Thu - February 9, 2006

EGM info update

I received a bit of clarification on some of the old days of EGM from a source that was there -- David Siller, father of Aero the Acro-Bat and Maximo: Ghosts to Glory, just to name a few. He was also one of the founding editors of EGM along with Steve Harris. Since I figure you guys would be interested in what he has to say, here's the e-mail:

Sushi-X was not originally Ken Williams...Sushi-X was created by David Siller and did those game reviews until issue 22. It ended there after he and Steve Harris had a major falling out. Siller also created Sam Mori and Terry Aki. It was also Siller’s idea to put the Famitsu style Review Crew into the magazine. Harris didn’t like the idea originally, but later relented. Sushi-X in name was indeed patterned after Taco-X which referred to [the Japanese word for octopus], not a Mexican taco. All of the early International Reviews and Japanese game news scoops were done by Siller as well after his travels to Japan. His writing style was and continues to be copied long after he stopped writing magazine articles combining wit with humor and style. Mr. Williams as well as others have written as Sushi-X. Mr. Siller also wrote on occasion the “Quartermann” gossip articles or contributed news bits to them. Steve Harris later granted David Siller the rights to use Sushi X in an actual video game, and that will come to reality in the near future.

Posted at 11:55 PM     | |

Wed - September 7, 2005

EGM Reality Tour: Lombard office, part 1

First, a little preface as to why I decided to do this. To me and I'm sure to many of you, old-school EGM was the gaming bible. Screw the internet--the phonebook-sized issues, the personalities, the screenshots, the scanned images from Famitsu, and...well, the writing... it all equaled one awesome mass of gaming info. And during the NES/SNES/Genesis days that was what you read if you played games. It just so happened that I lived not 20 minutes away from the office, which was extremely lucky for me and I'm sure played a big part in why I got to work there later on. But anyway, I'm straying from the point. Point is, the magazine and its personality was part of why I was so rabid about gaming during those days. It got me excited about being a gamer. If EGM said something was good, I played it. If they said something wasn't, well...I'd rent it to confirm that it was crap. Most importantly, if you remember EGM you remember more than just games -- you remember Sushi-X and Quartermann and Cyberboy and Martin and Al Manuel. And I figured it'd be a cool thing to put on the blog to take you to the old offices and show you around by snapping pictures of what it looks like today and including some of the photos I still have from back in the day, and recounting some stories along the way. Anyway, enjoy!

-------

During the late '80s, Electronic Gaming Monthly listed a Lisle, IL address as its home office. However, it is the location in Lombard, IL at 1920 Highland Ave. that is really considered the home of "old-school" EGM. Over 100 issues of the magazine were crafted by the hired hands / slave labor it housed until the operation up and moved to a much more spacious office in Oak Brook, IL in November 1998. Here's what that old office looks like today (9/2005):


Back in the day, the corner near the address marker had a Sendai sign (since they were the major tenant and Steve owned the building). Later it was replaced by a Ziff-Davis Video Game Group sign. Those were located where the current banner advertising open space is in the photo above.

The way I've heard it, EGM originally took up a single office space at the end of a long hallway on the 2nd floor of the building, closest to where I took this picture. Early EGMs were produced on rented Macintosh computers by Steve Harris and others on the staff. But as the gaming market and the magazine grew, they needed more space. Adjoining offices were leased, walls were knocked out and the office was expanded little by little. By the middle of 1994, Steve Harris had bought the building and Sendai and its various divisions had taken over the entire second floor. Probably 50% of the building housed various Sendai-related ventures including the fledgling software developer Studio E (also known as "Black Pearl Software," developers of Mohawk & Headphone Jack for the Super NES), the before-its-time online hub Nuke, Decker Publications (that did Electronic Games and Fusion), and MVP Media (that ran Cinescape and The Official X-Files Magazine). I'll just stop and note right here that even after Steve had sold Sendai's gaming books to Ziff, MVP Media and Studio E were still in the building -- MVP right across the hall.

