ULTRA Review Crew Bonus UNLOCKED - Mollie Patterson of EGM & GameFan [S1B2] - FunFactor

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, ty, do you like games? Yeah? I love games,
so like you'd say you're a game fan. Yeah, I
think that's fair to say. So you're a die hard
game fan.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
You pi kaye, motherfucker, You've got fun Factor. Two old
gamers reviewing old video game magazine reviews. I'm Thy Shelter,
He's Aiden Moher, and we're two professional writers who grew
up loving the video games and video game magazines of
the nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties, and two thousands. Every episode

(00:36):
we take a critical look back on the games media that,
for better and for worse, inspired us to do what
we do. If you're hearing this, you're remember of fun
Factor Ultra, our premium tiers that unlock I had free episodes,
bonus episodes like this one, and the member's only channels
of our discord. We congratulate you on your excellent taste
and thank you deeply for giving us the ability to

(00:56):
do what we do.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
We hope you love.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
It as much as we do, and if you do,
then help.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Us spread the word.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Shout us out on YouTube and TikTok at fun Factor pod,
or on Blue Sky at funfactor pod dot com. Nothing
helps us grow like our listeners telling their friends that
they should be listeners too. Our guest for this bonus
episode of Fun Factor is one of the hardest working
people in games media, legendary Molly Patterson. Welcome to the show. Molly.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
I do believe I send over more money to get
more adjectives beyond just legendary. I don't know if legendary
perfectly covers it or not.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Irreplaceable, indisputable, one of a kind.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Yes, no, thank you for having me. This is awesome. Yeah,
Like I mean, like it's exciting to an anytime there's
anything celebrating video game magazines, I love to see that happen,
you know, And so I'm happy to be here.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Awesome.

Speaker 4 (01:49):
Yeah, we're so happy to have you. As Kay and
I were kicking around the idea for this show for
honestly like two years, we're sort of developing it. You
were absolutely one of the first people that came to mind,
even before some of the work that you've been working
on recently, which we'll get to in a moment. But
we're just so happy to have you.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Listeners.

Speaker 4 (02:07):
If somehow you are not aware of Molly's work, if
you've been reading magazines since you know the glory days
of the industry, or you're a young buck who consumes
all your news online but still for some reason listens
to a podcast about legacy games media, you've almost certainly
come across her work. From game Fan to EGM and beyond,

(02:27):
Molly was at the forefront of online games media, creating
the very first English language persona fan site, which is
still online by the way, and spearheading game Fan online
well before other print magazines were stepping into the you know,
the world wide web. We just recorded an episode about
an issue of game Fan, and we actually spent like
probably five minutes talking about how remarkable it was that

(02:50):
game Fan was promoting their website. And this was in
nineteen ninety six, I think that issue was from and so,
you know, Mollie was there at the beginning of sort
of online games. More recently, Mollie's also part of the
team behind the EGM compendium Kickstarter, which raised an eye
watering two point three million dollars in its pursuit to

(03:12):
archive and chronicle and make available the history of electronic
gaming monthly.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Hey, this is tie from the future. Quick number correction
here because Aiden is Canadian. That is two point three
million dollars Canadian one point six eight million dollars US,
still a huge, huge amount of support from twenty four
hundred and sixty four backers at the time of this recording.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
All right back to the show.

Speaker 4 (03:40):
We'll get to the importance of preservation work in a bit,
But first, Mollie, your experience as a writer goes back
well beyond your professional work in magazines. You started in
high school zines like Digital Anime and Honor Students on Acid.
I want to know, like, what does fanzine culture and fanzines?
What do they mean to you in the larger games
media world back in the nineties but even nowadays.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
So I actually started in elementary school element Yeah, I
started because my mom was helping out because our school
got a bunch of Apple two's and nobod at the
school knew how to use them, and so she volunteered
to teach herself how to use computers and then teach
the other teachers. So because of that, we got to
take an Apple to home, and I had the print shop,

(04:23):
and so I started making a small video game newsletter
that only I ever read in elementary school, and then
in junior high is when I started making a fancine
called Dragon's Tale, and a friend of mine helped me
with that, and we were the only two readers of
that magazine. But then again into high school and like

(04:46):
a lot of kids like you want to find ways
for a bell, but you don't know how to do it.
And I don't know if you've guys ever seen it
by watching a movie called Pump Up the Volume with
Christian Slater and so he basically he's in high school
and he's trying to find his way to rebail. So
he starts a pirate radio station. Nice and I'm like, well,
I would love to do a pirate radio station, but

(05:08):
I have no idea how to make a radio station,
and so what's the thing I can do? And and
so I started doing fanzines and that's where Honor Students
of Acid came from, which was kind of a quote
unquote underground art and literature mag and then I got
in the Digital Digital Anime, which was my first video
game magazine. And so it's interesting, you know in this

(05:28):
era that especially like younger listeners might not completely understand,
but today, like if you want to do something like
it's it's not impossible for you to do it. You know,
do you want to make a movie. Do you want
to make a TV show? You know you do you
want to make a magazine? Do you want to make
a radio show? Do you want to make your own music?

Speaker 1 (05:50):
Like?

Speaker 3 (05:50):
There are tools now to do almost any of these
kind of creative things. But you know, back when I
was a kid, like most of that stuff didn't exist yet.
And one of the options that did started coming around
was this kind of desktop publishing. Was the idea that
you could just in your home have the tools in

(06:12):
order to make newsletters, make magazines, make things like that.
And I had been a reader of video game magazines
for as long as they had existed, you know, from
from EGM and Game fam which I would work for,
to they do games and computer entertainment and game players

(06:33):
later on game Pro when that existed, and so the
I had always loved magazines. I'd always wish I could
write for them. But then suddenly there was this option
to kind of make your own stuff, and especially I
would end up going to work for Kinko's Copies, which
is now at its office, and I worked the graveyard shift,

(06:56):
which that meant that I had like eight hours or
or a little bit less of being in that place
alone with not a lot of customers coming in. And
that meant that once I learned how many quote unquote
kind of like throwaway copies you happened in a day

(07:17):
at that company, you knew how many you could get
away with making without paying for them. And so I
had this great source of making fanzines, which which both
blew up my ability to make them, but also then
people would come in who were making their own scenes
and I would say, hey, you give me a copy,
I'll give you like a twenty five percent discount on

(07:38):
all the copies you're making. So I got into that
fanzine space. And there's other people out there that you
people will know. They also came up. You've got like
Jeremy Parrish, You've got Chris Kohler, You've got a great
Cassavan over at I'm forgetting the studio name. But it

(08:01):
made haities and stuff like that. Super giant, Yeah, super giant.
So there there were a lot of people too that
kind of We all came up to that fanzine space,
and so I had a real love for it, both
on the making your own stuff but then wanting to
make the real stuff and making those fanzines is what

(08:23):
gets me in the door for Game on USA, which
is a very very short lived magazine that came out
of a viz that was kind of trying to tie
the Japanese anime side and the Japanese video gaming side together.
I do that for a few issues, and then I
get my big break at Game Fan, and so yeah,

(08:44):
you know, like it's it's interesting now because fanzines aren't
as big of a deal these days, but I feel
like fanzines really laid the groundwork for what came later
in terms of podcasting like we're doing right now, YouTube
and things like that.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
And someone who's zene attempts started and ended with my
junior high weekly Red Wings zine that I printed on
my mom's Canon star Writer word processor, which kids google
that monstrosity. You know, I absolutely feel that fanzine kind
of approach and energy. When we were doing the Game

(09:27):
Fan issue for our recent main Feed episode, it really
kind of struck us that it had a sort of
like super hyper mega fanzine on steroids feel as opposed
to kind of the corporate Okay, this is an enthusiast
magazine for what's the enthusiasm oh, video games, right, So
was that part of the game fan identity?

Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yeah, And that's actually kind of like, I don't know
that that's the entire reason why I ended up a
game fan. But game tan was very aligned to what
I like to do, and I was aligned to what
it liked to do.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
You know.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
The awesome thing about fanzines and podcasts and YouTube and
whatever is you're at a certain level where you're not
necessarily worried about is this going to sell? Like are
people going to buy this? It's just like what do
I have passion for and what do I want to
put in this in this thing that I'm making? And
game Fan did kind of feel like that. And part

(10:22):
of the reason I would like to think that it
got the job at game Fan was I basically sent
them a big packet of fanzines, you know, and showing
them what I was doing. And I wasn't the only person,
Like I wasn't necessarily there weren't necessarily other like big,
big fanzine creators there, but there were other people at
game Fan who had kind of come through those similar ways.

(10:43):
It's like they were either really entrenched in the community
or they were making their own kind of Spanish things
in one in one way or another, you know, doing
translations or whatever. So it the fun thing about game
fan was that it, you know, like literally was game fans.

(11:04):
It was people who who loved gaming, who loved to
play games, who love to talk about games and recommend games.
And that's one of the kind of reasons. You know,
in discussing game fan and the pros and cons of it,
a lot of times it'd be like, well, game fan
was always very positive, right, is Like, sure there were
negative reviews here and there, but it was so often

(11:26):
just these glowing reviews of games. And part of that
was that, well, if we've only got a certain amount
of pages that we can use, let's use those to
really showcase the games we're loving and want to recommend
to people, versus just trying to cover everything that's out there.

