Guests Katrin Auch & Dan Amrich, formerly of GamePro magazine, discuss their time at the publication as well as the archival collection now housed by the VGHF. Kat and Dan recount their experience of transitioning from film to digital layouts, unintentional blunders, working under tight budgets and deadlines, and the creative process of creating content.
You can also listen to the Video Game History Hour every other Wednesday on Patreon (one day early at the $5 tier and above) or on Spotify.
See more from Katrin Auch:
Website: katrinauch.com
See more from Dan Amrich:
Twitter/X: @danamrich
Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/danamrich.bsky.social
See more from both Kat & Dan:
Dan & Kat Talk podcast (on hiatus): danandkattalk.com
Etsy: bit.ly/katrinauch
The Kyberpunks: thekyberpunks.com
Video Game History Foundation:
Podcast Twitter/X: @gamehistoryhour
Email: podcast@gamehistory.org
Twitter/X: @GameHistoryOrg
Website: gamehistory.org
Support us on Patreon: /gamehistoryorg
Transcript
Transcription provided by Jeremy Seith
Frank Cifaldi 00:09
Hello and welcome to the Video Game History Hour, the official podcast of the Video Game History Foundation. I’m your host, Frank Cifaldi. Today’s show we’re really excited about. We brought in two very special guests who worked on GamePro magazine, which is a magazine I actually read as a child. They came on because we actually have a really interesting collection in our archives of material related to the production of GamePro magazine and we brought in two experts, basically to tell us what it is that we have and why it even exists. So we had this conversation back on August 2 of 2024. Let’s roll the tape.
Frank Cifaldi 00:47
So Phil and I are happy to have two very special guests with us today, unabashed Disney adults and former action figures, Dan Amrich and Katrin Auch. Hi guys.
Katrin Auch 00:57
Hi.
Dan Amrich 00:58
I did not expect that one. Hi.
Frank Cifaldi 01:02
But I think more importantly, or directly for this podcast, Dan and Kat, may I call you Kat?
Frank Cifaldi 01:11
You can.
Frank Cifaldi 01:11
You’re Kat to me. Dan and Kat worked at GamePro magazine for quite a while, and I believe even met there, right?
Katrin Auch 01:20
No.
Frank Cifaldi 01:20
No? Oh, okay, okay.
Katrin Auch 01:22
We were married when we were working at GamePro, like, four years.
Frank Cifaldi 01:26
Oh, wow! Okay, my head canon was that you had a really romantic meeting at GamePro and falling in love story, but wow.
Katrin Auch 01:34
It was more a meeting at Ithaca College and falling in love.
Frank Cifaldi 01:37
Got it.
Katrin Auch 01:39
And then Dan got a job in California after we had been working together at a magazine, the magazine company in New York for couple years, and we were working in the same cube, and that’s when we actually got married. It was when we were in New York and we were in the same cube, and apparently we kept our relationship so underground that somebody who worked with us thought we were brother and sister, because we came together and left together, but we weren’t like, romantic in the office, and then we left for a two week vacation and came back married, and they were like, Oh, oh, we thought you were–
Frank Cifaldi 02:18
You married your brother?!
Katrin Auch 02:19
That’s very weird.
Dan Amrich 02:21
Somebody told me they thought there was a death in the family, and that’s why we were both out for so long.
Frank Cifaldi 02:25
That’s very funny.
Dan Amrich 02:26
So that was– we were very, very concerned about the sort of voting block that a married couple working together represents. So we tried to keep PDA out. But, you know, they said, Well, you guys go to lunch together every day, and you come and you go, you know? So they knew there was a relationship, but they didn’t know it was romantic.
Katrin Auch 02:43
Dan had started working there first so, and then we moved out to California, and then I started working at PC Games, which was the sister publication for GamePro. And then Dan came on to GamePro, and then eventually we were both on GamePro, but it took a little while to get there, but we got there.
Dan Amrich 02:59
Yeah, that was a– you started a PC Games in 1996 if I recall. And my first issue was September ’97 which means I started writing in June of that year that I joined the staff, because that’s how long the lead time was, was almost three months. But yeah let’s set the calendar of the Wayback Machine for ’97 to the beginning of GamePro for us.
Frank Cifaldi 02:59
Got it.
Frank Cifaldi 03:24
Thank you for clarifying that, because I was going to ask that. So really, there’s two things we’re going to talk about today. I think it’s really interesting and important to kind of capture what working on a video game magazine was like in, I mean, maybe not peak peak, but basically the peak of game magazines. But then also, Phil has been dealing with a collection of GamePro assets that literally have Kat’s handwriting on them, and so I think it might be fun to sort of talk about, like, what these things are and why they exist, and why Kat was so freakish about organizing them.
Katrin Auch 04:12
You have to understand, I set up that system because prior to me start taking over the head of that department, we didn’t archive things nearly as well as we did. And we also, like, shortly before that point, we were actually still working in film, which would mean we would send our files out to the publisher, and we would get back four pieces of film for every page. And having to, you know, have that, you know, stack of things to go through. It was really a lot to deal with. And then we started to move over to going all digital. And when we started to go all digital, it’s like, No, we should– We can package this stuff together and save it. And so we don’t have to make things from scratch each time. So that was something that I was very, very adamant about. And then I also had a team of interns that I used to put that system together and maintain it.
Frank Cifaldi 05:15
Well, let’s start there, Kat, because this is something that I’ve tried to figure out. So you came in in ’96 I know at least partially there’s a digital layout happening, right? So when you started, was there sort of a hybrid digital and what like paste up situation?
Katrin Auch 05:35
No, we weren’t doing paste up anymore. It was all digital when I came in, and because I started on PC Games, PC Games and GamePro were sort of parallel. They were sister publications, both in, like, on the same floor of the building, but they weren’t– different teams. So, yeah, we would do everything in– and I always thought it was funny that the PC Games magazine was entirely put together on Mac. And that’s the thing. It’s like all of the publications were almost always put together on Mac. We didn’t use PCs for that later, you know, like the editors had PCs that they would play on, but they would even write on Mac because they had to edit things later on the Mac, but yeah, we used Quark for, I’m gonna say half my run. I’m trying to remember when we switched over. I think it was like 2002.
