Player One Podcast

[Note: Once again, this is a repost of something I did for my older blog.]

During my freshman year of college I tried to keep one hand in the gaming world. I did a little bit of freelance for Intelligent Gamer — including a couple previews, reviews, and a six-page feature on one of EA’s first PS1 sports games, NBA Live ‘96. If you know me and how absolutely out of touch with basketball I am you’re probably wondering how the hell I managed that. Well, I have no idea. I tied it to the angle that this was really the first time the series had been done in 3D and how it changed the genre and how EA did sports. It worked.

May rolled around and I put together some cash to get down to LA for E3 with a couple friends. I figured that this was the perfect chance to hook back up with some Sendai work for the summer. So day one of the show rolls around, and the news hits that Ziff-Davis is buying Sendai. When I heard about it, I wasn’t sure what to think. I knew people at Sendai. Hell, I knew the boss. But this ZD thing was a whole different enchilada. The people at the top probably owned suits–and wore them to work…every day. It was an unfamiliar setting, and I heard through the grapevine that they weren’t going to be hiring anyone or doing another book project like the PS1 guide anytime soon. Aside from maybe an occasional freelance thing, I figured my days of writing about games were over.

So I did what any other college student does during the summer; I got a job as a temp. I started working in a local law firm, typing up documents and transcribing case notes, etc. It was pretty interesting stuff, actually. A week later Joe Funk, former editor in chief of Cinescape and (at the time) editorial director of the Ziff-Davis gaming pubs, dialed me up and told me that they were going to do another book for the launch of the Nintendo 64 and wanted to know if I’d be interested in working on it. I said “yes, of course,” and put in my notice at the law office (after only about two weeks) and spent July and part of August working on Electronic Gaming Monthly’s Player’s Guide to Nintendo 64 Video Games with John Ricciardi.

The N64 book was a very different experience than the PlayStation guide. It looked professional (not slapped together), its strategies were useful, it read well, and it gave me the opportunity to spend time back in Sendai’s Lombard, IL, offices, helping take screenshots for it and do various other little things. I ran into Ed Semrad a few times, too. It was always weird. The guy never looked at me, never acknowledged I was there, and never said hello (though I did, the first time I ran into him, anyway). By this time, EGM had hired a bunch of new editors, and I’d see them around along with the other people I’d worked with before. And they all still called me “Secret Turtle.”

With the book done, I figured that I would go back to school in the fall and continue my journalism degree at Drake University. But some difficult financial issues put a stop to that. I went in and talked to Joe Funk and told him I’d be sticking around the area and that if there was a position open on EGM or any other mag I’d like to come back. A few days later Joe called me and told me that they were looking for someone to help out part-time with EGM’s massive holiday issues. Sounded good to me so I agreed to do it. But first…I’d have to bury the hatchet with Ed. That was really not even an issue for me since EGM’s staff was fairly different now and I was gonna be in Illinois anyway and didn’t have to worry about school getting in the way of things. Hell, I could stay at the office 24/7 — I was gettin’ paid HOURLY! So I met with Ed, shook his hand, buried the hatchet, and boom — I was back on EGM.

It was really strange since Ed had told everyone that I was bad news and that I’d tried to bring down the magazine when I was the there the first time (me? One 17 year-old, sully an entire magazine’s reputation? How would I even be capable of that?). Yet here I was — back again! Needless to say things started out on a pretty odd note.

My first official issue back is #88, November 1996. I worked on a lot of stuff in that issue but nothing stands out as much as one particular preview…a line from it landed on the cover of one of the worst games ever made. More about that next time!

[And of course if you've been listening to the podcast for a while you know exactly what I'm talking about. Har. :'(]

Chris Johnston Electronic Gaming Monthly Electronic Gaming Monthly

[NOTE: This, too, is a repost of a blog entry I did a couple years back. Originally posted July 1, 2004. Enjoyyyyy. -CJ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More to come…

Chris Johnston Electronic Gaming Monthly Electronic Gaming Monthly

[Note: This is a continuation of the story that starts in this post. You may want to read that before going on.]

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

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

Read more…

Chris Johnston Electronic Gaming Monthly EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly

[Note: This too is a repost of an entry I did for my personal blog some years ago. One of the things I enjoyed working on the most during the time I was at EGM was the April Fools jokes. I grew up reading EGM and fondly remember things like the Simon Belmont in TMNT2: The Arcade Game for NES or Sheng Long in Street Fighter II. I'm happy to say that I was behind such memorable April Foolin's as the warehouse of Sega Neptunes, Sonic & Tails in Super Smash Bros. Melee and the Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball nude trick. But anyway, this blog entry is not about those -- it's about the one April Fool's joke that wasn't. Enjoy.]