Speaker 4 (11:45):
And that's a conversation that's come up in games media
within the last couple of weeks, like why we do
see a tendency towards sort a positive coverage of games,
And it's because, as you have an under resourced industry,
people want to spend time time with the things that
they're enjoying or have interesting or exciting things to write about,
and I think that that's something that's always been a

(12:06):
part of kind of enthusiast press culture. I guess, like
you don't have, you know, people with the bandwidth, you know,
watching a movie or listening to records and it's thirty
to forty minuteser it's two hours. You might be able
to listen to a bunch of records and then write
some scathing reviews, but that's a lot harder to do
when you need to commit twenty hours thirty hours to

(12:26):
a video game to get to that point. My background
is in not fanzines, but blogging, which for a period
of about seven or eight years is sort of the
fancying equivalent. And that was something that I, you know,
thought about a lot and how I chose what I
wanted to cover, and a lot of the time it
went back to, well, I didn't really love this book
very much. I have some sort of interesting things to say,

(12:47):
but it just wasn't really for me. I'd rather spend
time on this really interesting book that I read, because
I have a lot more to say about it.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
Well, well, you know, I think one of the truths
about this is when you when you start reviewing of
things of anything, is that you come to learn that, like,
if let's say you've got this ratiy scale of like
one to ten, right is zero two games or whatever
are really really fun to review. Eight to ten is

(13:18):
really fun to review. But everything else in that middle
is not necessarily fun, because you get to a point
where it's like, yeah, this is okay, you know. I mean,
you'll have things like one I always go back to
is the game Rule of Rows on PS two, right,
which is an absolutely fascinating to revel horror game. I

(13:41):
gave it a seven, and I think a seven was
generous when I reviewed it for play because that game
is just terrible in a lot of ways, but it's
also really really great in a lot of ways. And
when you get games like that, those kind of games
are really fun to review because you're getting to look
into something that is is like broken but beautiful, you know,

(14:03):
and you can talk about that and you can explain it,
and you can say, look, this ain't a great game,
but you kind of should play it, you know. But
a vast majority of stuff in that kind of range
is not necessarily fun to review, and so it's kind
of like Okay, where does your passion come in from
reviewing something and covering something? But also then where does

(14:27):
the value in your reviews come from? And I'm not
necessarily saying you should never review the Three the Sevens,
but I think that telling somebody this is a game
that is amazing and I love it, and here's why
I love it, and here's why you should play it,
and here's a game that is so awful that I'm

(14:48):
going to enjoy telling you how awful it is, Like like,
those are the funnest reviews to read and also sometimes
the most valuable. So you do get to that point
where it's like that mid ground just can cannot be fun.
So if you're going to have X amount of pages
any an issue of game Fan, then why not use
those to showcase the games that are really really worth playing.

(15:10):
And I did kind of end up taking that viewpoint
with me throughout life. It's like, if I have to
pick the reviews to do, maybe I'm going to do
the one that the game I like more, just because
I'm going to have more value when I say and
I'm going to have more fun in saying it.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (15:25):
Absolutely, I think like looking back the mid reviews were
the absolutely the hardest thing I ever had to write
for my blog or when I was reviewing professionally for
like Barnes and Noble Ortour dot com, because you get
to a point where it's like, yeah, this book's fine.
It's like competent, it's got a plot, the plot hits
its meats, but it's not exceptional, and it's like, what

(15:46):
do you say about that? Because really, like criticism is
about pulling out the interesting or the exceptional, on either
end of the spectrum parts of a piece of art
and saying, here's how those exceptional parts sort of make
this special in one way or the other.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
I think Rule of.

Speaker 4 (16:01):
Rose is a really interesting example as well, because, like
you say, it has both ends of those spectrums, and
that adds up to like a rather mediocre score.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
But Rule of Rose is worth like a ton.

Speaker 4 (16:11):
Of money now, and so it's interesting and it's valuable
not because of it's seven out of ten overall gameplay,
but because it's interesting because it's something that you can't
really experience elsewhere, Like it's not mid it's like kind
of broken and good and interesting, and there's a lot
of room for that type of game. But you can't
give a game a ten out of ten just because
it's really interesting. There's more balance between all of those

(16:35):
different facets that you kind of have to take into it.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yeah, and it's also you know, another just real quick
another aspect of game fan that I came away with
was I think there's a lot of times this draw
to like saying, Okay, Rule Rose is interesting, but it's
not as good as Resident Evil, it's not as good
as Silent Hill, you know, and here's why, and here's why.
Things like that. And one of the things I learned

(16:59):
pretty quickly game fan was that you can and maybe
should be very careful about comparing games to one another,
because it can be really easy to say, well, not
every game's not Ari four, so every game is less
and Ari four right, and it's going to get a
lesser score. But the game fan mauntra was always like,

(17:21):
what did this game try to do? And did it
accomplish it? You know, don't don't don't review it against
other games, review it against itself and what it was
trying to do. And so it's it's funny because on
one side you have people saying like, oh, game fan
were just a bunch of people who never went to
a journalism school and didn't know how to write and

(17:41):
were just loving everything because they were trying to sell
those those games at their game store at the same time,
you know. But on the other side, it is like
there there were a lot of four aspects of game fan,
like that or the idea that like you should be
at least knowledgeable and kind of these at like every
genre out there, which you know, later on you'd see

(18:04):
a lot of people writing reviews were like they had
their one niche and that was it. You know, game
fan was you should be able to play everything, you
should be able to kind of know about everything. You
should review games on their own merits. So there were
a lot of aspects of game fan that I think,
you know, really went deeper than people people understand, and
that really try to focus on giving games a fair

(18:26):
chance and not being afraid to sing the praises of
a game if it really doesn've it.

Speaker 4 (18:32):
I really like your point about criticism looking at something
for what it wants to be or what it's trying
to be, rather than just comparing it against you know,
like high bar standards you know in that genre or whatever.
That's something tie and I've talked a lot about, I
think over the course of these early episodes of our show,
But I want to go back to Game Fan because
I think it's really interesting how you're describing, you know,

(18:54):
criticisms against you know, like a bunch of writers who
didn't go to school or whatever for writing or criticism
or journalism. But I've seen you describe your early days
at Game Fan as being surprised by the quote unquote
garage nature of the operation. There wasn't a lot of
like standard equipment or workflow, but there's obviously something special happening.
The magazine was very important to so many people. It reached,

(19:15):
you know, reached me in Canada, and I read it
regularly as a Canadian. You that crew, you know, for
all the garage nature or whatever their background was, was
making something that a lot of readers adored. What was
it like working there in the mid nineties after you
kind of got your start.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
Yeah, for anybody who doesn't know, like resident heard me
talk about before, you know, like like I was saying,
like back then, like if you weren't doing fanzines, you
were doing pro magazines. And the ability to do pro
magazines today is literally one person at home could sit
here make everything and you know, write it up and
then do it all and end design, export it to

(19:55):
a PDF tended to a print company and they're printing
it right, and that that's it. But like back then,
you couldn't do and making a magazine was such an industry.
There were so many pieces, so many cogs, there are
so many things you had to do. And so I
went to game Fan thinking, Okay, this is going to
be a professional company. There's gonna be offices, and there's

(20:15):
gonna be like people like and then all this equipment stuff,
because that's what you had to have back then. And
I get to game Fan and it was literally like
a college dorm with a bunch of just pieced together
hardware that sometimes barely ran, you know, And it was
shocking to me that a group like that could produce

(20:36):
the magazine. But I think what it was, you know,
in one of the places where this most resonated with
me was so we had these RGB capture cards, which
most people didn't have. And so when you go back
and look through game Fan, if you're like, why were
there screenshots just so much better than everyone else, is

(20:57):
that we had these cards that had from my from
my memory of the story is they were they were
being discontinued, and so game Fan tried to buy as
many of the cards as they could get. We would
get all of our consoles modits they could hook it
up into into the capture cards, and when you were
sitting there capturing both, you couldn't you couldn't see like nowadays,

(21:19):
if you're capturing something from a when you're playing a game,
you have a record video the entire time and then
take shots from that, or you can instantly do screenshots
or whatever. But back then, like the person grabbing the
screenshots could not see on their screen what they would
get when they grab the shot. So you had you

(21:39):
had what were called grabbers. People who had done that
over and over and over again. They got the timing
down because it took about one or two seconds between
when you press it and what you would actually get.
You had to kind of like predict the screenshot you
were going to get, and then once you got it,
you had to actually de interlace the screenshot in order
to see it. You couldn't in real time check. But

(22:00):
so we would sit there and we would play fighting
games for like two three four hours just to capture
the screenshots, and that was all we were doing, and
we were like, Okay, in every screenshot, we're gonna have
both fighters doing an interesting move against one another, so

(22:21):
that you had a screenshot that was genuinely exciting and
showed off the game. And what's funny about that is
throughout my life now, I constantly will get screens from
pr at companies whenever, and I'll just be disappointed at
how often those screenshots are just so terrible because whoever