Phil Salvador 06:36
For listeners, This is a QuarkXPress, which was an early desktop publishing program that predates– what does everyone use now? InDesign, that’s kind of the standard one, InDesign now, but this was one of the earlier competitors that eventually got eclipsed by Adobe. But yeah, from what we’ve seen–
Frank Cifaldi 06:50
it’s still around!
Phil Salvador 06:52
It is? Really? Well, okay, eclipsed doesn’t necessarily mean put out of business, just nobody talks about QuarkXPress anymore.
Katrin Auch 06:52
Still around
Katrin Auch 06:58
Well, QuarkXPress was the thing, like, it was the– like, it was, like, PageMaker, I think was a thing, but InDesign, didn’t they? Adobe wanted to take over, and they tried several things, and we kept looking at them and going, No, we’re going to stay with Quark. And Quark got to one thing that was sort of stable, and then they didn’t. They had a lot of problems. Quark had a lot of problems. It was not like a very smooth system, including one of the big ones for us was when we’re doing layouts, a lot of times we would have character art that we would want to put into the text and have text run around it. Like that’s a very typical thing you’d see. Quark couldn’t do that without a third party extension being stuck onto it. So we had to have a secondary, you know, we had like five different sub programs that were, like, built into Quark, you know, like put over our Quark so we could make it and we had that Quark dialed in so hard by the time we went over, and when we did decide to switch over, it was going to be painful. We knew it was going to be painful because we were so into it. They actually brought in a InDesign trainer, and they put us all in the conference room together, the whole production team and the whole design team into the conference room, and we spent two days learning specifically what we needed to know for this, because they’re like, oh, let’s talk about graphs. It’s like, we don’t do graphs. We don’t care about graphs. We need to know this lane way, and we need to know it fast, and we need to know it quick and well.
Phil Salvador 08:35
How do we put the little guy who’s, like, screaming when he gets excited about a game? We need the pathway for getting that onto a page.
Katrin Auch 08:40
Exactly. We don’t need charts. We don’t need to know, like, there was a lot of stuff. There’s a lot of stuff InDesign can do, like, I know InDesign really, really well. At this point, there’s a lot of stuff InDesign can do that I have no clue about, because it’s this. I know my stuff, and I know it very well. But style sheets, oh, yeah, we know style sheets, master pages, like, all of the stuff you need to do templated work over and over and over again. We have in the bag, but yeah, we would lay everything out in Quark originally. And it would get well, do you want to just talk like the pathway? Like, how something we got into the magazine? Because–
Frank Cifaldi 09:19
I’m down. I don’t care if we lose every listener. I want to hear this.
Katrin Auch 09:26
Dan, why don’t you take the beginning and I’ll take the ending.
Frank Cifaldi 09:29
Well, I want to pause really quick. Were you working with film when you came in?
Katrin Auch 09:34
Like, we were working with film at the end stage, like we would proof on film the very last– we would get film proofs back, we would check them, and then we would send–
Frank Cifaldi 09:43
So publisher assets were totally digital by the time you came in or were you still getting sent film?
Katrin Auch 09:48
You mean from–
Dan Amrich 09:49
Were you still getting like, 35 millimeter slides for screenshots and stuff like that?
Katrin Auch 09:52
Yes, we were.
Frank Cifaldi 09:53
So were you scanning those?
Frank Cifaldi 09:56
Yes, we were.
Frank Cifaldi 09:57
Got it. Okay. All right. All right, I’m good. Let’s hear it. Let’s have this path. Path me
Dan Amrich 10:02
Well, at GamePro, and this was a point of contention, honestly, but it was a waterfall, right? So the editorial staff, the writing staff, started with, What’s this issue going to be? What’s our cover story? What are our features, etc, What are the reviews and we had editors for each section. We had a features e11ditor, we had a reviews editor, we had a previews editor. They were all in charge of their specific wells, right? But the text, it was the editor’s job to say, these are the things that we’re going to do this issue, and then ask the art team go and get us assets. Or if they could get assets themselves, they would.
Katrin Auch 10:39
I’m gonna say that they were supposed to get the assets. They were supposed to ask for the assets.
Dan Amrich 10:44
But, editors being lazy creatures, a lot of times, Kat would wind up having relationships with every art person everywhere. So GamePro worked on a beat system, so like only one person, Mike Weigand talked to Capcom, that way, if somebody called and said, Hello, I am from GamePro. You need to send me free games. They’d be like, you’re not Mike Weigand, so we all had different beats, and it was part of your responsibility as the editor to to get all the assets from your main contact at that company. But, you know, inevitably, that did not happen, and Kat wound up having really good relationships with a lot of other people from, you know, in the PR departments. So, we would write the text and we would offer the assets. We would get our own screenshots. Generally, we did not use canned screenshots for reviews. We would for previews, because that’s all that was available. We would get our–
Frank Cifaldi 11:35
And you were digital capture at this point.
Dan Amrich 11:36
We were doing digital capturing, yeah. I mean, when I joined in’ 97 they still had some equipment from the days of when they would have to use a camera and point it at a CRT. They had black shrouds around televisions, things like that. But they had mostly moved out of that when I got there in ’97. We had early digital capture cards, and we were using Adobe Premiere, and we would take screenshots or gameplay. We would generally pull stills out of gameplay and then deinterlace them, which was sometimes tricky, but that’s how we were able to get very dynamic images to go with a review. And we could write a pro tip specifically for what we wanted to show, or show exactly what we wanted to write as a pro tip, so that there was a sense that the screen shouldn’t just illustrate the game. It should actually help the player do something, be a little bit better at the game, On level three, you know. So for all the jokes that pro tips get, they were really supposed to be to help the reader a little surprise and delight. So we would have a story conference. We would get the article written–
Katrin Auch 11:43
For features, for features.
Dan Amrich 12:06
For features, yeah, for reviews, we would just put it on the server and say it’s ready to go, right? Oh no! We had physical dockets!
Katrin Auch 12:38
Oh yeah!
