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."

Comments

Misleading title

[penguin_asylum]

The title really had me looking forward to reading the article...

Re:Misleading title

[Shadow Wrought]

I felt the same way after a friendd took me to a Bare Naked Ladies concert. Three lies in one name.

Re:Misleading title

[clintp]

ObSimpsons References:

Movie, Naked Lunch -- Nelson: "I can think of two things wrong with that title"
Store, "Stoner's Pot Palace" -- Otto: "Man, that is flagrant false advertising!"

Re:I hate PA.

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

They sold out? How's that? By wanting to make money?

The horrible people wanted to make money doing their jobs? How TERRIBLE!

Don't think too much about it

[AvantLegion]

"Sold out" is one of those things people say when they don't have any intelligent criticism to offer.

Re:Don't think too much about it

[Meagermanx]

It's also what they say about a band when people like them.
Or what they say about a band when they make different kinds of music, even though you'd think making the same kind of music over and over would be 'selling out'.

Re:Don't think too much about it

[Anonymous Coward]

The grandparent likes VG Cats right now, but Scott Ramsoomair is making T-shirt and misc swag based on his comic, so pretty soon, he'll have sold out too (if he doesn't already fit the grandparent's definition of "sold out"), and then I expect the grandparent will start liking a sprite comic, but not 8bit or Bob and George, because they're popular and they've sold out too. No, it will be a sprite comic so obscure it'll be based on a small-release game from the 80s on the Famicom (Not the NES, lamers) and he'll think he's cool all over again because he was "there from the start".

Fight the power! Stop reading web comics when it becomes self-supporting, if not...*SCREAM OF HORROR!!!!* p-p-p-profitable! XO /sarcasm

PvP Wasn't the First Comic

[TarrVetus]

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.

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.

Re:PvP Wasn't the First Comic

[The Kow]

I think the context is web-based gaming comics, so you should probably just let this one go.

Re:PvP Wasn't the First Comic

[Soybean47]

It's a misleading excerpt. If you RTFA, they're not claiming that PVP was literally the first gaming comic... note the quotes around "real". They even mention one that came earlier. The claim in the article is that PVP was the first one that mattered, or something along those lines. The "real" beginning of the current crop of gaming webcomics. Or...you know... something like that. I don't really know what they're getting at there, but the statement is clearly not meant to be taken literally.

Arg, type-o in article.

[gmezero]

I've already written to the editors, to fix the errors at the beginning of the article:

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_Chronicl es#Basic_Chronology

Sigh...

The article is about online gaming comics.

[gmezero]

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 serving it's purpose.

[gmezero]

It's a promotional piece designed to drive traffic to their new comics portal.

8-Bit Theater

[Pluvius]

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

Re:8-bit theater

[fwitness]

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.