Step in side the lobby of the building and you'll see...


See? Anvil in the lobby...roped off to keep children and/or caffeinated editors from swinging upon its inviting metal arms. And back when EGM was about to move from the building, during an inspired moment, we all thought we'd move a car that had broken down or been abandoned in the parking lot in there too. But the vehicle had been there so long it'd fused with the ground and rusted in place, so that didn't happen. Might've been for the best, I suppose. But that brings us to another point of interest in the lobby...

The all-important, information-giving directory. As you can see in the picture to the right, in 2005 it looks like a pre-printed, professional job. Even adding another business to it probably takes weeks and the molding of special plastic parts to fidget into position. But back in the day the lobby had one of those directories with the white movable letters against a black fabric backing. All that kept one from tampering with the names of the tenants inside was a glass door that didn't lock and his/her conscience and respect for private property. So naturally it was fiddled with a number of times. The most memorable/hilarious of those times was this one, which I snapped a pic of with the office digicam for it to be remembered forever. Click here to see it.

During the latter half of the 90s Studio E, the Sendai (and later, Ziff) IT department, and the production department were all located on the first floor.

Stay tuned for the trip to the second floor...

Posted at 08:15 PM     | |

Fri - July 16, 2004

Thu - July 15, 2004

Embarassment, thy name is Bubsy

I distinctly remember being in Accolade's booth with a friend at E3 '96, checking out Bubsy 3D. We were laughing at how horrible it looked. I can recall saying, "Good god Bubsy 3D looks like such SHIT!" just as this woman came up to greet us. Nanoseconds before I actually saw her, as the word "shit" was escaping my mouth, I looked down and noticed her badge. It read "Eidetic Inc." (the company that developed Bubsy). Oops. At that point I think I tried to cover it up by saying something like, "I mean, Clayfighter, again? What kind of shit is that?" (Clayfighter happened to be in a display right next to it, ya see.) But it was too late. She'd heard me say that Bubsy was shit, and she didn't seem too happy about it. A couple of awkward seconds later I decided it was best to just leave.

But Bubsy 3D wasn't done with me yet. That no-pants-wearin' orange feline with the "!" on his shirt had not released his claws from my jugular just because I'd left his game's demo kiosk. See, when I returned to EGM in the fall of '96 as a temp writer, Bubsy was one of the first games I was assigned to preview.

Now, I'd grown up reading the EGM style of preview writing that was always blisteringly positive even if the title was something that everyone knew was complete and utter shit (like, I dunno... the other Bubsies?). And back in the day you weren't allowed be too negative in an EGM preview. So what I ended up with was a fairly positive-sounding write-up of Bubsy 3D.

Fast-forward to Bubsy 3D's release. We get it in the office and lo and behold EGM is quoted on the front of the box...and it's a line from my preview. Not the review, but my slightly positive (but not really) PREVIEW. I was shocked, aghast; no words could describe it. They'd taken select lines from my preview and added ellipses to it to make it sound as if I actually liked this unbelievably crappy game. It reads:

"...stunning...original...Bubsy 3D climbs back to the top...check it out!" --EGM

Did I say all of those things? Well...yes. But those bastards at Accolade had taken my words and twisted them to suit their nefarious purposes. Without the ellipses it doesn't sound nearly as positive:

"Accolade's third Bubsy game puts the infamous defender of yarn into a new dimension, with stunning results."
OK, I have many issues with that sentence, but I could've meant that the results were stunningly BAD.

"Bubsy's level design is original, with enough variation from level to level to keep the game interesting."
This is a completely empty statement if I've ever heard one. And again, not really "praise."

"Combining elements seen in both 2-D and 3-D play, Bubsy 3D climbs back to the top of the yarn ball."
I SAID HE CLIMBS BACK TO THE TOP OF THE YARN BALL... NOT TOP OF THE CHARTS!

"Gamers looking for 3-D action should check it out!"
Well, OK, now that you mention it this one does kinda sound like praise. Damn.