(22:43):
took the shot just didn't care, right, And so that's
what I think made game fan what it was, is
you had people who just cared so much about well, okay,
maybe not about grammar and English language, but cared about
presenting those games and showing them off. And so every

(23:04):
screenshot we took, every single one of them, was thought out,
and we pick and like, Okay, we're going to use
this screenshot not because that's what we have, but we're
going to put in there because that's the one we
want to show. We thought about the artwork, We thought
about you know, as much as now they look terrible
to me, is screenshots and game van how all these

(23:25):
borders around them and the layout people would take elements
from the games, crop them out and create this these
intricate borders, you know, around it. We would make these
crazy layouts, and we would go deep into like checking
out import games and stuff like that. So I think
that's what really made game found what it was and
why it was popular was because it was on one

(23:49):
side that fan level of if you read and I
was almost gonna say his name, I'm not going to
say his name, but if you read a certain person
or if you read other people in the magazine, you
you knew those people played those games and loved those
games and knew what they were talking about. You know,
if you read a fighting game from certain from certain reviewers,

(24:12):
you knew they knew what they were talking about. If
you if you read an RPG review or a critter
platformer or whatever it was, you know, you knew those
people lived and breathed and died those games. And so
that was part of it. And then on the visual side,
we put just so much effort into it. So I
think it was always clear that that it was a

(24:34):
genuine effort and not to throw anybody under the bus,
but I think as time goes on, there are certain
outlets and certain people where you see the kind of
things they say or do, or the reviews their previous
or whatever it is, where sometimes you can be like, Okay,
is this person legitimately, you know, loving games? This person

(24:55):
legitimately know this stuff? Do they do? They do? They did?
They really played the end of that game and stuff
like that. I think they were there that kind of
question A game fan is that whatever whatever we were doing,
you knew that we were die hard fans of that thing.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
And that came through in our episode that we just did.
The feature review that we reviewed was a review of
Lufia two, and the layout work that you talked about
came through. We were look at these beautiful there's a
border on every screenshot and it looks like the border
of a later generation RPG, right, even in the screenshots,
the Lufia two textboxes were just blue with white borders,

(25:35):
Final Fantasy style. But your screenshots actually had more artistic
care taken to them than the textbox of the actual
game did. But you know, it's a big, beautiful two
page layout with a bunch of screenshots at different sizes
and angles, and you know, and all, you know, a
lot a lot of texts, a lot of words lavished
on this game, and there was no score. There were

(25:56):
three capsule reviews earlier of the same game in the
main review sect, but this review was just a whole
editorial review with no score at the end, umpteen years
before that became in vogue, you know, just kind of
treat it as an art object and not as a
consumer product, which, as you pointed out already, was the
criticism that people would lovey at game fans, going, hey,

(26:16):
well you've got a game story. You're trying to sell
these games.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
But I thought that was.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
Really cool that all this time later we're looking at
this and that intent and craft and care still stands.

Speaker 3 (26:25):
Out and every game on that right. That was the
point too, is that, like, and I'm guilt to this too,
Like there would be things when we were driking like
Walmart game set or whatever. You know, there would be
some games where it's like, Okay, this isn't as important
of a game, so maybe we won't put as much
work into it or as much time, or we won't
care as much about screenshots, you know. But with game

(26:45):
fan there there were no throwaway pages. And even if
it was a game that we weren't wasn't like a
Final Fantasy seven, you know, it wasn't a King of
Fighters ninety eight something like that. Still put that same
amount of effort into showing off every game, so there
were no no of those like throwaway coverage stuff.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
That comes through.

Speaker 4 (27:08):
Like in the issue we were just looking at, there's
I can't remember the name of it, but it's like
a kind of Alone in the Dark style puzzle adventure
game for PlayStation, and like, I've never heard of it.
It doesn't have a Wikipedia page, but it got like
a full page spread with like great screenshots. Turns out
it was developed by gust who of course has gone
on to make a million popular games since. And it

(27:32):
was interesting because I think that, like, you know, game
Fan giving space to a game that like you never
would have seen that in game pro or game players
to that extent. And looking back, game Fan always made
me feel like I was learning about new games, not
just learning more about the games I already was excited about.
And I think that enthusiast idea that like the fanzine
enthusiasm comes through so much in the way that at

(27:54):
least I interfaced and you know, engaged with game Fan,
and it was the one that helped me understand that
there were so many games in Japan that I wasn't
getting to play, and that kind of always put a
fire under my ass to try to learn more about
what these you know, Japanese games that I couldn't get
my hands on were about, which is of course going
on to shape a lot of what I've done as

(28:14):
an adult as well.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
Yeah, it's funny because like my reading of game Fan
and not not not not at the beginning beginning, but like, well,
I don't know, I'm trying to think because like I
feel like my getting into game Fan and then working
at game Fan also came with the generation that was
PlayStation in Saturn, and not necessarily that you previous generations

(28:39):
you couldn't import games, but I feel like because of
games coming on on discs now and then being a
little bit cheaper to import and there're being more options,
Like I feel like that was really the generation where
imports became more of a thing and then now you
can just get a mod switch in your console whenever,
and so it was interesting that game Fan was one
of the was one of So you know, it's funny

(29:01):
because going back to EGM at this point. You know,
I've seen that there was more coverage of import games
than I remembered there being, but it was still oftentimes
we don't know what this game is, we don't really know,
you know, who's behind it, but we saw it somewhere,
we took some shots, We've got some information, so here
it is, and kind of presenting it that way. Where

(29:23):
was in the game fan side it was? It was
people who legitimately were like playing imports just constantly. Yeah,
And because game Fan, I mean gamers Club was getting
imports in constantly, we did have a direct source for
buying those games, So there was more love for kind
of showing off all those imports that you might not

(29:44):
see otherwise back in a generation when imports were getting
easier to play, but also those games were still not
always expected to get Western releases.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:57):
One of the things that like blew my mind yesterday
is in a game fan is at the back for
the Diehard store, you would sell imports, but there was
a little note saying that the Japanese games would come
with a translation.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
Do you know, like what was the story behind that?

Speaker 3 (30:15):
I don't know because I didn't I didn't really touch
much of the because the time I got there, the
magazine and store were pretty separate. But for anybody who
doesn't know, basically, Game Fan Magazine came out of Diehard
Gamers Club's catalog, which ran for a few witch issues,

(30:36):
which Dave actually first contacted EGM founder Steve Harris, asking
Steve if he could help Dave make the catalog and
then asked him for tips on making a magazine, and
then there was a big falling out between the two sides.
Oh wow, so which which is funny, but yeah, so,

(30:56):
I mean it based. I think part of it just
was is like, okay, we want to sell these imports
to Westerners. But this was back before the anime boom,
back before you know, every every kid was trying to
learn Japanese. You know, most people didn't speak it, and
there was no internet really and there was you couldn't
just go on game facts or you couldn't watch walk
throughs on YouTube. So you really needed some way to

(31:18):
help people justify buying imports or helping to them, you know,
to think could be okay to buy imports. So that's
why they were doing these these translated kind of guides
back then giving them with the game.

Speaker 4 (31:30):
I mean, I want to do a whole episode on this,
because this is like, this was in nineteen ninety six.
This is before like the final Fantasy Vive fan translation
from Kohler and a few of his compatriots, which I've
always sort of looked at as the first like breakthrough
fan translation. But there was obviously more of this happening
behind the scenes, and I'd love to kind of track
down one of those translations that Diehard was providing with

(31:51):
these imports.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
But I digress.

Speaker 4 (31:55):
I want to get back to, you know, just working
at game Fan. And one of the reasons we reached
out for this interview is that a piece you wrote
for game Fan went viral on Blue Sky a few
weeks ago. It was anime coverage, but the page is
just like wall to wall text and it was pretty funny.
People thought it was was quite amusing, and then you

(32:16):
stepped forward and claimed responsibility for it and said, hey, like, listen,
I was a writer who also did layout. I was learning,
you know, we're figuring things out as we go. But
you also pointed out that being a writer who was
also working on layout was unique at that time. It
was something that wasn't you know, most writers were writing.
Then you had layout people and that didn't necessarily cross streams.

(32:37):
I'm curious about how the sausage is made. We want
to learn and know more about magazines, Like can you
walk me through the process in those days for writing
and laying out an article for Game Fan? What was
the editorial process? Like what sort of tools did you use?
How did you you know, how did that come together
that you were laying out your own articles?

