It was more than three years ago that I presented part one of the history of my game fanzine. Read it here if you missed it. At the time I suggested a followup article would be forthcoming, and here it is!
To summarize (and to bridge the gap a bit): I printed a fanzine for about two years, and had no trouble selling every copy. But it was hard work, time consuming, and in 1996 I shifted my focus to a webpage. The website was quite popular, but it lacked a forum (which were somewhat rare in those days) and I was becoming swamped with emails from my readers (I used to run a letters page).
During the years I had worked on the ‘zine I had made a couple of contacts in the industry (at Atlus, FCI and Sega particularly) but none better than Victor Ireland, the president and owner of the company Working Designs. In late 1998, wanting to drive readers to his company website, he suggested buying all my content (my reviews, basically) and hiring me to continue reviewing games for his site.
At first I was resistant since I feared I’d lose editorial control, but he assured me I wouldn’t (a promise he never broke) and given the amount of work the website had become I eventually agreed. In early 1999 the Working Designs website was spruced up, and the ‘RPG Critic’ section added. That was me 🙂
Vic had the above commissioned in 2003, and it was intended for a website revamp (he had similar pictures made of all his staff). I had red hair in those days! You’ll note the review I’m writing starts with the line “This game sucks…” because by then – some four years after I had started – I had become somewhat infamous on the site for my occasionally scathing reviews…
But I jump ahead! Let’s go back a few years. When the RPG Critic launched all my old fanzine reviews immediately went live, as well as a dozen or so I had written but withheld from my website. There was some press in magazines about this, which was notable because US-based game magazines in those days mostly ignored the RPG genre. Online review sites were almost nonexistent in those days and Working Designs almost overnight became one of the web’s foremost sites hosting reviews of console RPGs.
My arrangement with Vic was simple: I would be reimbursed the cost of any game I reviewed for his site. This ended up essentially meaning I could get the sorts of games I liked for free, but very quickly I developed a near-obsession with reviewing anything that was an RPG and my game collection ballooned. Vic was occasionally slow with payment, but it always came eventually, and in addition I received a good amount of freebies from his company. In time I started testing games for them as well (not bug testing, more like system testing). The pinnacle of this was probably the extensive suggestions I gave him about endgame content in the Arc The Lad collection which led to my name in the credits 🙂
My reviews were out of 11, and as I mentioned Vic very rarely had any sort of comment on them. I’d write them, send them to him, and they’d be posted without edits. The only request he had was that I detail why I didn’t like games I gave bad reviews to, which was probably a reference to my sometimes too-short dismissals of bad games in the fanzine. I reviewed games from his company as well, and he never once suggested I change my scores (which was once as low as a 3). He was good to his word that the content of the reviews was 100% up to me.
That’s a shot of the site (obtained via the Wayback Machine) from 2003. By then it had become quite popular, and you can see Vic ran contests, posted fanart and had a very busy forum as well. The forum was particularly interesting, since everyone has an opinion, and often those opinions included critiques of my reviews. I recall Vic loved this, because it meant readers! During the five years I wrote for the site I very rarely posted to the forums except to answer direct questions, and I was amused to see that a sort of ‘supporter base’ had built for me, and whenever anyone would pop in to criticize one of my reviews (or me in general) they’d all chime in on my behalf!
Even my detractors though were impressed by the sheer content of my work, since by the time I ended writing for the site I had personally reviewed over 250 games (which meant I had played them all) and had become a sort of walking encyclopedia/expert on localized console RPGs. I recall most of the forum posts I ever made were to give information about particular rare or unknown games that people had questions about.
Here’s the first 11 I ever gave, to a game I still consider one of the greatest ever made:
And yes, I still own all those games…
One unusual issue that arose during my years writing reviews was people plagiarizing my work. I was usually informed about this via a forum post, and i can recall in particular the website rpgamer.com (which still exists today) ‘lifting’ the text from a few of my reviews and posting them under a different name. I contacted them and the reviews were taken down, but some time afterwards they went right back up! Even worse, a magazine (published by Viz communications) devoted to anime/manga/games stole one of my reviews as well and printed it essentially verbatim. I was actually a subscriber (!), and wrote them a letter to which I never received a reply…
Working Designs was very successful for many years, but ran into trouble during the transition into the PS3/X360 generation. I ended my association with them in late 2003. While I was still enjoying the work, I knew I had to devote more time to my graduate school work and couldn’t keep playing (essentially) every RPG released. Rather than pick-and-choose games to review, my intention was to pass the mantle onto a new ‘RPG Critic’. As it turns out, none eventuated, and with my departure the reviews simply stopped. The website stopped updating in early 2005 (no new reviews being posted for almost 18 months) and Working Designs themselves went out of business later that year.
By those days – some 6 years after I started writing for the site and 11 years after I printed my first fanzine – the internet had matured and game review sites were (too!) common. The niche that the WD website had once filled didn’t exist any more, and the RPG Critic was needed no longer. I remain proud of the work I did in those days – and the fact I played and beat so many, many games, but not for a second do I still wish I was doing it now 🙂