Indirectly, I probably caused hundreds of American children to awake on Christmas morning and find Bubsy's monotonous gameplay, uninspired graphics, and clunky control scheme waiting for them. To those poor children, I must say "sorry. I...didn't mean it. I really, really didn't."

Over time I've learned to laugh at this unfortunate cover quote, and actually did end up buying a copy of the game off of Ebay just for fun. One night I popped it into my PS2 just to relive its sucktastic-ness. Now I leave it on my coffee table so that when people come over and ask what it is I can reply with, "oh, just some SHIT PS1 game." It gives me an odd sense of satisfaction. It's like saying, "yeah, take that Accolade! Your company's out of business and I'm dissing your game. QUOTE THAT ON YOUR BOX...AND SMOKE IT!"

Curse you, Bubsy.

Posted at 11:47 PM     | |

Tue - July 13, 2004

Mon - July 12, 2004

When goofy things slip past...

If a typo on the *cover* can slip by unnoticed then it shouldn't be surprising that a lot of other wacky stuff got past both the copy editors and Ed Semrad and ended up in the magazine. (Sometimes I wonder if Ed actually read the pages that crossed his desk.) None of these gaffes are quite as bad as Game Fan's "jap bastards" incident (which has already been widely chronicled elsewhere on the 'Net), but... it's still kind of embarrassing.

Take this layout in issue #1 of EGM2 on Dynamite Headdy. One of Headdy's powers just...doesn't sound right. Can you guess which one it is? (Click picture to enlarge.)

Posted at 11:21 PM     | |

Thu - July 1, 2004

The Summer of PlayStation

During the summer of '95 I got to come back and do another project for Sendai—a one-shot PlayStation guide. Both the PlayStation and Saturn were scheduled to hit in the fall and they wanted to have two books ready for both of those consoles' release dates. (Of course, the Saturn launched early, kind of messing up that half of the project, but they still did the book anyway.) As luck would have it, I got the better end of the deal and got to work on the PlayStation guide. (Brian Goss, another fanzine editor who did a fine 'zine called The Guru, did the Saturn book.)

I couldn’t have asked for a sweeter deal. They paid me $5,000, the first $2k of it up front, and set me up with a Japanese PlayStation console and about 10 games. If I met all of three milestone deadlines, I could keep the PS and half of the games. Not bad for a summer job in between high school and my first year of college. With the money they'd given me up front I bought a brand spankin’ new Mac (before that all I had at home was an Apple IIGS, albeit nicely decked out), and churned out the book.

There was a slight snag though. I didn’t have a memory card, which was kind of a necessity for a lot of early PS1 games. And I only had three weeks to do the book (broken into three end-of-week milestone deadlines). So while I was working on one of the sections, like the Ridge Racer chapter, I’d have to leave the system on and just barrel through the game and take as many notes as possible. After I’d unlocked everything I could in one game, I’d power down for a while and move to the next...and saved nothing. (So if I'd messed up and forgot to write something down I had to do it all over again. Luckily that only happened once.)

Since the system was brand new, a lot of import shops were sold out of memory cards. So I spent about a week without one 'til NCS had restocked. I'd asked Sendai if they'd pop for it, but they refused and they didn't have one in the office either. Getting the card from NCS saved me for the last two milestones, but after that point I’d already done most of the strategy without it.

This was the first time I had written strategy of any kind and it's a very dry read. The "reviews" of each title that serve as intros follow the same formula from paragraph for paragraph. But it's far from the worst I've ever done. The deadlines went without a hitch and by the end of the summer I was $5,000 richer and had a Japanese PS1 and 5 games. Not bad.

While I thought the final product would be all gussied up like EGM, it's more like 100 pages of layout diarrhea. Imagine EGM from back then without funky type treatments or wacky colors in the background and you’ll have a good mental picture of it. It's like they imported my text straight into a 4-column Quark layout and dumped screenshots around it randomly. I probably could've done a better job myself. Thankfully it still looks better than most of the competing books (some of which had no screenshots at all), but it’s far from compelling by today’s standards.