Speaker 3 (32:56):
Yeah, so, I mean it's funny because you know later
days on EGM and then so later days EAGM. I
think it was like we had like five writers and
then one main designer doing the magazine, you know, and
then Walmart game Funder was a smaller staff. It said,
like I was saying earlier, it's like, there's so many

(33:16):
things you can do now, get so much easier to
do all this stuff that you can do it a
smaller crew. But I when I was in Game Fan
in ninety six, that's when I started. I mean, there
was a team of writers and a team of designers,
you know, and those were kind of two different groups.
And the writers would come in, they would play the games,

(33:37):
they would work with the grabbers to grab the screenshots
and they would give it all to the designers, and
the designers would put it all together. And so there
was this expectation of like, if your writer, you wrote,
If you were a designer, you designed. But there were
a couple specific people who who did both, you know,
because they wanted to do both. And the fun of

(33:59):
doing both was that if you were doing your own layouts,
then you know, we would we would talk to designers,
we'd sit in their office and be like, hey, you know,
this is what I'm thinking. These are kind of like
the theme I want to go for, this is what
I want to show off. You would do that. But
if you were the one doing the layout, then then
you got control of everything and from start to finish

(34:19):
you could know what you wanted to do in your
page or your spread or or whatever it was. So
I came in as a writer. I i well, I
came in hoping to be a writer, and then I
was quickly put on the website, and so I was
doing the website and then writing for the magazine both
and I can't remember what they One of my earliest though,

(34:39):
so my my very first layout was Sam roisetrad On
four for Neo Geo and I don't remember what it was,
but like, I was always into the design side, especially
because I had come from the fanzine world and the
fanzine world to do everything yourself, you know, and so
I loved the writing, but I did also love the design,
and so I I was like, hey, can I just

(35:01):
try making layouts? And they're like, yeah, sure, because the
designers weren't going to say no to you doing their
job on some level because they were going to get
paid anyway, so you know, they didn't care if you
want to do a layout or two. And so back
then we used cork Express is the one we used.
That was the big industry one, because back then Adobe
really wasn't do well. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I think

(35:23):
they had page Maker back then, but PageMaker definitely was
not as as high end as quirk Express was. And
then later on Adobe releases in design and that kind
of takes over. But yeah, no, I mean it was,
it was. It said. It was interesting because now I
don't think about the back then, like just the computers

(35:43):
we had were so terrible and so slow for a
lot of stuff unless you were designers, So it did
take a while and getting You know, these days, if
I want to do a layout for something, I'll reach
out to PR and be like, hey, can you give
me access to your asset site so I can grab screenshots.
I can grab that they have high resolution layered artwork

(36:04):
and stuff like that. That kind of stuff didn't exist there.
There were almost never asset libraries. You could never say
we didn't get screenshots from companies. You know, we might
get art, we might just have to find the art somewhere.
We have to scan the art from somewhere, you know,
and we do all these kind of cropouts of from

(36:25):
screenshots and whatever. So it was kind of just hacking
together whatever you had to work with. But yeah, it
was it was fun. Like I said, I loved doing that,
but I was definitely still learning and what I one
of the things I kind of said in talking about
the anime fanmi layout was that you didn't always have

(36:47):
people saying like, hey, this layout is completely unreadable. You
should not be doing this, And especially if you go
back looking through game fan now, there's so many things
where I'm like, why would you use that font color
on that background? Why would you have a box behind
the text, but the text is like right against the

(37:09):
edge of the box and there's like no padding and
no room to breathe at all. Why would you do this?
Why would you have for that anime page? It's like,
why is it one full with column of just eight
thousand words effect with nothing bringing it up? But it
it that does kind of go back to the fan

(37:31):
side of it. Was that is in my mind, it
probably was not oh, I need to make sure this
is readable. It was I've got all this information that
I want to give to people. And that was one
of the funny responses to me, was on one hand,
I was seeing people saying like, yes, this is unreadable,
you know, but on the other somewhere like it's unreadable,

(37:54):
but it's packed with so much information that I appreciate that.
And that's kind of the thing is that you look
at at you know a lot of the layouts we
were creating a game fan and all those screenshots and
all the images and all the text just being crammed
in wherever it could be. You know, it did make
it harder to read. But the thought was, we want

(38:16):
to give you as much as we can about this
this stuff, you know, and and and so yeah, so
like there was there was no like when I started
making layouts, I had like like maybe like an hour
crash course with somebody showing me how to actually use
work Express. But there was no Okay, these are these
are the good rules for design, you know. There was

(38:37):
nothing like that. So it was just I'm going to
try it, and then when I've made a layout, if
there's anything I don't like about it, next time, I'm
going to try it do something else. And one of
the other problems is that these days it's much easier
to know what the end result is going to look like,
but but back then, knowing how something would look on

(39:01):
a page was a lot harder, and it's even hard
today sometimes because inevitably, one of the big problems is
that things will print darker than you think they're going
to print, because on a screen, it's it's a it's
a lit screen. You're seeing all those colors like fresh
and bright and a lot of contrasts and stuff, and
then we like to print inevitably things that end up darker,

(39:24):
so you can you can screw that up pretty easily.
And there's other things. And so back at game Fan,
what we would do was you know, you weren't sending
digital files over. So we had these big machines in
the in the in the basement that you could. We
had one that was a printer, and so we would
actually print out our versions. It wouldn't look exactly like

(39:45):
the the actual magazine would do, but we would print
out spread after spread after spread after spread, and then
and then check through them. But then when we were done,
we would print out the four color separations on these
kind of I think they were clear sheets, and then
we put those into a Manila envelope for each in
every spread, and then send all that stuff by mail

(40:07):
to the printer and they would use those to print them.
So yeah, so it was it was a combination of
like having computers that made it hard to really get
into like complicated layout stuff, not having any of those
assets easily accessible all the time, and then not having

(40:27):
an easier way to see what the end result would
be in the end. And yeah, you know that I
feel terrible about some of those anime fan layouts going
back to them now, But at the same time I
got the chance to this. This came after the big
split where half the kind of crew went off and
made Gamers Republic, and that gave me the opportunity to

(40:50):
actually run anime fan for myself. Now I was getting
to write everything, I was picking what I was going
in there, I was doing the layouts, and so I
love that chance. And so it's hard to back to
a little bit to look at. But it was also
a huge opportunity for me.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
So so Molly, I think part of it is also right,
like you're trying to just do what looks cool, Like
you are guys making magazines, younger folks having access to
kind of you know, the tools of production, and going,
let's fix something that that looks awesome, right, and even
if that breaks the rules of what you know, people
magazine would do in there igazine layouts.

Speaker 3 (41:26):
Not only yeah, not and not only that, but also
and this is going to sound completely counterintuitive, but I
was trying to make something that was easier to read
than the rest of the game fan issue was, you know,
because I knew how dark things often were, and I
knew how things dark, how how dark things printed, and
so I was like, Okay, I want to try to
make this section look different and stand out and then

(41:50):
be a little easier to read. But but I just
some reason had not learned what columns were yet. Yeah,
and I really should have.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
Well it kind of it kind of reminds me Aiden
and I both had independent blows roughly the same times
on science fiction and fantasy and mine on the Detroit Lions.
And you know, I was kind of learning the tools
of layout and web and stuff on the fly, trying
to make it look readable, look presentable. I know a
lot of indie bloggers did not put any time into that,
and you know, five oh six oh seven, and as

(42:20):
you know, more attention came, people kind of bounced away
from them because they weren't even trying really to look
up how how do I make things readable? Right? And
I feel like we had this kind of like brief
blooming of like stuff looking good, and then ads started
taking over. There was this whole drive towards a clean minimalism.
Got to be clean, clean, tons of white space, cleanling clean,

(42:40):
and then all that white space got filled up with
ads and more ads. And now I feel like, you know,
if it's not a subscription site, then whatever you pick
for your visual layout is just going to be slathered
with ads, you know, all around and then on top
and video and rolling and interstitial and everything else. But
now that we have have some of these you know,

(43:01):
subscription sites and more indie sites that are you know,
Patreon funded or you know, were with member full for
our podcast or you know, just for the love of
the game and not trying to make money at all,
it feels like maybe we're back at this. Hey whatever
looks cool, right, So, like, what trends are you seeing
in like visual design and layout and stuff that you
think are really cool.

Speaker 3 (43:23):
It's you know, it's it's really funny you're saying that,
because I So I've got my own personal blog, not
not blog like like my my work like accomplished of
my work over the years site. And then I've got
I recently launched a website for tracking Modern Era Genesis
physical releases, you know. And then I've also just launched

(43:45):
a big EGM website, you know. And so I thought
about web design a lot recently. And it's funny that
there was this this point, and I remember being a
game fan and constantly struggling against like Internet floor six,
for example, like trying to make things look good because
ie six was just the worst thing to ever happened

(44:07):
to web design and that was also the era of shockwave,
and I remember when game fans homepage had like these
like flame effects on it and things like that, and
it was like, threw up all this kind of animation
and stuff, you know, and throw all these complicated designs.
And then we got to this point where we were
kind of having just this this backlash against all of that,

(44:29):
and it's like, okay, simple and clean, right, the modern look.
We get to a point where we get to that.
And I absolutely one hundred percent fell into that. I
loved the idea of just simple and just make it
really clean and solid colors and have it be readable completely.
But we have kind of lost something in that, I think,

(44:50):
and I've been thinking about it more recently, in part
because I've been getting more into like retro tech or
like eighties uh you know design, like looking back at
like the eighties Japanese magazines and getting into like city
pop and stuff that, you know, stuff like that, and
then you go back and it's like, you know, we

(45:11):
have kind of just lost the fun of things. It's
like all of our phones look the same, all of
our computers are starting to look the same. You know,
cars are pretty similar at this point there's just so
much that we've lost. And so I was recently like,
did a really small update to the Mega Drive website
to give a little more color and stuff. And I've
been trying to think about like, how do how can

