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Will Strip For Games
1up has a piece today on the backbone of the gaming zeitgeist: online comics. From PA to 8-Bit Theatre, they have thoughts on all of them. From the article: "The 'real' origin of game-based comics came in May 1998, when Scott Kurtz started Player vs. Player, a strip based around the office hijinks at a video game magazine. Hosted at MPOG.com, like Polymer City Chronicles, early PvP reflects its origins as a lighthearted way to lampoon games in the context of a larger gaming-focused publication. Some of the earliest gaming webcomics were started in a similar fashion; Penny Arcade, for example, was originally conceived and submitted as a strip for Loonygames."
The title really had me looking forward to reading the article...
It's a shame nobody cares about comics these days, comics rock!
That was in the late 80s... before 1998!
They sold out? How's that? By wanting to make money?
The horrible people wanted to make money doing their jobs? How TERRIBLE!
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
So I'd definetely wager that PvP was not the first... good ol' Dank and Scud were veterans by the time the other comics started swinging.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Wrong. Dead wrong. My proof? Howard and Nester (http://hn.iodized.net/main.htm), a comic which successfully ran in Nintendo Power for several years in the late 1980's and early 1990's.
And while Howard and Nester predates PvP by 10 years, I'm almost positive it wasn't the first of its kind, either.
Ob South Park quote:
"If you work in the entertainment business and you make money, you're a sellout!"
I've already written to the editors, to fix the errors at the beginning of the article:
l es#Basic_Chronology
In the third paragraph, it is stated that PCC started off in 1995 on MPOG.COM, that is wrong. It started out on the web on GameZero.com in 1995. It only ran on MPOG for a short stint from mid-2000 to mid-2001.
And only the archives for the current storyline date back to 2000. For previous strips dating back to the start you need to visit the pre-2000, older archives on the Game Zero site at:
http://www.gamezero.com/team-0/comics/
Please see wiki for clarification:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_City_Chronic
Sigh...
"Dude, you're working for a corporation, you're a total sell out!"
"Man, you're spending all your time and money working on your business instead of hanging out with us, you're a sellout."
"Dude, you're bumming off of welfare and mooching off of us. You're such a sellout."
"Dude, ever since you became rich and famous, you forgot who you are. You've really sold out."
"Man, commiting suicide because every other option would label you a sell out? That's the easy way out, you're a sell out."
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
If you want to just cover "gaming comics" in general. Nintendo had one, Famitsu had a couple (I love the strip were it turns out that Wario is actually Luigi in disguise, getting revenge for all those years of Mario getting all the credit), GameFan had one... and there were about a billion others. Heck Atari published Atari Force under DC Comics in 1982 when Nintendo was nothing but a Game'n'Watch fad in the U.S.
It's a promotional piece designed to drive traffic to their new comics portal.
I like an interview I saw with "The Clash" who, when asked about selling out said (paraphrase) "Selling out is great, it means that the fans like our shows".
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Penny Arcade sucks ass. Doubly so now becasue they sold out.
That's becuase it's not for you.
Actually, the real first intentions for Penny Arcade was to submit two sample strips to Next Generation (or perhaps it was different mag?), then when they didn't win the contest, they decided to keep making strips and that's when Loonygames started hosting them. I've been reading PA since their 4th strip was ever released ;)
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
I remember posting on the 8BT forum once that the only reason the comic was worth reading is that it's a goofball retelling of the original Final Fantasy story with twisted renditions of the main characters; if the comic was about something else, even if it only changed over to a more generic fantasy story, it would no longer be funny because then it would rely entirely on its repetitive, often ripped-off jokes to come across to the reader. The other people on the forum, being fanboys, of course ripped into me for stating that opinion. But imagine my surprise when the creator himself admits as much in this article!
So it's perhaps inevitable that the writing would be a secondary concern, and the humor is often far more repetitive than the art. To compensate for this, Clevinger begun focusing more on story than jokes some time ago, but as a rule the quality of the writing hasn't become any sharper. A large component of the strip's popularity is love for the characters Clevinger uses, something he acknowledges when he says "I've lost count of how many e-mails I've gotten from fans thanking me for reminding them how much they loved the original Final Fantasy."
Some people just can't handle the truth, I guess.
Rob
Read the bottom of the page. It's a work of parody, fully lawful in the U.S. That's why you can have Saturday Night Live product/commercial spoofs. It's a crack in the law that allows us to continue our normal lives without fear of being sued if we say "Pepsi" in a sentence.
-- I have fans? Wow.
The Revolution only truly came with Bob and George, the first sprite comic!
Hey, look, it's Mega Man!
ZOINK!
as a diehard gamer, i don't read any of that shite.. face it PA sucks.. out of a month's worth of comics they have maybe one or two borderline funny. PA is like the HBO of comics, cheaply put together trying to exploit the novelty of cursing every other word.. except guess what, it's not a novelty, fucktards.
SNL doesn't make 90% of its entire episode by stealing artwork from other shows. It also doesn't sell merchandise with drawings of characters from those other shows.