Like my previous EGM work, it’s full of lines that are stone-cold stunners, like:

Ridge Racer tip: “Pick a fast car if you can.” (Lovely strategy that can be applied to just about any racing game, when you think about it.)

Battle Arena Toshinden: “It is truly one of the great home video games ever made.” (Wow, I’d like to take that one back...)

Cyber Sled hint: “...just keep at it. Eventually you will fine-tune your own game play strategy.” (Ha, and you thought I’d written this book to give you my strategy. Fool!)

Air Combat: “Air Combat has a lot of playability.” (“Playability” is one term that shows up in a lot of reviews that has zero meaning to me. If you can explain to me what you think it means, please do—'cuz to me it means the reviewer is grasping at straws trying to fill a word count. Calling something “playable” means that you can push buttons and things happen on-screen. It’s an EMPTY statement. If you’re a reviewer, please don’t ever use this term, and if you’re a reader—this word should set off your bullshit alarm. Why do you think I used it here? I was bullshitting.)

Tama: "Tama is a fun game, but the concept pales in comparison to other 'guide the ball' games." (??? What other “guide the ball” games?)

PlayStation: “The PlayStation is turning out to be a system that has almost every type of game available for it.” (Huh...well, I guess it’s true. I mean it has the market cornered on the “guide the ball” genre.)

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself. The book is actually pretty good and served its purpose, despite the shoddy layout and loads of poorly chosen screenshots. Many of the sections have huge shots of title screens. Just look at that Ridge Racer layout--one picture of the title screen and another of the pre-title loading screen. WTF? I can't be blamed for those though -- I had no hand in taking any screenshots for the thing. I just wrote the text. And I did it all without having to deal with Ed. My contact was strictly with editorial director Joe Funk and Sendai's director of operations, Marc Camron.

More to come...

Posted at 10:25 PM     Read More   | |

Mon - June 28, 2004

A Fool to Remember

I must confess that I don't know all the details of the story I'm about to tell you about here. I wasn't working at EGM at the time this happened. But I did catch wind of the aftermath. So I'll tell you what I know here, and if someone else knows the rest, they can e-mail me and I'll gladly add it (anonymously, if they'd like). Anyway, on with it:

If you've read EGM for any length of time you know that every April issue brings with it an April Fool's joke. That's just how it is. EGM...April issue...there's a joke. But not in April 1994.

And I can almost understand it. When you're working on a magazine, after a while the deadlines kind of mush together. Sometimes you're usually not even cognizant of what month it is (what, it's December already?). You're especially not thinking of something as small and insignificant as April Fool's Day. I mean, it's not even a postal holiday. And in 1994 when the staff was working on the April issue, everyone forgot what month it was and that there was supposed to be a joke in there. Even the editor in chief, Ed Semrad -- the guy who had been there for years and you would think would remember 'cuz it's tradition -- forgot.

I'd like to imagine the staff was completely oblivious to it until they opened snail mail letters with people guessing what the April Fool's joke was. "You almost had me there -- those Babalities in Mortal Kombat II have got to be fake," "Handheld Genesis? What kind of an idiot do you take me for!" or even "I believe that ad in your magazine is a joke. No company would ever call their game 'Plok.'"

But what I do know is that upon the discovery of this royal f-up, Ed called everyone into a big meeting where he proceeded to yell at the staff for a long time. Tears were shed (by him, if I remember the story correctly), people were blamed, fingers...pointed. Evil eyes...given. It was a bad scene. But what's done was done.

Now...the best joke would've been to admit that there wasn't one; that readers had spent time looking for a joke that wasn't there. Now that would've been funny. Instead, it was damage control time. A decoy was acquired -- a typo on the April cover. While EGM of that vintage was often a hotbed of typos and grammatical errors on the inside, this time one had broken free and somehow worked its way onto the magazine's front. Thank god for that li'l cock-up, eh? Thus, "STREEETS OF RAGE 3" (with an extra "E," 'case you missed it) became the "joke." In the next issue they passed it off as such, proudly pointing out the typo as if it was deliberate. A brilliant gag, huh?