(45:33):
I redid my personal site kind of make it fun again,
because I do think that in so many ways in
society is when we're at one end of something and
we're like, Okay, we need to change this. We don't
swing to the middle, We swing to the complete opposite side,
you know, and we have problems finding that midpoint. And

(45:54):
so we went from an era where everything was noisy
and everything was loud, and going back through e GM,
it's it's completely obvious that they're they hit that point
as well. There's a point in the issues where I
think of like that that SpongeBob meme where it's like
capital letter lowercase, capital lowercase kind of thing, Like they

(46:17):
started doing that in like EGM the magazine itself, and
it's like, why why were they doing this? There's there's
no explanation for this. And you can see the point
where all of a sudden, uh, photoshop can do gradients right,
and then photoshop can do kind of like the three
ding and where Photoshop can do like the drop shadows.
You can, like it's fun to go back through each

(46:39):
GM and look at that because you can see when
every new kind of technology came along, because suddenly everything
has that, Suddenly everything is textured, you know, suddenly everything
is like is like embossed and stuff. And so you
see those different generations. And you know, I did the
same thing with my websites too, and and so we

(47:00):
had all of that. As technology is advancing, as computers
are getting more powerful, and as these apps can do
more things and Photoshop can do more things, then everything
is getting just so bombastic visually to a point where
it breaks everything. Everything goes to this white background, black
text world, you know, simple colors, flat logos. And that

(47:25):
was nice because it was a change from just all
the visual noise and all the chaos that we'd had.
But then in that we did lose the personality and
lose the fun of things. So we need to find
a kind of in between point now between how do
we keep things readable, keep things usable, but also bring
some of that color back, seeing, bring some of the

(47:47):
visual back, bring some of that fun back.

Speaker 4 (47:48):
Absolutely, we've now lot absolutely One kind of fun trend
that I've been seeing online recently is like, especially like
authors that I'm friends with in the book world are
starting to use like NEOs for to build websites for
themselves again like those old sort of like oh yeah,
yeah yeah, mid Aught's website builder sites.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
And it's great because they're very.

Speaker 4 (48:09):
Very effective at communicating like concise information to people, which
is everything that an author needs. And I do like
the idea that we're looking back at these older design
mentalities and philosophies and saying, hey, that was actually okay,
it's not just because it's old doesn't mean it's not
effective anymore, which I always think is fun.

Speaker 3 (48:29):
Well, and it's funny too because like so you mentioned
it kind of in the beginning is I was the
person who launched the first ever English language on a
fan site and called the Velvet Room. And I've had
that it's been up for almost the entire time. There's
been a couple of years where it was down, but
for the most time it's been up. Not because that

(48:50):
was nicely a conscious effort for me. It's just just like, well,
I've always had host web hosting somewhere. I'll just throw
it up there and the reason not to, and that
was up for years. I didn't think about it, and
then a few years back, all of a sudden, I
don't remember who it was, it was an RPG gamer
or some rpgame or someone with that on Twitter, but

(49:12):
was like, don't let these fan sites die, and like
mine was the first on their list, you know. And
then a few maga me tenessay fans did a like
an hour and a half long YouTube video like going
through the site and talking about it, and so there
was this big explosion of like people remembering my side
existed or finding it for the first time. And so

(49:32):
it was interesting for me to go back to that
because that was a design I had done back in
what like nineteen ninety seven or something like that, and
it was so old. You go back to it and
it's like this site is optimized for six forty by
forty for example, you know, and it's like now it's
like tiny on your screen. Back then, that was like

(49:53):
the the hot new, you know, screen resolution. And so
I was thinking about, like, you know, I really should
update the site just to make it more readable on
modern on modern web browsers and stuff. And in doing
that there was this like pulling me at first of
of you know, I should really modernize the site, and

(50:14):
then I was like, maybe, you know, maybe I actually shouldn't.
Maybe keep it the way it was, let it be
what it was back in the day, but just make
everything bigger and higher resolution, but try to keep the
intent of what it was, just because you know, don't
don't be afraid of that and don't think you have
to get away from that. And it's it's fun to see, Like,
you know, I've watched videos of like younger younger I

(50:37):
don't want to say kids, but not younger kids, but
you know, teenagers and twenty somethings going back and looking
at this old stuff and just being amazed to look
at it because they don't they don't know that world
when designed was that way. So it's like, don't be
ashamed of it. Just kind of lean into it and
have fun with it.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
Molly, it's funny something This is going to get to
what we're going to get to you shortly here. But
there is a web comic I reread every few years
not to buy a graphic comic called The Guy. I
almost was like online only a graphic novel by Patrick
Sean Farley at Electric Sheep Comics kind of talking about
how he had kind of bottomed out waiting for like

(51:16):
the scientific tech future utopia that he was promised as
sort of a you know gen xer growing up to
arrive and you know, was broken going nowhere, and he's like,
you know what, I'm gonna forget it. I'm gonna buy
a typewriter. I'm gonna get rid of all my electronics.
And there's kind of this critical moment in the webcomic

(51:36):
where he sets his typewriter down that he bought by
selling basically whatever physical possessions he had left, and he's like,
I don't have any paper. So he grabs his bachelor's
degree off the wall, feeds it in through the typewriter
and types I don't need a computer. And I think
it was originally set for VGA resolution because that's the

(51:59):
graphic was like four or five screens wide and whatever.
The frame for the webcomic was tall, so you had
to physically scroll like he was typing it out, you know,
I don't need a computer, like like it's reading on
a typewriter. That's like a super cool effect. And then
it was very funny to me every couple three times
I went back and read it over the next decade,

(52:21):
you know, basically screen resolution had increased the degree where
the graphic just displayed straight on the screen because yeah,
four times six forty or whatever. It was just there's
enough pixels there. It doesn't you don't need to scroll
at all. Funny how you know, modernizing it or updating it,
like you are going between, okay, well, do we want
to preserve it exactly as it was? Do we want

(52:41):
to update it so that the spirit of it, you know,
the creative intent comes through, or you know, versus you know,
completely modernizing it and redoing it for scratch.

Speaker 3 (52:50):
I mean, that's kind of the one reason I love
print so much is like that page that you make
in print will always be that size, It'll always be right.
You know, you can put anybody's hand and it's gonna
look the same. You don't worry about browsers or resolutions
or screenws or devices or anything. And so that that
is one of the nice kind of things about print
is just like I can make something one way and

(53:11):
everybody's going to experience that way versus having thousands of variables.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
Awesome, Okay, Well, This is a premium episode, folks, so
you are already getting added free episodes if you are
listening to this. But we are gonna give your ears
and our mouths a quick break. We're gonna reset, give
you some of millennium facts, amazing original music you created
for this show. And then when we come back, we
are gonna switch gears to get into some different topics.
Right here with Molly Patterson on fun Factor.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
Welcome back to fun Factor.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
We're two old gamers review old video game Megga. We've
sen reviews. Of course we want you to review us.
Do we get a full five point zero and fun
Factor leave us a review on Apple podcasts, we will
read the best, funniest, kindest and most entertaining ones on air. Okay,
so Molly, before we get into our second half of
our conversation, we're going to put you to a bit

(54:18):
of work. In front of us is the December nineteen
ninety nine issue of Game Fan, which I believe you
worked on.

Speaker 1 (54:25):
Yeah, your job.

Speaker 4 (54:26):
Here is a flipped page one hundred and thirty two,
and read the reader mail titled time heals all prices
from Tetsuo via the Internet.

Speaker 3 (54:36):
See I like this reader mail, because it wasn't one
of the ones that was like yelling at me about
I would like to read this. One thing I'd like
to add to the PlayStation to debate is that the
p S two will cost approximately the same as the
original PlayStation when it arrived, and even at three hundred
and seventy dollars for this kind of technology, it's a

(54:57):
fair price considering that most DVD players are high, if
not higher. No matter what company any of us favor,
it's hard not to be impressed by Sony's monster of
a game machine. Tetsuo via the.

Speaker 4 (55:13):
So this was a really interesting piece of lettermail to
go back and read because game prices and console prices
have been such a hot topic. We're recording this in
kind of mid twenty twenty five and the Nintendo Switch
is about to come out. There was a lot of
talk about is it too expensive? And I was just
fascinated to look back that like, no matter where we

(55:33):
are in games history, consoling game prices have just always
been too high. It's always been a topic of conversation.
But I also thought Tedsuo was like spot on the
editor response. I Don'm not sure if that was you
Molly or if it was somebody else who was responding,
was a little more skeptical about the DVD player in
the PlayStation, allowing it to kind of penetrate homes. But

(55:55):
as we know with hindsight, that edition, as Tetsuo says,
of the DVD player in the PlayStation, allowed it to
find its way into so many living rooms because it
would work for people who weren't gamers too. So if
your dad liked movies or your mom liked movies and
he liked video games, there was that ability to be like, hey,
this is actually probably the best value DVD player on

(56:18):
the market. You might as well buy it instead of
a standalone and then I get to play the game.

