The GameFan history thread

[Glass Joe]

Could it be he surrounded himself with very talented people to make himself look better while his replacements came on during a time of cutting back and uncertainty?

It could be that he surrounded himself with talented people. I just thought that unexplainable "thing" that makes good things great was missing during the ECM era. I still loved it then, it just wasn't the same.

[Compass]

It could be that he surrounded himself with talented people. I just thought that unexplainable "thing" that makes good things great was missing during the ECM era. I still loved it then, it just wasn't the same.

I was just as into it during the ECM era. Yeah, GF wasn't quite the same but it was still great in its own way. ECM's various rants are probably the most entertaining gaming journalism I've ever read (with some of the PC Accelerator stuff close behind). It was discussed on here before how it didn't matter if you vehemently disagreed with him or not, it was still so fun to read these diatribes from somebody who was so passionate about games. I must've read his Saturn Grandia review a dozen times.

Thanks for the answers, Shidoshi. Sucks about Evil Lights. I had no idea. I'd have thought they would have had some sort of send-off in the mag for a fallen comrade. Strange.

[Glass Joe]

Sucks about Evil Lights. I had no idea. I'd have thought they would have had some sort of send-off in the mag for a fallen comrade. Strange.

Yeah, that is really odd.

[isamu]

Sucks about Evil Lights. I had no idea. I'd have thought they would have had some sort of send-off in the mag for a fallen comrade. Strange.

If "Evil Lights" is the same reviewer as "Stalker", then the person he is referring to is Dan Grannet....who died in a car accident sometime in late 1998. A very close friend of mine as well.

[mollipen]

Okay, it's quite possible I got the two people mixed up. I knew that one of the staff members ended up dying, but I guess I got the wrong one.

[kevincal]

Ok...so who is gonna right a book about all of this? lol....

[Super-Eggroll]

Oh yeah, and remember E. Storm's obsession with Hermie Hopperhead? I actually imported that game which I almost never do because of his constant praise. It was pretty fun but of course nowhere near the miracle he made it out to be. I was at Yuke's office once and the Hermie box was there on a display with all the other wrestling stuff. I don't like wrestling and told them I was a big fan of Hermie and they should do a sequel. Confusion and disapproval ensued. haha. They were mostly just surprised an American knew about Hermie. I wonder if they were aware how much Dave pimped him.

I still have my copy of Hermie that I got for the very same reason. I don't currently have a modded Playstation to play it on, so it's just taking up shelf space right now and collecting dust. Fun game, but yeah - nothing to get really excited over.

Ok...so who is gonna right a book about all of this? lol....

Seriously, somebody needs to document everything GF related and make some money. I know several people that would buy reprints of the mags in collected volumes if they were available, but I'm sure getting the publishing rights would be quite the challenge.

[djpubba]

Okay, time for the story of the first GameFan cover.

It was one day from our first deadline and we had no cover art. That morning, George Weising came in and said that he had met this dude at a game store in Newhall, CA (High Tech Game Center), who did artwork for Heavy Metal, and was looking for work. We all thought, cool! THE Heavy Metal, like, you know -- the movie and magazine -- this stranger's artwork will blaze with fiery balls of joyful bliss! So we gave the dude a call and told him to come in with some work samples. This skinny blonde guy named Terry Wolfinger showed up in short order and showed us his art and it was indeed reasonably blazing. So Halverson showed him a cover of Famitsu and asked if he could airbrush something of that quality. He said he could, so we told him that if he could do us a cover we could use for our first issue and have it to us in the morning, he was hired. We showed him Monitaur and told him to draw him, Sonic, Mario and Bonk busting out of the cover. He said he'd do his best and went home. Meanwhile, we set to work burning the midnight oil to finish the rest of this issue. Around 5 AM, Terry called and said he ran out of ink for the background but was on his way over with the art. Around a quarter to six in the AM, he arrived and presented the artwork. It was fab, except the background was a blotchy red color. So we scanned it and turned the background black. I created the logo in a 3D program on the Mac called Infini-D. On my IIx it took, like 3 hours to render. When it was done, I noticed that I screwed up and had the wrong texture on the "DieHard" part of the logo, but it didn't look too bad, so we called it done and we had our cover and a new staff illustrator!



One of the next things we had Terry draw was Sonic humping Tails. Sadly, that joyous drawing never saw the presses.

It turned out that Terry didn't actually have anything to do with anything Heavy Metal(tm). What he had done was some animation work on a heavy metal themed animation straight to video series called "Hard and Heavy". George had somehow, err, got them mixed up.

Something Terry never told anyone but me was that, on his way home from that meeting, he stopped at an art supply store and bought a book on how to airbrush because, while he did have an airbrush, he had never airbrushed anything more than some smoke and clouds before! So not only did he crank out a fabluvulous piece of art in less than 24, he taught himself how to airbrush in the process. (I checked with him to make sure it was okay to spill those beans here. He said it'd be okay if only I plugged his site, Cursed Amusement).

[Jeremy]

That's a pretty good cover anyway, and under those circumstances...wow. Thanks for that story.

[Super-Eggroll]

Cursed Amusement

The Mad Max sketch rules. Nice to see a Postmeister mixed in there as well.

Maybe one of you can answer this -

At the '96 or '97 E3 convention, there was a GF booth set up that had a 6 ft Monitaur statue with a small TV built into it's head and hooked up to a Sega Saturn (If I recall, I played a quick round of Darkstalkers on it before being asked to move so someone could snap a picture of it).

Does this statue still exist, and who currently has it?

If I get time this weekend, I'll go through all my old E3 junk and see if I took any pictures of it. Maybe I remember this thing being cooler than it really is, but at the time I was like, "OMG this is the coolest display ever".