message—it’s a mascot.

It was an unprecedented revival that continued to lift the former Escapist team into the sky with burning support from fans and without fear of corporate greed. Even without concrete promises of what exactly Second Wind was or could be, it was clear that viewers were showing up for the people, not the place.

“I like to think it’s because people like our content so much,” Yahtzee said during an interview with The Pitch. “I always felt it would catch some attention when I finally did end Zero Punctuation after 16 years, people get comfortable when you produce something once a week and it kind of falls into the background noise, so they only sit up and pay serious attention when it suddenly goes away. But I also think the way we all left The Escapist made us, in the eyes of some people, a sort of symbol of defiance to corporate capitalism.”

Second Wind held its first live stream with hosts Calandra, who now serves as content director from his Kansas City home, and Yahtzee on November 8, two days after an idea for the worker-owned follow-up was conceived.

While viewers were happy creators like Yahtzee, Frost, Campbell, and Nwosu would have a new home, many questioned the foundational strength of a company that was put together so quickly. Some went as far as to theorize that the former Escapist team planned to create Second Wind ahead of time.

During an interview with The Pitch, Calandra said there were a few warning signs signaling his termination, but he also confirmed that work on the team’s next chapter didn’t begin until after the deed was done.

“Once they started firing other parts of the team, and there was only our head of production and two talent leads left [at The Escapist],” he tells us, “we had all decided by then that we were not giving up this once in a lifetime team and needed to get something up and running while we could before Gamurs controlled the narrative.”

Reforging The Way Forward

The Escapist team had prepared themselves, not to inevitably leave the site they once called home, but so that they could be hardened for the worst should it arrive. There are theatrical qualities to the story of a small group of talent taking the power back from a mega-corporation in such a public fashion, but it’s more than just a display of where the true strength lies.

“We took this risk because we created the work that people loved, not the corporation we worked for,” Calandra tells us. “We’re not just employee-owned, but we’re also in a creative business.”

Calandra says that Second Wind isn’t “in it to make millions of dollars.” Instead, they’re simply after a “comfortable standard of living doing the job that we love to do.”

“We make the content that we want to make because we’re passionate about it, and not just for views or to generate ad revenue, so I think audiences find a lot more to connect with just on a personal level where they’re not just numbers, but an actual audience that the team cares about and wants to support just as much as they support us.”

Workers moving out from under such a large shadow will find that ownership over their practice grants new opportunities, especially when that practice involves creatively driven content.

Take Yahtzee’s show, Zero Punctuation, for example. Seeing as Gamurs currently owns that intellectual property, the weekly rambling review series effectively came to an end with its creator’s departure. However, Yahtzee is already set to expand upon Zero Punctuation’s quick comedic style with a new show: Fully Ramblomatic. The name is one he’s used with other projects, such as his personal blog, for years, and it completely belongs to him.

“My only worry is that with a complete lack of limitations, I’ll start getting really weird and avant-garde, like submit a ten-minute video of a stained urinal glimmering in the evening sunlight, or something,” Yahtzee jokes.

Fully Ramblomatic could be a spiritual successor of the foul-mouthed antics seen in Zero Punctuation, but plans for how to continue other content are still in the oven. For example, while creators like JM8 and Frost own their shows Design Delve and Cold Take, respectively, Gamurs still has control of other popular Escapist properties, such as the Dungeon & Dragons campaign series, Adventure Is Nigh!.

Regardless, Second Wind offers the team a chance to create new projects while also breathing new life into existing ideas. Without Gamurs, there are more possibilities than ever. Assuming things go smoothly, Second Wind will become a home not only for the former Escapist team but new, budding creators the world hasn’t met, too.

Second Wind accumulated more than 135 thousand YouTube subscribers in its first three-ish days of operation, but the fight to create a home for its team is just taking off. Calandra and co. will soon launch a Kickstarter campaign and seek partnerships to fund the first year of Second Wind. From there, the plan is to take the money from Patreon, merchandise sales, livestreams, etc. and bank it to keep things running over the coming years.

Details on how exactly those plans are shaking out are hazy so far, though Calandra seems optimistic and vows to maintain financial transparency as the pieces fall into place. Of course, there will be learning curves to tackle, too.

“We create stuff. We don’t know the ins and outs of getting a worker coop started up with all that paperwork and legal contracts and whatnot,” Calandra teases. “We’ve got the content part figured out. Now, building a business from $0 is the part we’re all about to get schooled on.”

Calandra recognizes Defector as an inspiration for how Second Wind will remain open about how its money travels. The list of substantial employee-owned outlets is small but offers a glimmer of hope.

That glimmer, for now, is enough to have convinced Calandra that such a model might work for his second wind.

“I spent five years now working in corporate media, and those five years were worth it to get to this point, but [they were] also incredibly stressful, heartbreaking, and demoralizing. If I didn’t have the team around me that I do right now, I would have given up years ago,” Calandra said.  “Creative media isn’t compatible with endless growth models. Corporations with shareholders don’t care about you, they don’t care about the work you’re doing, they don’t care how that work gets done, they just want to see the numbers go up. You’re constantly told ‘It’s not enough’ or ‘Why do we need this person,’ and it sucks. It sucks telling people they’re doing good work, only to have your parent company not support them in any way, or tell you, as I was told, that ‘they’re lucky’ to be full-time.

“So, take all that out of the equation and do the opposite, and you’ve got your benefits right there.”

The Pitch has reached out to Gamurs for comment on this story, and will update the piece if they respond.

Disclosure: Michael Cripe is one of several Pitch employees to have previously been hired by The Escapist in freelance capacity, but no longer has arrangements there, or financially to Second Wind.