Speaker 3 (56:23):
I ated PS two because it killed my Dreamcast. I
was a diehard Sega fan. I'm still a writer or
die and I was so mad at people because I
saw so many people saying, now, I'm just gonna wait
for the PS two. You know, It's like, but Dreamcast

(56:43):
has this game, and this awesome game. This helps me. No,
I'm just waiting for you know what what got me
on the PS two It actually wasn't the DVD playback,
but the DV playback ended up being a big thing
for me because I I had actually gotten into DVD
early and paid way way too much for a DVD

(57:07):
player back in the day. But you know, I remember
this is because this was a game fan. And remember
he was substance d in the magazine named Michael Hobbes,
and I actually still worked with him. We were both
big DVD people, and we would go on lunch break
every Tuesday because there was a store near us that

(57:30):
would get the new DVDs, and you could literally say, Okay,
today there are three new DVDs come out, you know,
and we're gonna go see what those three DVDs are like.
Like At this point, there's like, you know, hundreds, if
not thousands of new ones coming out whenever. But back
then it was it was like that small but thing.
So we got into DVD early. But like I remember
when I finally broke down and got a PS two

(57:54):
that it was both my game machine and it was
my DVD player. And and I absolutely positively think that
that one of Sega's biggest mistakes. And it wasn't a
mistake in terms of I don't think they could have
done anything otherwise, but one of the real sticking points

(58:15):
for the Dreamcast was that it didn't play DVDs, and
I think that was a huge, huge part of it.
And I think the PS two was absolutely one of
the the biggest drivers of DVD acceptance, you know, in
in the world. So Tetso was absolutely right. You know,
DVD was a huge part of the PS two, and

(58:36):
I think that's you had an amazing game console, plus
you had this thing that could let you play this
new medium of video releases that were a complete game.

Speaker 4 (58:49):
I still, like, don't know if I've watched a DVD
on anything other than my PlayStation two.

Speaker 1 (58:54):
It's still my device, like my my DVD player.

Speaker 4 (58:57):
I haven't hooked up upstairs to a CRT and when
I want to watch you know, Jurassic Park on DVD,
because I prefer it to the four k uh pressing,
like that's what I wanted.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
It is my PlayStation two. Uh.

Speaker 4 (59:09):
You know, maybe I've put on Lion King on my
PlayStation three for my kids at one point, but like
I've watched almost all of my DVD movies over my
entire life on my PlayStation two.

Speaker 3 (59:22):
Our four k U C player is an Xbox one S.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
Yeah, yeah, there you go.

Speaker 3 (59:27):
I think, I think for people like us, it just
became second nature to think, Okay, my game consoles, i's
gonna be my player.

Speaker 1 (59:35):
Yeah yeah, my plate PS five is my bluerray player.

Speaker 4 (59:38):
Yeah, absolutely, yeeah. And just having them all in that
one set top box. I mean, given how big game
consoles are now, you don't have room for dedicated devices.
But yeah, I mean, like just the PS two was
that first one. Maybe the PlayStation with the CD because
it was a great CD player. Maybe that was the
first time it was like, oh, okay, these devices can

(59:58):
sort of be multipurpose like payment units rather than you know,
the entertainment system. Nintendo was ahead of the curve.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):
I guess they just needed well, I will tell you
I had the I had the VHS adapter for the Neo.

Speaker 1 (01:00:11):
G amazing.

Speaker 4 (01:00:14):
I didn't even know that was a thing, can you know,
my lord. I was one of the way too early
convergence guys. So in like two thousand and one, two
thousand and two, I had a PC that I had
built with a radion all in Wonder with cable coming
into it and video out into my AV receiver and
DVD drive, you know, so we would host parties and

(01:00:38):
I'd have you know, my whole big Hi Fi system
set up with the TV and go, yeah, cool, here's
my here's the playlist. You know, we'd have MP three's
going and people would be like, what's what's happening?

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
Like, oh, you want to.

Speaker 1 (01:00:50):
Watch a movie?

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:00:51):
Yeah cool?

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
Here, let me just pop CD drive out, and you
know I had a wireless keyboard. You know, people were like,
what what is this? And again, know, the technology was
not mature and and still never really became to this day.
If you're trying to do the same thing with a PC,
you're jumping through a million hoops and results you're going
to you got a plex server. You know, there's open

(01:01:13):
source software, you know, three different libraries you got to
get in order to have connectivity throughout that. Whatever it's
it's always been more trouble than it's worth. But then
everyone's get the oh, I see, but me too. If
I want to play a movie on disc, it's it's
going into the PS five.

Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
I mean, to be fair, we did have a local
store that had the Pioneer Laser active set up, and
I did drool over that thing. But as as a
kid who was trying to get a Neogea at some point,
like if the neo Geo was just a pipe dream
kind of thing, like the Laser Active was, They're never

(01:01:54):
love it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:56):
You know old media.

Speaker 4 (01:01:57):
I think it's safe to say we're all sort of
you know, fans of old me as you can imagine
Molly based on the premise of the show, Ty and
I were big into game magazines back in the day
as readers. I have boxes and boxes of old issues
here in my garage with me that my parents have
been dumping at my house regularly since I started this show.
But they're a great reference for fun Factor. I can

(01:02:19):
pull out a physical magazine that we're talking about, I
can flip through that actual issue as we're like planning
the show. That's not always a big possibility for a
lot of people. And one of the big driving motivations
here behind fun Factor is highlighting how and why it's
important to preserve and contextualize this legacy media so we

(01:02:40):
can understand how it impacted us then and now. You're
in the midst of wrapping up or launching or beginning
a huge preservation project called Electronic Gaming Monthly Compendium, which
we've kind of touched on earlier in the episode. It's
focused on preserving and making accessible the entire run of
EGM from start to end, including a missing issue that

(01:03:01):
never made it to print. Well, can you tell us
about the scope of this project, what it means to you,
and what your you know, hopes are for going into
the future.

Speaker 3 (01:03:09):
So when it started, it was a book. That's really
all all that we were looking into. You know. We
the magazine market is terrible at this point, you know.
I mean, it's it's awesome to see you know, gamingformer
coming back after we thought we had lost them, But
even then, I worry, right is like, is like how

(01:03:32):
how long can that actually exist for? And because the
reality is as much people say they want they want
magazines back, it's like they don't. They don't necessarily pay
for them, you know. And there there are some projects
out there that are doing their thing. They're selling a
couple thousand copies or whatever, maybe maybe even ten thousand
or so, you know, but the unfortunate realities about people

(01:03:54):
just don't want magazines at the point. Uh and and
so the magazine market was kind of dying off. You know,
we were like, okay, what what do we want to
look at Osky doing and we had talked about doing
books for for years at this point, and so we're like, okay,
if we're going to do a book project, like, what's
the most logical starting point for us? And that was, yeah,

(01:04:14):
you know, uh, I worked for I worked for Steve
harris Is, who's a person who started e GM back
to day. He owned all the rights again to EGM.
He picked them back up after Ziff Davis kind of
killed it, and so you know, there was no problem there,
and it's like, okay, so let's make a book that
kind of both honors the legacy of EGM while also

(01:04:37):
telling the tale of the history of video games through EGM,
you know, through its pages, through its its coverage and
things like that. So we were coming at it as
a book project. And then kind of early on, uh,
Josh Josh Harmon and I are the two kind of
main writers in the book, and we were like, we've

(01:04:57):
got to figure out a way to index everything that
was in the GYM. And I will I will tell
you that when you initially think about going back and
kind of making a database of what was in a magazine,

(01:05:18):
it seems, at least to me, it seemed easier than
it ends up being is because you do not realize
how complicated that get. Because when you're making magazines, there's
there's no thought of we're going to have to archive
this later, We're going to have to have some sort
of way to figure out what was in this issue later.
One of the good but also bad points of magazines

(01:05:40):
has always been you're making that one issue, and when
it's done, it's done, it's out the door, and you're
you're the next one, you know, and it's it's good
in that you can just kind of do whatever you
need to do for that issue, and then you can
change things up to the next issue. The bad is
there's a history of not archiving stuff, you know, of
not saying it, of not preserving it, of not caring

(01:06:02):
because once that issues out, it's been sold. Like the
mentality was, you're it's done and gone, and you know
same games used to be like that. Before you know
is in the older days, you'd make games, you release them,
they were done, you didn't think about them. There were
no virtual consoles, there were no digital downloads, there was
no guilty like that. So we were trying to think

(01:06:23):
of ways to to archive this stuff. And then you know,
jos Josh had had thoughts about what he thought we
should do, and I had some thoughts about what I
should do, and so we kind of were like trying
both of our things. And on my side, I was like,
what if we have a site that you can just
kind of like burcht through and like link to, and

(01:06:44):
it was it wasn't as as ambitious as what the
digital archive ended up coming. We were like, okay, what
what if we had an option for going back and
looking through issues like that? And so we we basically
just went through and tried as much as we could
to get all the content for every issue. For issues
of EGM kind of databased out. And you know, as

(01:07:09):
you guys look through all the issues of magazines e
GM or otherwise, I'm sure you'll find this is there
was a lot of information that was just wrong or
in company. You know. One of the infamous ones for
me is that when when EGM reviews casts of Illusion
on Genesis, they just lit up literally call it nickey Mouse.