Dan Amrich 12:43
We had plastic pouches. And we had a template, photo copied form where you would have to fill it out and say, Who is the editor, who’s the writer on this thing, who is the designer on this thing. And there was a checklist, and it would route around. And so you would always have a stack of these plastic things that had printouts, and they would get bigger and bigger, especially if there were multiple revisions to the design. There would be like a Microsoft Word, just a straight document printed out of the text.
Katrin Auch 13:16
And you were supposed to put your CD of assets in there, if you had it.
Dan Amrich 13:19
Right. And eventually that became, I’m going to put it on the server, under the previews folder, under the name of the game, or whatever, but yeah, in the early days, it was a physical asset. Here it is. Deal with it.
Phil Salvador 13:31
Printing out a physical copy of a Word document sounds like a thing that somebody insisted upon, that just kept being done.
Katrin Auch 13:38
Well, editors would hand edit on paper.
Dan Amrich 13:40
Yeah, we did paper edits for at least my first three years there.
Frank Cifaldi 13:43
Oh Iwant to say, I mean, when I was working a little bit with Game Developer magazine, like 2005 we were still printing out, because it just something mentally about copy editing on paper just worked better.
Dan Amrich 13:54
Yeah, I still prefer it for some projects. I’ve gotten very much used to doing digital but, yeah, it was still very much of an analog process in all regards. So yeah, editors would start, but as a result, there was a bias that the editor would tell you what to do as the designer. And as you can imagine, this led to creative problems here and there. Kat and I worked together when I became features editor. Kat and I work together on features almost entirely alone, like I would do all the text, and Kat would do all the design. And then when we were done, we would hand it off to the publishing department, the production department, sorry.
Katrin Auch 14:31
Well, no, wouldn’t it go back through copy edit, and then to–
Dan Amrich 14:36
Yeah.
Katrin Auch 14:37
Because they wanted to see it in flow.
Dan Amrich 14:39
Right. But I mean, we were so good at what we did that they didn’t need to edit it very much. But I do remember, like, the two page spread on the cel shaded shooter XIII.
Katrin Auch 14:51
XIII. I was thinking XIII when you said–
Dan Amrich 14:53
Yeah, that was one of our favorite ones. And I just, I knew what I wanted it to say, and Kat knew how she wanted to use those assets. And there was a lot of– there was very little back and forth. But it was like, Hey, this piece of art is really important, please use this versus, Hey, this is too long. I need you to trim this. Okay, I’ll lose a screen because I can’t really lose that, you know, I can’t cut that part that’s critical. Or, yeah, let me go in and futz with it. So the editors had access to QuarkXPress so that we could do digital edits when it came down to it, because honestly, and I don’t blame the graphic design department for doing this, it became, Well, then you fix it, you know, like, if you know how to sculpt the text, you get in there and you fix it, you tell me when it’s done, and I’ll make sure you didn’t mess anything up. And we’ll move to the next stage.
Katrin Auch 15:38
Well,2 what we usually did. So we started talking about this, and then sort of drifted off, but yeah, when a feature was ready, and it was only the features, we would– the production department– somebody from– because they’re– the departments–the main departments that you had on the magazine were editorial, copy, edit, production and design. So the one member of every part of that team would come together, and we would sit down, and we’d talk about, like the editor would tell us what the story was about, and, you know what the mood should be, which they’d show us any pieces of art they had, or they would give it to us ahead of time, so we could look through so we’d have it in our minds when we talked about it. So we would just sort of like sketch out like, this is what this feature should be. This is how many pages it is. You know? This is how much screenshots that we have. Sometimes it’s like, Well, this needs to be a five page feature, but we have three screenshots and one piece of art, so let’s figure out how we’re going to make that work. So that was all–
Katrin Auch 15:43
Is that when you call Francis Mao and tell him to draw something?
Katrin Auch 16:44
To draw stuff, yeah. Usually that was always a possibility. But, and Francis, I adore Francis, Francis had so much workload on him that we tried to avoid having Francis draw things whenever we could, just because there’s certain things he had to do. And if we could avoid knowing– because if you had Francis draw something that was coming in the day– it was going out of like, that was not coming in early, that was coming in at the last possible second. But then the art team would sit down and, you know, we would go through the art, and we do, like, a basic layout, and there was a lot of things that we could do, like we had, are you familiar, I’m trying to think, it was widows and orphans. widows and orphans. Are you familiar with– and I don’t– And I mean in a text term, not in a–
Frank Cifaldi 17:36
No.
Katrin Auch 17:36
Okay. So widows and–
Frank Cifaldi 17:38
So, I mean, I’m imagining killing some darlings here. Like–
Katrin Auch 17:42
No, it– well not really. It’s the– widows and orphans are–
Frank Cifaldi 17:47
I’m imagining killing some darlings is the sentence that just came out of my mouth, sorry.
Katrin Auch 17:55
When a paragraph is going, like, how much text is left over, and I forget what qualifies as a widow and what qualifies as an orphan, but like, how much text is like–
Frank Cifaldi 18:04
Oh, like to break between pages?
Katrin Auch 18:06
No between, like, in a paragraph, who’s flowing underneath, or something like that. And so we had, like, you had to have, like, at least a half a line, like, if a column is three inches, you had to have at least the last part of that paragraph had to go at least an inch and a half out. If it wasn’t that far out, it had to either come up or more had to push down. Does that make sense?
Frank Cifaldi 18:29
Yep.
Katrin Auch 18:29
So we would, we would go through and we would fix kerning and like between letters, we would, we would do all we could, and then we get to a point if we could not fix it, then it was like, Dan, could you come over here? Can you sit at my desk? Can you spend five minutes and fix these lines, you know? And he would just go through and he would re-edit the text to get them to where it needed to be. So, yeah, we would do our best to get it to not need to do that. But if it didn’t work, then they had to come and edit it. So it was a lot more necessary in the smaller articles, because we had like eighth of a page previews that was like a screenshot, and then the text and those were– that was a lot of stuff to try to fit into that small space. But yeah, each– and we had some rules for every review. You had to have a logo, and you had to have a certain number of screenshots, and you had to have some of the– I think at least most of them needed to be pro tips. One of them could just be a like art screen, but the rest of them had to have pro tips underneath it. So yeah, there was a lot of time where I would get a list let you know. We’d get an article if I did not have art for it, I would ask the editor, Hey, do you have art for this? No, I don’t have art for this. And then I would pick up the phone and I would– I badgered them all to just give me their contacts, or else I was going to keep bugging them. So they gave me all their contacts. I started calling and making relationships with everybody and I would say, Hey, we’re doing this review of, you know, Ratchet and Clank three. I forget the name of it, but, you know, with this–
Frank Cifaldi 20:12
Here We Go Again.