Originally posted June 28, 2004 — I must confess that I don’t know all the details of the story I’m about to tell you about here. I wasn’t working at EGM at the time this happened. But I did catch wind of the aftermath. So I’ll tell you what I know here, and if someone else knows the rest, they can e-mail me and I’ll gladly add it (anonymously, if they’d like). Anyway, on with it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO BE CONTINUED….

—–

There’s more talk of EGM April Fools jokes at this Wikipedia page (btw anyone remember what the 1996 joke was? Did they forget that year too? It’s not listed here).

And when I was a guest on EGM Live (the 3/26/07 episode) we talked about April Fools jokes a bit.

Chris Johnston Electronic Gaming Monthly april fools, EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly

[NOTE: This is a repost of a blog entry from my old personal blog.]

Originally posted June 26, 2004 — Now’s a good time to take a moment and talk about one of EGM’s mainstay characters — Sushi-X. While other people can probably tell this story better than I can from the beginning, I’ll take a stab at explaining some of what I know about this mysteriously pseudonymed character.

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

Read more…

Chris Johnston Electronic Gaming Monthly EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Sushi-x

As a reader, I’m a James Mielke fan. When the guy is covering a game or a developer that he’s interested in, he generally does a fantastic job at it. He’s truly passionate about certain games, and it comes through wonderfully in his writing. I’ll even admit that he’s far better at covering the games he likes than I probably ever was, or ever will be. I also thought that the final issues of EGM – the ones under his direction – were fabulous. He managed to inject that kind of passion and enthusiasm throughout the entire magazine, even though he liked to pat himself on the back a bit too much in his editorials.

Even on a personal level, I like the guy. Whenever I would take trips out to our San Francisco office he was always friendly and helpful, fun to be around, and just an all-around good guy.

That’s probably why, when he chose to fellate himself for about 11,000 words on his weblog, it didn’t really bother me for the most part. I rolled my eyes at a lot of it, because despite some real accomplishments during his career, it’s hard not to see the whole thing as one massive ego stroke where his apparent greatness is more than a little exaggerated.

And that leads me to my third relationship with James Mielke – as a co-worker. As a co-worker, I had a real problem with the Milkman. And normally, I’d keep that kind of feeling to myself. But two paragraphs in his recent blog post misrepresented the then-crew of EGM so badly – a group of people I love and respect – that I feel like I need to defend them (and myself) publicly.

Read more…

Greg Sewart Electronic Gaming Monthly EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly, james mielke

No game talk this week. Instead, we dedicate the whole episode to talking about EGM’s closure and the 1UP layoffs in the wake of Hearst/UGO’s purchase of 1UP.com. In addition to regular hosts Chris “CJ” Johnston (ex-EGM News Editor) and Phil Theobald (ex-EGM editor and former GameNow Reviews Editor), we welcome a couple more ex-Ziff guests to the program: Kevin Gifford (ex-1UP editor and gaming magazine expert/Magweasel), Greg Sewart (ex-EGM Previews and Reviews Editor), Greg Ford (EGM Managing Editor), and Andrew “Skip” Pfister (ex-EGMer, GMRer and 1UP.com Reviews Editor/Podcast Producer).

Thanks for listening! You can leave us a voicemail comment by calling 713-893-8069 or you can send a comment via MP3 to our email address, playeronepodcast@gmail.com. Don’t forget to join our forums if you haven’t already!

Running time: 1:54:27

This week’s links:
Andrew “Skip” Pfister on Twitter
Andrew “Skip” Pfister’s page on 1UP.com
Greg Ford’s page on 1UP.com
RebelFM
Eat-Sleep-Game.com (RebelFM folks)
Talking Orange (ex-1UP Show folks)
Magweasel
GSW: Opinion: Print Game Media – [Still] Not Dead, [Maybe] Getting Better
GSW: Game Mag Weaseling
Greg Sewart’s Wordpress blog
Chris “CJ” Johnston’s Twitter
Phil Theobald’s page on 1UP.com
Joystiq: Future Publishing experiences increase in gaming mag sales
PaidContent.org – Ziff Davis Gets Out Of The Game
NeoGAF: Listing of 1UP/EGM folks’ blogs and Twitters

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Chris Johnston Episodes 1UP, 1UP.com, EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly, ford, Gifford, Pfister, sewart, Skip, UGO, ZD, Ziff-Davis