(01:07:32):
That was the that was the name of the game
in terms of the review. You know, back then there
was no internet to to to clarify and to research things.
Companies were not as easy to get information from. There
were Japanese companies that you just never reach, so you
might not know the exact developer on something, you might

(01:07:53):
not know the exact name. So going back, there's all
this stuff that's like wrong. So there's all this work
we have to do to buy, fix things, and connect
things and update things. So anyway, we get to a
point where in our preservation project, we've got the EGM Compandium,
which is a book that's coming out later this summer

(01:08:13):
that is kind of looking back at all two hundred
and sixty four issues of EGM, you know, looking through
each of one of them and kind of giving an
overview and what they were and looking at the history
of video games through those, We've got a lot, a
lot of interviews with X staff from across all the
generations of EGM. We're going to have feature stories. We're

(01:08:34):
going to have like a list of the thousand best
games according to EGMs. We've views, We've got this big
giant database, we have every single review score, and then
we've got averages, and then we're doing weights by how
many times those games showed up in EAGM magazine and
all this kind of stuff. So we're doing lots of

(01:08:55):
fun things for the book.

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:08:56):
But then also the website, which is a little more
personal meache because I was the one who kind of
built the tech behind it. You got the website digital
archive where you can go on and on a on
a base level, you can just reread through every issue
of EADM digitally. You know, you can flip through it.
So what we did is because we did all that archiving,

(01:09:17):
all that databasing, all all those connections and stuff, you
can go in and you can do these incredibly complex searches. Right.
An easy thing would be, okay, I want to see
every review that Molly Patterson wrote in the magazine you know.
Or you can say I want to see every preview
for a Final Fantasy game, you know. Or you can
say I want to see every time that Hegeo Kajima

(01:09:40):
was interviewed for something you know, but you can get
you can keep adding on to those things. You can
say I want to see every Dreamcast review of a
game from Sega, you know that had a certain score
level or whatever. Like there's these and then you can
use these incredible deep searches you can do. And then

(01:10:05):
once you find the results, you click a link, and
it jumps you into whatever issue that was on the
exact page that thing was on. And doing that is
far more complicated than you might initially think, like it's
been an incredibly complicated ask. But and I want to
be careful to everybody. I'm not trying to be an

(01:10:26):
ego maniac. You're not trying to toot my own horn.
But I think that we have really created a site
that is just unlike anything that I've seen exist for
magazines to the point, and there was a point that
we reached in using it in its earlier form where

(01:10:47):
we went from this is a nice tool for us
to use for making the book, to you know what,
this is actually something cool enough that we should share
with everybody else. And the reason the site had me
so excited, And I know you guys are going to
appreciate this because you're booth in the magazine. I have

(01:11:08):
boxes and boxes and magazines in my in my mother's basement,
you know, in storage. And I'm getting older and I've
got kids, and I've got my own house and everything,
and you reach a point where it's like, can I
keep justifying having these boxes and boxes because you find

(01:11:31):
yourself saying, you know, there was that review that EGM
did that I want to go back and read, or
there was that preview of that Japanese game that game
Fan did and I'd love to look at it again. Right,
And so if I if I said to either one
of you, you know, so I did a review of
the macrosse game on PS one, Right, So if I said,

(01:11:52):
go find that in your in your game fan library, right, like,
how long would that take you? You know, how much
of an effort would it be to go back through
all those magazines and doing that a couple of times
makes you then not every want to go back to them.
But that's not what I want for the legacy of magazines.
You know. I don't want it for game fan. I
don't want it for EGM. I don't want for anything

(01:12:13):
like is. I loved magazines and I still do so much.
I I it was a blessing to me to get
to work in this industry, to to write and design
and create for magazines. But even with like my own
kids like it. If I if I gave my my
kids a gigantic sect of game fan, is that sit

(01:12:35):
down and read these like that's an effort, you know,
and like you might grab an issue or too and
kind of look through it and just see what's in there.
So like finding anything specifically looking for something wanted to
go back and read a certain thing. It's so complicated
and so hard even if you have all those issues
sitting there. And so I think for me, one of

(01:12:57):
the most awesome parts of our preservation project for EGA
is that we've built a site that if you do say,
I remember Dan Shue wrote a review of that particular game,
and I love the comment he wrote in it, I
want to read that again. In ten to fifteen seconds,

(01:13:18):
now you could find that. And it's it's not that
I want to replace those physical issues and just throw
all mine away and only have this, but I as
not as the person who helped make it and is
trying to sell it to people, but as a person
who loves magazines and loved reading magazines and loved writing

(01:13:42):
and making magazines. I so appreciate that there's a way
that all everything in those issues can now exist again,
and not only exist again, but truly be accessible for
years to come.

Speaker 2 (01:14:01):
It's a fantastic project, Molly, and just the work that
you're talking about as you're describing it, I'm mentally going like,
oh my gosh, that is a ton of work. And
then we think about stuff like what just happened with
Polygon and what's happened with a bunch of other websites
that people have grown up loving with Giant Bomb obviously,

(01:14:22):
you know of people who are ten fifteen years younger
than us think about some of these websites and you know,
have same that same attachment to the work that inspired
them to be better gamer or to become writers, become
content creators. And then how is that work getting preserved?

Speaker 1 (01:14:40):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:14:40):
You know, we have the Wayback Machine, yeah, which the
Internet archive and how it's run as a whole separate topic,
but like, how do you think we can if we
can try and preserve some of that work for future
generations as well?

Speaker 3 (01:14:58):
Yeah, you know, and that's that's a quest. I mean,
I just like, I so back into us nineteen when
when a previous rand was when around you know, I
wrote this thing on Twitter where I was like, you
have to save your work. Yes, I don't care what
it is, I don't care what you're doing. You cannot
rely on anybody to save your work. You have to

(01:15:19):
do it, and you can't just do it in one method.
You've got to do it in multiple methods. Like I
think we really really have to because we are just
constantly seeing these just just you know, sites go down.
We're like tens, if not hundreds of thousands of articulture
are disappearing. Yes, it can be gone for good, even

(01:15:39):
with the Internet archive there, even with the wayback machine,
like it's not always going to grab everything, you know,
it can't grab everything in We have to I'd love
to stay on a company level do this, but it
has to start, I think on a personal level, because
you cannot trust anybody but yourself to preserve your work

(01:16:01):
or care about his legacy. And so I think every
single one of us, I mean, I'm so I'm going
to this right now because with all the podcasts I've
been doing I started podcasting, was it like, uh, it's
been a while, I've been doing it for years and
years and years. But like I had all those podcasts

(01:16:22):
of I had a friend who uh graciously offered to
give me hosting on his hosting server, so I had
a lot of the podcasts on there, and then unfortunately recently
he passed away and then his sort of just is
gone and nobody can act as a whiles And and
I'm now in the point where, like I might not

(01:16:44):
have backed up all those things like I thought I had,
and if that was my backup, those are now gone,
you know. And so even like that is like anything
you do any if you make YouTube videos, if you
make podcasts, if you do writing, if you do artwork,
save save it all. It is never in the history
of mankind been cheaper to save digital files, and it

(01:17:07):
is now. It's never been easier to do it. So
we have to start this on a base level. I
would love to say that every magazine out there gets
its own digital archive like we've made for EGM. Right
that that would be my dream. It's not going to
happen first because of just the the effort it takes,
but also because companies don't always care. So so as

(01:17:31):
much as I'd like to say, I love would love
to see companies do it, it has to be a
personal thing. And so whatever you're doing, if you're a
creator of any kind, please for the Lord's sake, save
your work, preserve it, care about it, you know, make
sure it does not go away.

Speaker 4 (01:17:47):
We've been talking a lot about you know the beginnings
of our careers, and you know the progression of games
journalism preservation. But what do you have to say for
somebody right now today who wants to start writing about
games but maybe looks games media and says, I don't
even know what to do at this point?

Speaker 1 (01:18:03):
Where do I even start?

Speaker 3 (01:18:04):
Do not do it? For God's sake, to run away
as fast as you can, don't do it. I The
unfortunate reality is, I would say, as as hard as
it was to get into writing about games previously and
making it three out of it, I think it's ten
times harder now if it's more than that, And so

(01:18:28):
I would say, never ever, ever think about doing it.
If you are trying to make money on it, it
has to be a passion project. It has to be,
you know, something you're doing just just for your own sake.
Like at the moment, I am putting together initial plans
to do another fanzine because I've been wanting to get
back into fanzines for a long long time. I'm going
to make a new issue. I'm gonna try to And

(01:18:51):
that's what you have to do. If I do it
on a fan level, try to start a blog, uh magazine,
write about games on on Blue Sky you know other
things too, of course, but like if you want to
swift could do writing, I think you have to do
an undersfand level just because the unfortunate reality, you know,
I got my start at game on that in I

(01:19:15):
think it was ninety nineteen ninety four or something like that,
and I've been off and on writing about game since then.
For money, there are still some ways you can do it.
You can you can do a book project for example,
you know, and do like a Patreon kind of thing.
But the reality is just we are at a point

(01:19:36):
where writing about games is really tough to make a
living at. And chat GPT is not going to make
it any better, you know, because I think about you know,
we would do every year for Walmart games or do
we do the Parents Guide to Games? And this was
a big book and in the back we had all