If you have the May 2004 issue of EGM handy (#178, MGS3 cover), flip to page 57 and you'll see the first public acknowledgment that this "joke" was actually just a mistake and a close-up picture of the typo. But that piece doesn't go into too much detail. It's such a funny story that it was one I'd tell any new staff member come April Foolin' time.

TO BE CONTINUED....

Posted at 09:01 PM     Read More   | |

Sun - June 27, 2004

How about we play a little game?

I love to go back and read the reviews from the original crew in old-school EGMs. They're hilarious and a lot of the time they wouldn't mention the name of the game in the text at all, which makes it great fodder for a guessing game. In the last couple years I worked at EGM, I'd occasionally send out an e-mail to the rest of the staff with one of these "classic" reviews to see if they could guess which game it was for.

So I pose this to you -- what game is this a review of? (Reproduced without correcting grammar mistakes.)

Sushi-X: "Ummm ... are they going make a fighting game out of anyone? Where's Barney? Sure it's got some decent moves and a Story Mode, but it doesn't have the technique. The best thing about it is the animations, which were done rather well. However, the characters aren't anything special and the game play doesn't provide the tight control for a good challenge. Fighting fans will get bored with its limited playability."

And the answer is: SHAQ FU. Kris (in the "Comments" section) guessed it right. Congratulations, you win nothing. But thanks for playing.

Posted at 01:24 AM     Read More   | |

Sat - June 26, 2004

Super-Secret Gaming Ninja, Sushi-X

Now's a good time to take a moment and talk about one of EGM's mainstay characters -- Sushi-X. While other people can probably tell this story better than I can from the beginning, I'll take a stab at explaining some of what I know about this mysteriously pseudonymed character.

The way I figure it (and I'm guessing here, since he appeared in EGM before my time), the Sushi-X persona was inspired by Famitsu's Taco-X, a reviewer often dressed as a ninja. Since EGM's Review Crew style is a direct rip-off of Famitsu's, this hypothesis of mine probably isn't too far from the truth. The Sushi-X that most EGM fans know and love was the one that was a master of fighting games, hated Game Boy titles just because he could, and was often the "swing reviewer" who would pan something the other guys "liked." HIs real name was Ken Williams. Ken had been Sushi-X for a good long time before I started in 1994. His personality was exactly that of the Sushi-X in the magazine -- he loved fighting games and had a passionate disdain for anything Game Boy or that involved turn-based role-playing. When a new fighting game would come into the office he'd spend hours on it -- whether it was an upright machine or something that could be plugged into the office's Super Gun. While I was working there, Super Street Fighter II Turbo arrived and the guy went nuts on it, practicing combos, refining his technique -- it was insane to watch. I never considered myself very good at fighting games, but I did get schooled by Ken a couple times. And I mean...rocked. Some of his techniques and skills would show up in the magazine as strategy guides or in special fighting game guides that EGM would publish from time to time. EGM did print a picture of Ken at one time semi-hinting that he was Sushi-X. At one of the early '90s Consumer Electronics Shows, the Sendai booth had a Street Fighter machine set up where people could challenge a staff member. I forget which issue it was, but there is a picture of that scene in the magazine. Of course, no one figured that the white guy with the EGM jacket playing against them was Sushi. Most thought Sushi was a Japanese guy, which had never been the case.

But at some point later (after I'd already left EGM the first time 'round), Ken Williams departed the magazine and started working on Sendai's web-project, a site called NUKE. He gave up his Sushi-X duties, and soon everyone else on staff was taking turns playing Sushi-X (much like I described the middle-days of Quartermann in the first entry of this blog). And that's where things derailed as far as Sushi maintaining a consistent personality. Suddenly he liked a couple GB games and RPGs. He was still generally played as the harsher reviewer but it was definitely different.