Katrin Auch 20:13
Can you send me the logo? And, you know, whatever, like art you have. And they’re like, Oh, I gave all that to Mike. And then I go to Mike. I was like, Okay, thank you. And I go like, Hey Mike, can you check your desk, because Tom says you have the CD. And Mike’s like, No, no, I’m sure I don’t. back. And then, you know, he’d come back five minutes later and say, Oh, yeah, I found this. But yeah, it’s funny, because I ended up knowing all the PR people, and I would just call and they’re like, Oh, well, I sent it to them, but yeah, here you go. I’m gonna just send things to you separately. And I started just getting mail with all of the the stuff, or email, eventually, with all of this–
Frank Cifaldi 20:54
Well, I was gonna say, like, the era we’re talking about, like, it was– it made more sense to just mail you a CD.
Katrin Auch 21:00
Eventually, near the end, they did get, like, I think I– eventually they had–
Dan Amrich 21:07
FTP sites.
Katrin Auch 21:08
FTP sites, yeah.
Frank Cifaldi 21:09
I started like, 2005 when in the media, and it was like, just kind of transitioning. It felt like it was kind of a hybrid of, sometimes we’d get discs and sometimes it just be an FTP login.
Katrin Auch 21:19
I think it was easier for– Well, depending on how paranoid they were, it was easier for them to make the discs and send them out rather than having FTP, because they were never all that smart with the FTP logins. It was always like press and then media was the, you know, like the password. Like I did, like, do that a lot of times where I go to a website and it’s like, Ubisoft slash press, okay, I’m in here. Okay, here’s all this art. Okay, I can just download it, you know, like they were not all it was not all that secure a system.
Phil Salvador 21:51
So I think this is a good opportunity to talk a little bit about the collections we have, because we kind of dance around a little bit that we have some exciting collections from GamePro. So first off, there’s kind of two components we talked about to this. The first is that we have, it’s a bunch of binders on our shelf. It’s like CD binders that you would put, like your mix CDs in, but it’s filled with things from GamePro. So first off, we have the QuarkXPress layout files that y’all were talking about, which is exciting, but, and Frank, you can correct me on these details, but we’ve run into an interesting digital preservation issue with those, because we have the layouts of magazines, we have the raw GamePro. So theoretically, if we had an old Macintosh, and we had those, we could produce, like, high quality PDFs of GamePro. It is something theoretically that could be done. The interesting issue we’ve run into is that we don’t have the fonts to do that, right? Because–
Frank Cifaldi 22:42
We have most of them.
Phil Salvador 22:43
Most of them, okay, but not– because it’s like a specific, you know, Here’s the weight of this font that was only on Macintosh computers in 1997 so we can reconstruct most of GamePro, is my understanding.
Frank Cifaldi 22:56
Well, so, I’ll fill in here. I have not tried anything past a 1995 issue, which unfortunately predates both of our guests, but, like I just kind of pulled that one randoml-ish and attempted to reconstruct the pages, and essentially we have exact matches for most of the fonts in that issue from additional disks that perhaps Kat put together that just are, like, CD-Rs that say fonts on them. And, you know, like, we were missing sort of the main body font for reviews. And, like, we could get one that’s basically identical, but the kerning is off, you know, stuff like that, if we swap it in and–
Katrin Auch 23:44
Well, the kerning was all really customly done.
Frank Cifaldi 23:47
Right, but if I fed it the correct font, it should be fine. I would think, right, like correct font with the kerning.
Katrin Auch 23:52
Probably, I would think so. But that also may be, because I said a lot of this stuff was done with third party extensions added on to Quark. So it could be that there was something with that.
Frank Cifaldi 24:03
Oh, so you– that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of that.
Phil Salvador 24:05
Oh no. Oh, geez.
Frank Cifaldi 24:08
So actually, the fonts we have might be fine. It might be– okay. That’s interesting.
Phil Salvador 24:13
I just shudder at the word third party extension for QuarkXPress. I don’t know who is preserving those. That’s worrying.
Frank Cifaldi 24:21
Yeah, which weird charity is preserving that?
Phil Salvador 24:24
Yeah, yeah. But I think, as I said, that’s a collection that I think in general we’re not touching as much right now, because we don’t have a workflow for, like, Okay, do we have an era appropriate version of Quark we can feed things through and generate PDFs out of. I think the library will be launched by the time this episode airs, at that point, there are GamePro scans in the library, but those are done from actual issues. We have not tried reconstituting GamePro in bulk, just because of the you know, doing this at scale is difficult working–
Frank Cifaldi 24:56
Well, even if we did the advertising is not part of the layouts so that we’d have to like, manually add them.
Phil Salvador 25:02
That’s a good point.
Katrin Auch 25:06
There were a few ads that we did create in house, but most of them were not created in house, and that was a special deal whenever that happened.
Frank Cifaldi 25:15
Yeah and, but I think that’s, you know, it is a kind of a fun, like you said, interesting challenge is that we do technically have the master files for GamePro going back to, I don’t know when the oldest CD is. I think it’s like mid-’93 and I don’t even know when it ends. I want to say it ends like 2009 or something like that. Probably ends about when Kat leaves is my guess.
Katrin Auch 25:36
I would think– Well, the person who took over after me was one of my interns that I trained. So I know he kept the things for going. So I would think that it’s– and I think he did, I want to say he did at least a year there.
Dan Amrich 25:54
Is it Gabe?
Katrin Auch 25:55
Yeah.