(01:19:59):
these pages with like one hundred and twenty five little
capsule about video games, just saying what they were, if
they are appropriate for kids, like what you used to know,
so that if parents were going on to buy a
game for their kids for Christmas or Holidays or whatever,
they would have a little bit of information right, and
the realities I think about now is like I could
probably do ninety percent of that issue with chat keep

(01:20:22):
I really, you know, and I as a writer, I'm
not going to do that, but I can tell you
that companies are going to do that. You know, if
a company needs just a basic guide about video games,
why why would they not just go on chat kepp
and asked it to you know, give me x amount
of words about this game, tailored towards what parents would know, right,

(01:20:45):
or whatever it is. And so that that's just the
reality and the reality. So the reality is, as much
I hate to say it, if you want to write
about games, you have to come at it as a
hobby and do it as a hobby. And if you
can make money off of it, then you are incredibly
lucky and you should out your stars for that. But
you cannot go into it with any sort of idea

(01:21:05):
that you're going to make money. You know, no, no
disrespect to the YouTube generation at all. But as somebody
who was a paid writer, I it was you know,
it's funny, there was the time in music when it
was like metal and like especially hair and metal and
stuff like that, and then this one day, this song

(01:21:31):
called Smells like Teen Spirit comes out, and seemingly overnight,
the entire industry changes and it is now runge and alternative,
you know, and and and you have. I remember the
interviews with metal bands and they're like it was like
every single bit of the oxygen just went out of
the room and our careers were over almost overnight. That's

(01:21:56):
kind of what YouTube felt like for us, is there
was pre pre YouTube and post YouTube, and even though
it wasn't when YouTube started, it was. It was that
point where it almost seemed like overnight everything switched from
companies we're still talking to us and wanting to work
with us and wanting to do previous with us and

(01:22:17):
having events for us to everything is now in and
we are not even on their radar. That's how it
felt like. So you know, I saw this years ago coming,
especially even more now. So yeah, unfortunately, too bad, So
sad if you want to write about games for a living,

(01:22:37):
because that's not happening anymore unless you can do it
on a personal level.

Speaker 1 (01:22:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:22:42):
Yeah, I haven't been doing this nearly as long as
you have, But I've been being to games journalism for
how six years or so and it's gotten steadily harder
and harder and harder to sell pitches.

Speaker 1 (01:22:53):
And so I've been making a shift.

Speaker 4 (01:22:54):
I have my newsletter Astrolabe, and I've been writing more
features that you know, should have found a home, would
have found home even five years ago, that are now,
you know, something that I have to make a platform for,
which is fine.

Speaker 1 (01:23:05):
I get to write stories that.

Speaker 4 (01:23:06):
I want to write, but you know, it's hard. Then
the flip side of that is when you're a freelancer
and you're just writing for your newsletter, access to people
and stories and companies becomes difficult too, And I'm curious
how that that friction is going to play out over
the next couple of years. But I think I fully
agree with you, Molly, that writers get out there and write,

(01:23:28):
create a platform for yourself, and even if you're not
starting off with a big readership, create the content. Write
the stories that you want to write, and don't be
afraid of writing stories or pitching stories, or coming up
with ideas that you need to get through editorial staff,
right the ones that really interest you, and you know,
put that out there and it's not you know the
the adage, if you build it, they will come and

(01:23:50):
that's just not true on the internet anymore. Like you
do have to put effort into making sure that your
stories get out there, but the reward of digging into
these ideas and stories and publishing them yourself should be
something that you know, we're all feeling more positive about.
I think a lot about how like musicians don't hide
in their basement playing songs until somebody signs them to

(01:24:11):
a deal. They hit local bars, they hit restaurants, they
go busking, and they're out there putting their art out themselves.
They believe in themselves and they do the art for
the art's sake, and then that builds. And that's what
writers I think need to do as well, is like
build your own success because there's nobody out there that's
going to give it to you anymore. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:24:30):
Yeah, I just trult to be careful to say just
like where there was a point where I could say,
you know what, you could you could probably go into
this industry and make a living out of it. Yeah,
I would just say please for the sake of your future, Like,
don't don't think you're gonna go out there and be
a writer about video games. And that's me the only
thing you do try, you know, do your own stuff,

(01:24:52):
get get it out there. But that even on the
even on the higher level, like I mean, we you know,
we other people were having problems getting that attention that
you're saying, you know, you not get as a freelancer.
It was for us as well, you know, and you know,
I mean I had to say it. But like, if
something that you want to do that you think you

(01:25:14):
could transfer your writing to also doing a video as well,
you know, then try YouTube that that's a better thing.
At this point, it's hard, sure, it's absolutely hard, but
as long as you just don't bet your future on it.
I'm not saying not to try it. What I'm saying
is is please don't go into the industry thinking that

(01:25:36):
it's going to be your sole source of income and
that you can survive.

Speaker 4 (01:25:40):
Yeah, for a bit of like context, for me, I
just did my taxes.

Speaker 1 (01:25:44):
My game's writing basically paid for my games writing this year.
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:25:47):
It's like my expenses and my income from games writing
was basically exactly the same. And so that's where it is.
It supports itself, which is great. It allows me to
be able to go out and buy a new game
when I want to write about it or if I
need to, you know, like it's going to pay for
my Nintendo switch to this year.

Speaker 1 (01:26:02):
But that's basically about it.

Speaker 4 (01:26:05):
But you know, I would love to be able to
make more of a living off of it, but that's
just not really the reality.

Speaker 3 (01:26:11):
But you know that doesn't mean yeah, yeah, absolutely, but
said my my bank would just be uh, do it
for yourself first, you know, and and that might something,
but absolutely possitively do it for yourself first. And and
don't don't stress if it can't become more, because it's
just it's so hard to become.

Speaker 4 (01:26:33):
Absolutely, Mollie, it's been such a delight to look at
the past in the future of games media with you.
Is there anything you want to pitch before we wrap up?
Where can people find you? E GM compendium? What do
you want to put?

Speaker 3 (01:26:46):
Yes, so real quick, e GM compendium. If if you
are interested at all in checking that out, you can
go to uh well okay, so if you go to
e Gmcompanion dot com, that's the compendium. But as of
this point, you do have to have backed our kickstarter
in order to get in. There are there are low
tiers so you can still get into that can get

(01:27:08):
you digital access, but I don't know if there's actually
really really good links raight to that. But if you
go to Kickstarter and search for EGM, you're going to
find it because we are like crazy successful like I
was I was before we launched this, we were all like,
is anybody going to care? You know, like is this
going to do anything? Are people going to care about this?

(01:27:28):
And we were just praying as like, okay, man, if
we get to like because it's it's funny real quick,
is that the magazine side, we said that we would
do a new issue of ETM, which we are going
to do now. But the new issue of EGM was
our very top and final redcoal at two hundred and

(01:27:53):
fifty thousand dollars, and we're like, Okay, I don't know
if we're getting that far, but if we happen to
get two hundred the k we'll do a new issue.
And then uh, we've gone just a little bit a
little bit above that to an incredibly frightened for me personally,
I would love for you to do one of two things.

(01:28:14):
You can go to uh either way, they'll take you
the same place. You can go to Mollyl Patterson dot com.
But if you want to be easier, it's m O
L l I e N dot com and I'll take
you to my personal site where I have twenty plus
years of writing up there. I have lots of really
cool interviews, cons of reviews. I'm constantly adding more stuff

(01:28:38):
because I'm going through my archive of writing and all
the time adding more things to that. There's tons of
things up there you can check out. Or also if
you go on Blue Sky, that is my social media
of choice, and you can just search for the same
thing m O L l I p N and you
can find me on there and follow me and follow
my nonsense in terms of IDEO games in retrotech and.

Speaker 1 (01:29:02):
Love with that excellent.

Speaker 4 (01:29:04):
I just want to say it was a success of
the GM compendium Kickstarter that convinced me, I can't speak
for Tie, but convinced me that this idea TIE and
I had been kicking around for twelve to eighteen months
like would have legs in an audience, and it was
a catalyst for getting this show going. So I just
want to say thank you to you and Josh and

(01:29:25):
everyone else. I think Steve Harris is involved in the
compendium forgetting that going, putting that out there, putting the
work in to show that there's such enthusiasm for old
legacy games media and the preservation of it.

Speaker 3 (01:29:36):
No, it was funny because there was a little bit
of sentiment on our side is like, is anybody that
actually gonna care? You know, is there some an audience
out there? And yeah, there is. In between this and
you know, Game of Form being revived, there's been some
really terrible happenings in terms of games media, you know,

(01:29:59):
all sept and right now with Giant Bomb all stuff,
and it was feeling like game magazines were truly dead,
you know at this point. But now in twenty twenty five,
we're gonna get a new Game Informer and new EGM.
So that's cool.

Speaker 2 (01:30:14):
It's extremely cool, and it was extremely cool to have
you on, Molly. We thank you so much for your time.
Everybody who is out there, make sure you follow the
EGM Compendium project, Make sure you follow Molly on all
of her socials, read her work, and hey, follow us
on socials, share us on socials, spread the word pass
us around like it's third grade. We're on the playground

(01:30:35):
and you're sharing it with all of your friends. Tell
everyone you love being a fun Factor Ultra Review crew
member telling Nisha join to hear great bonus episodes like
this one. If you do, you and we will have
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