When I came *back* to work on EGM part-time in 1996 (issue 88), the Review Crew had changed. It was now Dan "Shoe" Hsu, Shawn Smith, Crispin Boyer, and Sushi-X. Continuing to do Sushi at this point was like beating a dead horse, but we did it because readers were attached to the character. During this era, a guy named Scott Parus played the part of Sushi most often (although a different guy had dressed up in the ninja suit for pictures), but sometimes others would chime in too. Some of those Sushi reviews were written by other members of the Crew, who'd already written their own reviews of the same title as themselves, trying to reflect the Sushi-X persona (which would also give one an anonymous chance to rail on a particularly crap title).

Then an interesting thing happened. Ken Williams returned to EGM as Managing Editor in October of '96. So suddenly, the old Sushi-X was back. (Nothing was said in the magazine about this though, since technically, Sushi-X had never left.) If you're keeping track, that means that issues 89-104 have the original Sushi doing reviews again. Of course, when Ken left Ziff-Davis in March of '98, the dead-horse beatings began anew.

As we were planning the drastic redesign of EGM that was scheduled to hit with issue 120 (July 1999), the entire staff made the decision to axe Sushi-X from the Review Crew for good. The concept of the character had long since worn out its welcome, and as a staff we wanted to move the magazine in a different, more mature, direction. One without pseudonym characters giving opinions. When that issue reached readers, they replied immediately with: "What happened to Sushi-X?" A fair question, and one we got several hundred times. After all, they'd gotten to know him over the course of many years (even if he was but a weak imitation of his former self by now). So he was brought back to answer questions in a Letters section sidebar called "Ask Sushi." But it didn't last and a few months later the character slipped into the mists of time and disappeared.

That is...until another Ziff-Davis magazine, GameNOW, brought him back in early 2003. For those of you who missed checking out GameNOW when it was around, the thought was that EGM would be the games mag for the older crowd, and GameNOW (rising from the ashes of Expert Gamer/EGM2) would service the younger readers. So resurrecting the Sushi-X character in GN made perfect sense. This new Sushi was a bit different (and more hip with the street lingo) but he still loved a good fighting game and not much else. Sadly, GameNOW closed in late 2003, thus closing the book for good on Sushi-X's tale.

But who knows, maybe this gaming legend will be back someday...

TO BE CONTINUED....

Posted at 12:18 AM     Read More   | |

Fri - June 25, 2004

My first job at EGM, part II

Before you read this, you should read this.

I don't know if you've ever had to go into your boss and say, "hi, I'm overworked, can I get a little help here?" but when you're 17 years old and the guy at the top is a lot older than you and already doesn't like you, it can be a harrowing experience. I'd already been on Ed's shit list. In one issue of EGM2 I'd used black and white photos of a little Sega PDA/toy device because it was the only assets of it available at the time. I'd written the article, dropped in the pictures and everything was cool--the issue was signed off and went to the printers. But when it came back, I got yelled at for using black-and-white anything in the magazine--even though he (Ed) had supposedly signed-off on those very same pages just a week or two earlier. Surely this was something he saw and could've brought up then? Getting yelled at by Ed was the worst part of the EGM job. He had this way of making you feel like you'd committed an unbelievable atrocity for which there was no forgiveness. Something inhuman, immoral, and that your own mother would disown you for. Ask anyone who's worked for him and you'll hear similar tales.

But I thought that this meeting would go differently. It had to. After all, Ed had a son/stepson in high school himself and would surely understand. And when you think about it, I was getting paid hourly at that point and didn't have Sendai's health insurance benefits or anything, so--what was the harm? Less hours means they wouldn't have to pay me as much. It's win-win...right? So I went in, asked if I could have a moment of his time, and began talking. I explained that I was 17, and that since I was going to school full-time, maybe I could cut down on some of the amount of work I'd been assigned (3 sections, 2 magazines, plus special features, deadlines every 2 weeks). By that time I had also been recruited to help Todd Mowatt with a lot of his work as well, so I felt I had a justifiable reason to beg for leniency. If I could offload one section or not need to be Mowatt's monkeyboy then everything would be fine. Just a little mercy. Please?