Dan Amrich 25:56
Okay, Gabe Graziani, who now works for Ubisoft.
Frank Cifaldi 26:00
Oh, interesting. Yeah, we were just talking about Ubisoft before this call, because I just came back from stealing from their trash.
Katrin Auch 26:05
And he was an Assassin’s Creed social media manager.
Dan Amrich 26:08
Yeah, he was the community manager for Assassin’s Creed for like, five years.
Frank Cifaldi 26:11
Cool.
Dan Amrich 26:12
He works at EA now in community,
Frank Cifaldi 26:14
But yeah, it is an interesting challenge. My assumption was always that we were missing some exact fonts, and that it was an issue of, I mean, a lot of people don’t understand that, like, files on a Macintosh are just inherently different than files on a Windows computer, and that there’s this whole concept called a resource fork.
Katrin Auch 26:36
Oh yeah.
Frank Cifaldi 26:39
Oh Kat just put her hand on her mouth in reaction.
Katrin Auch 26:41
I hadn’t heard that for so long, but then it’s like, Oh, yeah. We used to get resource– There would be like, resource fork errors that would come up every once in a while.
Phil Salvador 26:49
Right, yeah. And I gotta say, as someone who’s doing all this processing on a PC, it is really annoying having to deal with the just the differences between file systems. It’s, I can’t imagine what that would look like trying to do that at scale. I think we have a friend Keith, who is a, I would say, a Macintosh guru, who, when it comes to, like, Mac specific file formats we often bring him in, and he might have ideas, but like with the equipment we have now, just dealing with those kind of things gets very complicated very fast.
Frank Cifaldi 27:19
I don’t remember which issue it is. But I actually did hand off the files to E-Day at Retromags, and he did reconstruct an issue by hand.
Phil Salvador 27:30
Oh, wow.
Frank Cifaldi 27:31
Because he owns GamePro. So one of the releases on Retromags is actually like a digital version, but, well, it is interesting, like, I don’t know, spit out a 600 DPI page from like 1995 it’s just kind of looks like an alternate reality. It’s very funny.
Phil Salvador 27:47
And before we move on to the other part of the GamePro stuff, one thing I do want to mention is, I think a lot of people might say, Oh, why don’t you just do that? Why don’t you just take the time and do all those things? And something I’ve been saying with the work we’re doing is that I think a lot of people, when they look at digital preservation work they think about, you know, intensive restoration on individual things. And I like to say that a lot of the work people do in the community, it’s like taking a scalpel to history, and we’re kind of taking a shovel that we’re operating at the scale of hundreds of issues of GamePro. And in those cases, doing that kind of time, intensive manual work just isn’t feasible for us to do. So I think, as much as we love to reconstitute those things, I think we have to wait until we can get to a point where we can do it at a larger scale, in bulk, rather than taking however many months of– Frank and I, we’re the full time staff of the foundation, how much time can we dedicate to working on this?
Frank Cifaldi 28:37
Yeah, I mean, I will add too that I think with the layout collection, there’s other things to do besides reconstruct the magazine. For example, GamePro would occasionally review games and with native screenshots that they took that didn’t end up shipping. And in fact, the first interaction Dan and I ever had in our lives was because Dan wrote a column in GamePro about games that didn’t ship, using GamePro assets for games that didn’t ship, and I ran a website about games that didn’t ship. So it was like, Brother!
Katrin Auch 29:10
Is that Vaporware?
Dan Amrich 29:14
Paper Trails. And the whole point of those articles was to find out why– you may remember this when we ran this screenshot three or four years ago, what happened to it? And I was trying to track down the stories of the missing game
Frank Cifaldi 29:26
Right. But the point is, like, we might not have, like, an asset, raw asset from the publisher or whatever, but maybe GamePro had a review copy. They took screenshots, and we can, you know, instead of having to scan the screenshots that are printed in 300 DPI of lost media, like, maybe we can get the original JPEGs that are in the layout file, which is kind of cool.
Phil Salvador 29:46
I think there was an example. I want to say it was an article about, and remember exactly what it was. I think it was Mario 64 where the screenshots they use, they just had, like a scan shot from film, or something, of a bunch of screenshots.
Frank Cifaldi 29:57
Yeah, so I can tell you exactly what that is, which is whatever the show was called at the time in ’96 Shoshinkai, I think the Nintendo show, they handed out screenshots on four by five posi film for Mario 64 and they were four by four grid. And I was going through a GamePro layout, that’s right, I forgot about this, where I turned off layers, and it turned out, like, the whole four by five was in there. You know what I mean? It was just, like, covered. So–
Phil Salvador 30:26
Instead of cutting the images, yeah.
Katrin Auch 30:29
Come on, we’re gonna take as many corners as we can in that it’s like one scan rather than four. Yeah, that’s absolutely
Frank Cifaldi 30:36
but the point is that, like, as you’re flipping through GamePro, there might be hidden goodies that you can’t see behind the scenes that we could dig out.
Katrin Auch 30:45
What I was going to say is, you know, we’re talking about the Quark files, but we did switch over to InDesign, and InDesign had a fabulous feature. So in the later issues, when I can’t remember exactly when we switched over to InDesign, but when we I thought it was 2002 but it would have to be more than one year, because I used it for more than one year at GamePro. But it has a package thing. So at the end, when you finish, it does a– you tell it to package the files, and it puts all of the photos in a folder, all of the like, the text in the– it like has the file, the text, and I think also a PDF of the page. So all of that would be in there. And there also should be the final PDFs for the whole magazine should be in there. So if you look at some of the later InDesign things, you should have all of that, including the fonts, which may be the GamePro font might be in there
Dan Amrich 31:44
Was that a third party program called FlightCheck.
Katrin Auch 31:47
No, FlightCheck was Quark. You could do a FlightCheck in InDesign, but it was part of InDesign
Dan Amrich 31:56
But was– did FlightCheck do that? Did that bring all the files that you needed together?
Katrin Auch 32:01
No, FlightCheck just did a check that does– is everything the right resolution? Is everything linked properly? Like it made sure that all of the– like, is there proper crop marks? Because you had to have all the crop marks on the page correct and–
Dan Amrich 32:19
Okay, so that was the last stage before shipping it out to the printer?
