Player One Podcast

Check it out! An actual Player One blog post! An actual sorta-reason to come to our main page! Maybe now we won’t feel all guilty for asking people to go here during our show outro.

I was looking through some old backup CDs from my Ziff Davis days earlier this evening, and I found all sorts of crazy pictures/poorly-Photoshopped images that we used to amuse ourselves back on Expert Gamer and GameNOW. Many of them are extremely in-jokey, “you had to be there” kinda deals, but I figured that “outsiders” would appreciate this one.

There is a bit of a story behind it, though. Back in late 2001, there was a contest to design the movie poster for the then-upcoming Resident Evil film. Mike Vallas, one of the head art guys at Ziff, was a huge RE fan, and he jumped at the chance to design the poster. You might remember Vallas as the guy who told the show-stopping anecdote at the end of our Andy Baran tribute episode (#145).

Contestants were given access to all sorts of artwork, including logos and various poses of the movie’s stars. Most of the pictures were the standard stuff that you might expect…Milla Jovovich brandishing large guns, random zombies…that sorta thing. Among all the images, however, was one picture that really stood out. Instead of a grim-faced shot of Milla or Michelle Rodriguez in some sort of “action movie” pose, it was a close-up of Milla with a delightful grin on her face. It looked remarkably out of place–definitely not an image that would sell a zombie movie.

We all had a good laugh at the picture, and joked about how we should make a poster using that image to enter into the contest. Not one to let a good joke die, Vallas actually went ahead and did so after whipping up a trio of fantastic (and serious) posters for his own entry. This is what he came up with:

We were all extremely pleased with the results. At the risk of unintentionally taking any credit for this, I didn’t create any of it. The design and the tag line were all Vallas. Because Vallas wanted to enter his “real” entries (or maybe just one of them…I can’t remember if there was a limit to the number of entries one could submit), the idea was for me to enter the joke poster. Unfortunately, my laziness (and probably some hectic magazine deadlines) caused me to miss the entry date.

It’s a shame, really. For all I know, the movie producers would have loved the idea. They might have completely reworked the film to fit the poster’s aesthetic. Maybe that movie would have actually ended up being good (ho-ho!).

Bonus Trivia!: Unfortunately, Vallas didn’t win the contest. Strangely enough, however, the winner was another videogame magazine editor: Nick “Nick Rox” Des Barres, of GameFan and Play fame. I don’t recall the exact details of the contest, but Nick’s poster didn’t end up as the one used in theaters/on the DVD case (at least, not that I’ve ever seen). If memory serves, this is Nick’s winning poster.

Phil Theobald Video Games, Ziff-Davis Expert Gamer, GameNOW, Milla Jovovich, movie, poster, Resident Evil, Ziff-Davis, zombies

In 1984 a little film called The Last Starfighter hit cinemas. It’s the story of Alex Rogan, an average teen whose hopes and dreams of escaping his trailer park existence are consistently dashed. It seems his one triumph is that he’s really damn good at Starfighter, a fictional 3D space shooter that’s somehow the only arcade machine in the tri-county area (and this is set in the mid-‘80s? Yeah right!).

After having an especially excellent game one fateful night, the machine alerts Centauri (played by The Music Man’s Robert Preston), an alien shyster who placed the games on Earth to find the best Gunstar pilot in hopes that he or she would assist the galaxy in defeating the game’s main foe Xur and his Kodan Armada for realz.

In case you’ve never seen it or haven’t seen it in awhile, here’s a refresher:

It’s without a doubt one of my favorite movies ever. I own two copies of it; one DVD and again on HD-DVD. Once Universal gets their heads out of their asses and releases it on Blu-ray I’ll have that too. I love the film. It shaped my childhood. Yes, really.

Twenty-five years—holy crap has it been that long?—later, a show called Aaron Stone has come along to take the concept and shape it into something more palatable to today’s discerning teens. Instead of a space shooter (popular in the ‘80s but which holds no favor with those not raised on Galaga), the Aaron Stone game is an action-GTA-WoW-Crackdown-space-marine-type knock-off. The trailer park setting has been moved to suburbia and the teenager is a little less hopeless. Like Alex Rogan he’s a regular kid…OK maybe loser kid…whose hours spent honing his gaming skills get him recruited to be the hero for real. Not by a deceptive yet well-meaning alien con man but a “billionaire recluse” and his assistant (played by the same actor who was “Not Moby” on How I Met Your Mother, incidently). The threat isn’t quite as far away anymore either. While Xur and the Kodan Armada were light years from Earth, the enemy in Aaron Stone is an evil corporation right here at home, intent on enslaving the human race.

Here’s the teaser for the show, where the similarities will become apparent to any fan of Starfighter:

Eerily similar, right? I guess we’ll get to see how good/bad it actually is when Aaron Stone debuts next month on Disney XD, a new channel replacing Toon Disney on February 13. But I will say one thing. That getup that the kid wears as the real-life “Aaron Stone” character is ri-goddamn-diculous. Couldn’t look any more like a K-Mart Halloween costume. Captain Power had better duds. Seriously.

Surprisingly enough while doing a little web surfing around The Last Starfighter it looks like director Nick Castle is going to do some kind of continuation of the film called Starfighter. At least according to IMDB. Pretty cool.

Chris Johnston Miscellany, Video Games '80s, childhood, memories, movie