I could tell just by the expression on his face that my argument was not falling upon receptive ears. But I didn't know how extreme the backlash would be. It came swift: "Are you telling me that you can't do your job?" No--that wasn't what I was saying at all. I can still do my job, just...I'd like to do a little less of it for a while so I could...oh, I dunno...finish high school? "What I'm hearing is that you don't want to do your job." At that point the "I can't believe what I'm hearing's" began. While my memory's blurry on some of this, I remember that he insinuated that I was bringing down the magazine and they couldn't have someone that didn't pull their weight, and at one point stormed off to get Sendai's legal counsel guy so I could apparently announce that I was not able to perform my job to someone else. It was not going well. When he couldn't find that guy, he stormed back in and told me to say that I didn't want to do my job into a tape recorder. (Probably so he could listen to it in his car and laugh maniacally--or maybe I'm just imagining that.) I refused. After a little more arguing and apologizing on my part, it was made clear that I would do my job and maybe get one small project that I'd been doing for Mowatt taken off of my shoulders.

When I left the office that evening I'd more or less decided that I didn't want to work at EGM anymore. The pay was good and I loved games and my friends were jealous, but the hours and the people (except for a small few) just sucked beyond all imaginable bounds of suckitude. I'd spent three-plus months there and had only recently received a shitty Mac to do work on at my ramshackle desk and the people I worked with were a-holes. Why would I want to spend any more time there? I talked it over with my parents and made up my mind.

I decided that instead of telling Ed I was leaving and open up another can of worms, that I'd go straight to the top and tell Steve first. I figured--he'd hired me, if I'm going to leave I should break it to him my own way (especially so he didn't hear any stories of how I "can't do my job, blah-blah-blah"). So I dropped by his office, handed him a letter that I'd typed saying I was quitting--effective immediately. I stuck around and talked to him for a bit about a few of the reasons why. He understood. He was sorry to see me go. But he also left it open so that if I wanted to come back anytime, I could. And that part cheered me up a bit. Maybe I could come back sometime and do some other work for Sendai that didn't involve working with Ed. That'd be nice.

Since I didn't leave any real personal belongings at the office anyway, all I had to do was pick up my backpack and go. I had quit EGM.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Posted at 10:59 PM     Read More   | |

Thu - June 24, 2004

My first job at EGM

When I was originally hired at Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) I had just turned 17, and it was the summer of 1994, between my junior and senior years of high school. I'd been doing a fanzine called Paradox for about three-four years before that and had sent copies of it to EGM in the hopes that one day, they'd give me a job. During the 'zine days, I'd talked on and off with Sendai's then-grand pooba Steve Harris about the magazine and the game industry -- though really, I was a wide-eyed kid with a passion for games and mediocre writing ability that wanted a job. So when he offered me one, I was ecstatic. All that blood, sweat, and tears doing a 'zine with some friends at my own expense had finally paid off. My starting "Associate Editor" salary was $16,000/year -- not bad for a high-schooler still living with his parents.

I remember my first day, and my first assignment, vividly. At the time, EGM2 had just started up and both magazines had a single staff. Because it was the last day of a deadline, I was told that my first duty would be to help out with the Quartermann column for the premiere issue of EGM2. I thought, "great. I get to pow-wow with Q-Mann, talk rumors; this will be great." But as a longtime EGM fan I was ill-prepared for what I found out a few seconds later: THERE WAS NO QUARTERMANN (dun dun dunnnnn!) There was in the beginning; one person wrote Q-Mann (and apparently got an awful lot of his information from the staff of a certain west coast game store that would later start its own magazine) every month for a couple years and that was that. But the "old" Q-Mann didn't have time to do it anymore, so it was up to various members of the staff to pick up the reigns. And because I was the newbie, it was my turn to do it. I was given a sheet of paper with some minor (read: crap) rumors on it and was told to write Gaming Gossip as my first assignment. To me this whole thing came as a shocking revelation. Here it was, my first day working at the North Pole and I find out that there is no Santa Claus--or rather, that I am Santa Claus.