Katrin Auch 32:22
Yeah
Dan Amrich 32:23
Okay. Because once it went to the printer–
Katrin Auch 32:24
And that was not done by– that was usually not done by us, that was done by production, the did FlightCheck.
Dan Amrich 32:29
Production team. Yeah. Because the one immutable deadline in print magazines was, this is your time on the press when you ship it to the printer there is no wiggle room if you miss your print date. We were just told there’s not going to be an issue this month, like, or it’s going to be two, three weeks late because the printers had so many jobs lined up for so many different clients that you had a very specific window that you had to hit. So it became a you’re going to have to pull an all nighter, or you’re going to need to cut that, or you’re gonna do something else. So last minute issues, last minute mistakes that sometimes you had just live with them. GamePro famously ran like an eight page strategy guide on Thrill Kill, which never came out, and we had already shipped it, and then they canceled the game, you know? So people got my review of Half Life for Dreamcast has gained some renown, and people had said, you didn’t get a final version. I did. I got a very– I got, like, a 95% build, and we ran a review, and then it never came out. So those things, they happen so far in advance and through, you know, this little sniper window of This is when you’re going to be on press. There was absolutely no leniency on the press date, so making sure all the files were 100% correct and complete was critical.
Katrin Auch 32:29
And there was also, as Dan said, it was like a waterfall, like how things came. Like whoever took– whoever was at the bottom of the waterfall, which was production, production was the last people who touched it, they were the ones who would get screwed, because if, if editorial was late, then design had less time, or had to take the amount of time that they had to take. But then, you know, so design had to be like, there was a order where everything made sense, because you had to think about it as like a four– it’s a four week cycle. So for design, the first part of the month, we don’t have a lot to do because it’s not written yet. And then we have a lot to do really quickly. And we worked very closely with production, and we were cycling pages back and forth between us constantly, you know, making sure, is this done? Is this done? Okay, it’s ready. Go send it. And, like, if editorial, like, if somebody’s like, Oh, it’s coming in late. It’s coming in late. It’s like, dude, if it comes in too late, it’s not getting designed. It’s like, give me everything. Like, I think I’ve designed things without having the text. Yeah, because I’m like, Well, we have to design it. So this is all FPO, and I’m just gonna funnel this text in at the very end.
Dan Amrich 35:06
Yeah, I remember those.
Phil Salvador 35:08
You mentioned the threat of missing an issue one month. I don’t know offhand, did GamePro ever miss an issue during your time? Did that actually happen?
Dan Amrich 35:15
Not on my watch. No, it didn’t. Because it was a really serious threat. And let me tell you, we had very serious and sometimes physically imposing production people. So, I mean, Kat brought up a name, somebody, a true hero of GamePro who never got enough credit with Shelly Reimer. She was the head of our production, and Shelly knew the process inside and out. She was amazing. She was fun to work with. She was professional, she was creative, she just, she was one of those heroes behind the scenes that took it from design to printing, and that was great. Richie Lesovoy is the physically imposing person I’m thinking of.
Katrin Auch 35:16
He was not at GamePro.
Dan Amrich 35:36
Oh, that’s right, he was at Future, sorry, Future, because we both worked at Future after–
Dan Amrich 35:43
Herb. Herb Linden was–
Dan Amrich 35:45
Herb Linden, yeah, was also at GamePro.
Katrin Auch 36:09
Yeah, he was at GamePro, and he was the person who, like, he bought the paper because you used to have to, like, buy paper and then send it to the printer and have the printer had to hold on to your paper, so he would take care of the paper and the relationship with the printer. And he was like, very– he was a very nice guy, but he was very insistent. And it’s like, If I’m going to tell you this, I’m going to tell you this three times, so you make sure that you know that we are not missing this deadline because we are on press at this time, and I have to have those files at this time.
Dan Amrich 36:39
Yeah, it was just understood that it was not something that you could argue.
Phil Salvador 36:43
I wanted to ask, Was he also physically imposing? Is that just innate to production people?
Dan Amrich 36:49
I will say that Richie, Richie Lesovoy, from from Future, which was the days of I was at OXM and Kat, you were on Scrapbook Answers magazine and Pregnancy magazine.
Katrin Auch 37:01
We came over together to work on custom projects at Future after leaving GamePro, and we were there together as a team and then we got split up when they decided to cancel that department. So Dan went to OXM and I went to Scrapbook Answers, which was the one they had open. And then I ended up working pretty much on every single magazine in that building.
Frank Cifaldi 37:23
Scrapbook Answers?
Dan Amrich 37:25
Scrapbooking was a huge hobby in the mid 2000s and it supported its own several magazines, one of which was Future, and, you know, it would be ideas. And it was a very good scrapbooking magazine.
Frank Cifaldi 37:38
Were there a lot of scrapbooking questions that needed answering?
Katrin Auch 37:41
Yeah, yeah. What’s the best glue? What’s the, you know, where do I get the paper that–
Dan Amrich 37:45
Where do I get pinking shears? Things like that.
Katrin Auch 37:49
There are, like, 50 different shapes of pinking shears that you can get for like, what kind of edges you want.
Frank Cifaldi 37:54
Did you do, like, Cook’s Illustrated style reviews of shears?
Katrin Auch 37:57
Yeah, kind of. A lot of it was, like, different techniques. Like, most of it was like, you know, how do I make it look like, you know, lik–, or I want to do a spring thing. What’s, what’s some ideas for spring stuff that I haven’t thought about, or, like, different techniques. And it was fascinating. It was kind of like an art– it was almost like art book rather than, like more scrapbooking, because they really did push different techniques, like really advanced techniques.
Frank Cifaldi 38:28
Everyone listening is like, stop talking about scrapbooking. I want to know who Scary Larry was.
Phil Salvador 38:32
I just Googled scrapbook answers and their cover story, like, usually GamePro cover story it’s like Metal Gear Solid and Scrapbook Answers is Letters that Pop! Punch up your titles.
