Remembering Mike Fahey Of Kotaku, Who Passed Away At 49

Mike Fahey knew how to disarm a person.

Most people know Mike’s humor: the way he would slip into cartoon voices on a whim, how every conversation was like a poke to the ribs that tested your verve. The six-foot-six guy with a thunderous laugh was a magician, though, and his larger-than-life personality was classic misdirection. Behind every joke and every antic was a sensitive man who had lived many lives and seen a lot of shit.

Yes, this was the guy that reviewed toys and snacks for a living. He was also the guy that could make you go “damn” in a blog about Fortnite or Animal Crossing. Mike Fahey wanted to tell you about the dozens of keyboards he owned, to show you that he’d pinpointed the specific symphony of sounds that he heard when he pressed his fingers down on each individual key, curious to see if you could hear it, too. I suspect this was the same drive that made him want to tell you what he dreamed about during a coma. It’s no accident that Mike was one of the first writers on the internet to really capture what made MMOs tick. All we have is each other, and Mike knew better than anyone that we often use video games to find connection. Even when he was being absurd and reviewing, say, a frozen dinner, he still wanted to find ways to make people feel less alone. With Fahey, even moments of crushing despair were laced with a hopeful laugh.

It’s hard to write this, for a variety of reasons that may be obvious, but one of them is the heartbreak of knowing just how badly Mike wanted to come back and keep sharing his joy with everyone at Kotaku after eight months of being away. Between trips to the hospital, Mike kept telling me that he was sure he would come back soon–that he needed to, because writing and playing games were one of the things that still brought him joy.

But after years of fighting against health issues, some of which left him partially paralyzed in 2018, Mike Fahey has passed away at 49 years old, possibly due to organ failure according to his spouse. It’s bewildering to write this, because by the time I started writing for Kotaku on the side while still in college in 2012, Mike had already been here for around six years. That was a decade ago. To say Mike is the heart and soul of Kotaku is an understatement.

For many readers, Fahey is Kotaku. He built this thing that millions of people read every month, as a part of a network that forever redefined what it was like to surf and read the internet. We take the idea of “personalities” as a given on the internet now, but Mike Fahey provided a blueprint for being a human voice in a tech-driven space. The drive to put a person at the forefront of everything is still in many ways Kotaku’s north star.

Fahey may be gone, but his spirit will forever live on in anything that we do. I said this to Kotaku staffers this weekend, but it bears repeating again: I want to think that somewhere, there’s still an Xbox game superglued to a ceiling that will never come down.

You can contribute to the Fahey family’s fundraising efforts here, and scroll down further to read memories from colleagues current and former.

We’ll miss you, Mike.

Stephen Totilo, Former Kotaku Editor-In-Chief

Mike was my kind of curious writer and my kind of human being: he saw wonder in everything, turned his nose up at nothing. He was delighted by so many things and wanted to tell us, through words and sometimes video, about all of it. FarmVille blew up and he was game to launch Kotaku Social and search for great games on Facebook (he really, really tried). He launched Kotaku Mobile, too. Then a toy show and Snacktaku. He began a mechanical keyboard beat. He even attempted a gamer-parenting show with his amazing sons. He always had plans for more. His dreams were vast.

I was far from Mike’s only fan, obviously. During my run as editor-in-chief I fielded plenty of reader feedback about our writers and producers. Regarding Mike, never a complaint. Nothing but love. It fit. He loved writing for all of you.

We mostly connected by phone or Slack, though we crossed paths in person early in my Kotaku run when he’d go to E3. He traveled less as his boys got older, well before any health issues. But connecting with him in any way was a delight, not the least because 50% of any conversation with him was jokes–and another 10% or so [was] him doing a bit as he switched to his notorious, absurdly deep “scary” voice. His longtime colleagues can hear it right now, I’m sure.

I last saw Mike in person in mid-2018. He’d had his medical episode, had woken from a three-week coma (about which he’d later write), and began grappling with being paralyzed from the waist down. Our company was in some crisis or another (always!) and it was E3 season, too. No matter, I flew down, with a Nintendo Labo box in hand, to spend a day with Mike in the hospital and give him some hugs…