So during that first summer I worked at EGM, I did about 5-6 installments of Gaming Gossip across both EGM and EGM2. To differentiate the two columns I eventually had to come up with another pseudonym for the EGM2 version. That experience would later haunt me for years to come when I came up with a ridiculous pseudonym that everyone on EGM would soon constantly tease me about -- "Secret Turtle." But the name that made it into the final product was "X-BERT." Yeah, both are pretty lame, huh? In addition I did the Interface: Letters to the Editor (letters), Press Start (news), helped with the arcade sections, and did other odd-jobs and special features. And because one staff did two magazines, deadlines were every two weeks.

While working at EGM was a dream for me at the time, there was a slight catch that made that first summer...well, a living hell. The catch was that Steve Harris had hired me without consulting EGM's editor-in-chief Ed Semrad. Ed had wanted somebody else instead -- Canadian games reporter Todd Mowatt. Yet, while Ed was on vacation Steve had gone and hired me. So I started at an incredible disadvantage -- my boss' boss had gone over my boss' head and hired some 17 year-old kid that did some fanzine. Not good. And because of this, I suffered. For the first month I worked at EGM, I had no cubicle, no computer, no phone, no game systems, no TV, and nowhere to sit. And no one -- least of all Ed -- was in any hurry to get me these raw materials. Instead, I used another guy's area while he was on vacation. When that guy came back, I would wait for people to go to lunch or until after 5 p.m. and get on their machines and work. And because this was a time before fileservers or the Internet, I had to borrow other people's optical discs to be able to do anything and hope my stuff didn't accidentally get corrupted (which happened to those discs all too often).

The other problem about being persona non grata with the boss was that no one else on EGM liked me much, either. I had a few friends -- Mike Vallas, Tim Davis, "Trickman" Terry Minnich and John Gurka among them -- but the rest of them didn't like me, and took a certain pleasure in watching me suffer. Eventually I got a hand-me-down computer and a "desk" (an old door laid across two filing cabinets) so I could get some work done during the day. But I sat far away from the real "EGM area" and still had to borrow an optical drive so I could get any work done. And the computer I had couldn't take game screenshots, nor did I have any game systems or a TV to play on so I had to use other people's stuff for that still.

A few weeks later, Sendai expanded to take up a whole floor of the small office building in Lombard and EGM was scheduled to move to the other side of the building. I figured that this was going to change everything. I'd probably get a cubicle and sit with everyone else. Maybe I'd even get a real desk (GASP!). One day the entire EGM staff had a meeting and we all went over to the new area and Ed laid down a small map of the place which had it marked where everyone would sit...except me. Somehow, someway, they had forgotten a place for me. This honestly pissed me off. I'd been working there for a solid two months or more, and yet it was if I didn't even work there. Todd Mowatt, who had eventually gotten hired to EGM after I was, had a place on this floorplan. I was the only one who didn't. So when EGM moved to this new area, I was squeezed into a tiny walkway with just enough room for my table-on-two-filing-cabinets desk. And because I was nowhere near any electrical outlets, I had to use an extension cord that was plugged into someone else's outlet. And they enjoyed flicking the switch, cutting the power to my computer every now and again.

By this time, it was August and a new school year had started. For a while, I'd go to high school during the day and then go into work at night. The problem soon became that even though I was technically working part-time now (and was paid via time card), I was still expected to do all the sections I'd worked on when I was salaried. For both magazines (remember--deadlines every two weeks.) Unless I quit high school (which I wasn't gonna do) I had to somehow lighten my load. I could not keep working these crazy hours -- school from 7:45 in the morning until 3:10, then EGM from 4-10:30 at night, every day plus working on weekends. So I went in to talk to Ed. I explained the situation and that I needed to have a few things taken off of my plate or at least given some help...

TO BE CONTINUED...

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