Dan Amrich 38:43
This is accurate. Well, so Kat and I, she mentioned that we met in college, but our first jobs were working together on different magazines at Harris Publishing in New York City, and we shared a cubicle, but we worked on different stuff, and Harris was one of those publishers that was the king of niche publishing, right? So technically, I was on Country Guitar magazine, not being a fan of country music, but loving guitar. So that was how I started my music career.
Phil Salvador 39:11
Back when there were choices of more than one guitar magazine to write for.
Dan Amrich 39:14
Right, yeah. I mean, and I wanted to work at Guitar World, and this was like a sister magazine of Guitar World, but we would go in the back and see, like all the back issues of Guitar World and all these other things that they would do, direct to newsstand, never– These weren’t subscription magazines. These were direct to newsstand, one shots, or maybe six times a year, or four times a year. Country Quilt magazine, Guns and Ammo for Law Enforcement magazine,
Katrin Auch 39:42
Country Music Hairstyles.
Dan Amrich 39:44
Country Music Hairstyles had the cover story Achy, Breaky Hair. I really can’t go any further than that, but yeah, so yes, you are gonna find that Scrapbook Answers is speaking a completely different language than the cut lines that you would find on a GamePro.
Phil Salvador 39:59
We have so much we have to talk about the GamePro collection I want to abandon the podcast and just talk about Country Music Hairstyles magazine.
Katrin Auch 40:13
And that was, like white–
Dan Amrich 40:15
Yeah, White Crochet Annual. Full Strut Turkey Shoot magazine specifically for turkey hunters in the South. And plus the things that you would expect from something like this, like word jumbles and crossword puzzles and early Sudoku, you know, stuff like that,
Katrin Auch 40:34
And Vampirella comics!
Dan Amrich 40:36
Oh yes, they also had a comics division, which, at the time, owned the old EC comics, yeah, so Creepy and Eerie and Vampirella. The Warren comics, sorry, not, not the EC comics.
Frank Cifaldi 40:46
Warren, yeah.
Dan Amrich 40:47
The competitor to EC comics, they–
Frank Cifaldi 40:50
Warren also did a video game magazine.
Dan Amrich 40:52
Did they?
Frank Cifaldi 40:53
Yeah, Video Gaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated? Is that right, Phil?
Phil Salvador 40:58
Yes, if the name changed at one point it was Video Gaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated. Which is–
Dan Amrich 41:03
Wow. I–
Frank Cifaldi 41:04
The only video game magazine I’ve ever gotten from, like, comic book back issue vendors, because they just collect anything that says Warren.
Dan Amrich 41:11
Warren on it, yeah, that, well, that’s, that’s amazing. So yeah, there was the heady days of when you could find literally any niche interest on a newsstand are long gone, but let me tell you, it was fun. You never knew what you were going to find.
Phil Salvador 41:23
Well, thanks for coming by the Country Music Hairstyle history hour, yeah, talking about your careers.
Frank Cifaldi 41:28
Wait, I got to throw one in because I worked at CMP, which was doing Game Developer magazine. We also did like Dr. Dobbs and stuff like that. And one that I just could not get them to give me a subscription to was Tissue World, which was a tissue industry magazine for like, cleanups, and toilet paper and stuff.
Katrin Auch 41:47
Sure.
Phil Salvador 41:48
I think we figured out they still have a tissue world convention. I think we figured out, right?
Frank Cifaldi 41:52
Right but they don’t have the print magazine anymore.
Katrin Auch 41:54
Nobody has the print magazine anymore.
Dan Amrich 41:56
When we were at Harris, one of the biz dev guys decided that there was a market to challenge Cat Fancy magazine. So he is Bob Büchler, if you recall Kat.
Dan Amrich 42:08
Yeah, I remember him.
Dan Amrich 42:08
And he came up with an idea for, like, a competitive cat magazine.
Frank Cifaldi 42:14
Cat Grungy.
Dan Amrich 42:15
I can’t remember what the name of the cat magazine was, but it was–
Katrin Auch 42:18
I can’t either.
Dan Amrich 42:19
It was almost designed to like, you would mistake it for Cat Fancy. That was their plan. We’re gonna break the hold that Cat Fancy has on the market. You know? pretty it was pretty fast. I mean, we did Flux at Harris as well. So that was my video game opportunity, that and all the sports magazines like Slam and Blitz and Hardball, I was the game columnist for that. So, you know, we had a lot of interesting little thing– Little projects were always going on left and right at Harris, and a lot of them were, yes, super niche.
Phil Salvador 42:50
All right. Well, now that somebody who’s listening has just woken up from their nap and suddenly thinks they’re on a completely different episode, I do want to talk about–
Frank Cifaldi 42:55
We joke, but I bet everyone listening was like, super into that.
Phil Salvador 42:59
If you want an episode about scrapbooking– Sorry, I keep saying scrapbooking, Country Music Hairstyles magazine, please send an email to podcast@gamehistory.org to let us know.
Frank Cifaldi 43:08
Achy Breaky Hair.
Phil Salvador 43:10
But I want to talk about the other GamePro thing, because this is the collection we’re actually working with. So besides the layouts you mentioned getting CDs from game publishers with assets and press release information. You saved much of that stuff. One of the big collections we have is about 750 CDs containing some CDs sent directly from game publishers. Some of them are CDRs that you Kat burned and wrote the names of video games on. And it is this astonishingly complete archive of art and occasionally other press materials for video games from that era. I have to ask Kat, I’ve been wanting to ask, non judgmentally, why? This was kind of your project. So what was the motivation here?
