A few more quick stories from the days of GameFan...
Bergstein (the guy in charge of Metropolis) had this small army of guys who did his bidding - problem solvers, basically, no matter how big or small the problem. They were all of the same certain ethnicity, Middle Eastern or something like that. The lead guy - Musha, Misha, Moesha, some name like that - had supposedly made sure more than a handful of guys were never seen or heard from again back in his home country.
Jody Setzer was a nice guy, but I had a stupid situation with him one time. He asked me if I wanted to help on the Puzzle Fighter guide (the pocket one that was given away at Kay-Bee), and I said sure, because I was a big fan of the game. He then took that to mean that I wanted to DO the strategy guide, and expected me to get started on it. I had never done a strategy guide in my life, and at that point, I had little grabbing experience and zero layout experience. I tried to tell him that I couldn't just "do" a strategy guide without at least some suggestion on how one makes one, and he got pissed about that. The project was given to a few of the other guys, but I still helped out on it.
Most of the foreign writers started working at GameFan totally illegally. They would come over on a visitor's Visa, work at the office, and once their three month vacation Visa was up, they would fly back to their country and stay there a bit until they could come back on another visitor's Visa.
THQ came by when they were trying to pimp their PSX fighter Vs. The semi-Asian girl with pink and black hair in the game was based on a real girl that one of the lead developers had a hard-on for. (It might have been his girlfriend, but I don't think so.) So THQ brought her along one day, and we sat down with her to play the game. Most of the guys were just goofing around, not really playing seriously, and letting her win. I wasn't such a gentleman, and kicked her ass in the game. Suddly, the THQ PR chick pulls out this Sony discman with a huge "Vs." sticker on it, and proclaims me the winner of the Vs. "tournament." We, of course, had no idea we were in some sort of tournament. The THQ PR woman was a TOTAL hottie, so even though their games sucked ass back then, I loved it when they stopped by.
I was in charge of reviewing Ten Pin Alley, a bowling game (and actually, a pretty good one) for the PSX. One of the guys who worked at the company releasing it, ASC Games, tried to convince me to convince Dave to put Ten Pin Alley on the cover of GameFan. He even offered to name one of the characters in the game after me if I could talk him into it.
I'll post more later.
WARNING: This post may contain violent and disturbing images.
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