Katrin Auch 43:54
The motivation was, we used back– like, we would use art over and over and over again. It would not be just a one time use. It wouldn’t be like, Okay, we’re doing this review, and then we’re gone. We would have, sometimes we would have strategy guides about it. We would have– we also had another magazine called Code–
Dan Amrich 44:12
SWAT Pro
Frank Cifaldi 44:13
CodeVault
Katrin Auch 44:14
CodeVault. That’s what I was thinking. Yes, we had SWAT Pro. We also had CodeVault, but in any of those, we could have stuff where we would need to get old games back. So not only that, you have the CDs, but what you do not have is the master list. Because I’m trying to remember what program we used, and I can’t remember what it was, but we had a program where we could scan a CD and it would keep record of everything that was on it, and then we would have, like, the numbers. So if I’m like, hey, oh, shoot, I need to do WrestleMania 16, and I need the art for that, I could open up that program, type in WrestleMania 16, and it would tell me the numbers of all the CDs that had art from that game on it so I could go pull it, which was vital to being to having that project. So the idea was that most of that art was either the raw art or the raw art, and whatever edited art we did, and one of the things that we had to do a lot of, and especially there’s two things that are in my mind, that are seared in my mind, are we would have to create– We’d have to make silos or clipping paths around art, because we talked about, you know, wanting to have the run around, around the art. In PNG–, I don’t think– if they existed– I don’t think they existed.
Dan Amrich 45:40
We weren’t using PNGs.
Katrin Auch 45:41
We weren’t using PNGs.
Katrin Auch 45:43
You were all TIFF all day from what I’ve seen.
Katrin Auch 45:44
Yeah. Yeah, well, we needed the resolution. We wanted a non-lossy format, and JPEG and PNGs were both– and GIF were all lossy formats. So we needed to have something that was not going to reduce in resolution every time you saved it. So we would use specifically TIFF most of the time. And because that’s not transparent, there’s no transparency in that. So in order to make it transparent, and this is something I am infamous for among my interns, is that you had to make a clipping path. And you had to make a clipping path with the pen tool. You could not do the magic lasso, magic wand, any of that. You could not do it that way. And there was reason why. And the reason why is if you did it with the pen tool, it would cut through a pixel. So if you’re going around, it cuts through the pixel. It makes a perfect outline of the item. If you do it with any other source, it will go it will cut around the pixels, not through a pixel. And you can see it I had like, every time we would do it, like the pen tool uses Bezier curves, which is a difficult thing to learn. It is awkward, it is hard. It does things you don’t expect it to. You just have to sit there and learn how to do it. But once you learn how to do it, you can be pretty quick on it. I was very quick on it, but and then when I got you know, like I did it when I was starting out, I would do paths like crazy. And then when I had interns, I would have them do it, and every single one of them would try to trick me into giving me a file that did not have– that they did without doing– they’re like, I’m gonna shortcut this. She’s not gonna know. She’s not gonna know. And they would hand me files. I’m like, Oh, really good, good work. Go do it again with a pen tool. And they’re like, But I did. I’m like, No, you did not. You didn’t do it with the pen tool. I can tell. Look, you see this jag here that is not a pen tool. Go do it again. So yeah, they all hated me, but every single one of them when they left was like, Well, I know how to use a pen tool really, really well. The worst things to silo were the wrestling games, because the art that we had was actual photos of wrestlers. So you have to get very close in when you are doing clipping paths. And nobody needs to be that close on a wrestlers junk. It’s just not fun.
Katrin Auch 46:04
Speak for yourself.
Katrin Auch 46:20
It’s not a good time.
Dan Amrich 48:35
Kat, you’ve been clipping paths all week, but this weekend at SummerSlam–
Katrin Auch 48:41
It was an experience. And then the other thing was, we did like Dan would every so often do like a controller round up. And so when we did like, I remember one time we took pictures like we had, like a huge bin of controllers. We took them into the kitchen of GamePro in San Francisco had the best light. We shot all these photos. And then I had to do —
Frank Cifaldi 49:10
The kitchen/photo studio.
Katrin Auch 49:11
Yeah, exactly. I had to do clipping, pass on all of them and in Photoshop. And it was, you know, like, I had a lot and my parents came to visit, and I’m like, Hi, my parents are both artists. I know you want to do something. I have 30 pictures of controllers that I need to make silos. Why don’t we make this a contest? Let’s everybody sit down at a computer and we’re going to do clipping pass of stuff. And my dad had a very different– my dad is used to doing it. He has a very different technique from me, because he would go through and he would do like, seven dots around it, and then come in and then, like, and then add more dots in to make it more detailed. I just make it more detailed as I go around. I just like, do the intense part at the beginning. I don’t care. My mom had never really done it before, so she was at a major. She is an art person, but she had never done clipping paths before, so she was at the thing my dad worked at a newspaper. So my dad was, like, was good. He’s the one that taught me how to use Photoshop and InDesign and everything before I got my first job. Like, my degree is in audio script writing. So when I couldn’t get a job in audio script writing and video production I left, and my dad’s like, Let me show you how to use Photoshop and InDesign and Freehand, because he didn’t even use Illustrator, he used Freehand.
Dan Amrich 50:34
So your dad introduced digital desktop publishing to Gannett News. That’s part of his legacy.
Phil Salvador 50:41
So this answered a couple questions for me that I had. The first thing is, the CDs that you had written, you had burned and you had written the label on, those were ones– I always wondered, well, how did you– like, where were you getting assets from if you were burning CDs in 1995? and it sounds like that was stuff you had made publication-ready in a lot of cases, for some of those ones.
Katrin Auch 50:41
Yeah, that is true. My dad has worked at Gannett his entire career, and he was very into Macs at the beginning. And he’s like, Hey, we can use Macs to make the weather maps that take us hours and hours to do and these charts, we should do that. And eventually he ended up going around to all the Gannetts around the country and bringing in that skill to the whole to all of Gannett papers.
Katrin Auch 51:29
Most of them, yes. some of them were either scans that we made in house. Like, if they came in on film, we would make scans and then they would be put on a CD. Or if I had a bunch of, like, some things came in on ZIP disk and stuff like that. So if I had a, like, only a few pieces of art from everything, I wasn’t going to keep a full CD. If it was like, there’s five pieces of art on here, I was just going to combine them together to save space.
Phil Salvador 51:56
That makes sense. And the other thing that answered the question for me was, all the CDs we have, you’ve made little inserts for them that has, like, the name of whatever game is on there. And it was interesting noticing that some of them don’t entirely match what was on there. But in a way, that’s making sense to me now, because, as a librarian, I am always interested in, like, Okay, what is something being used for? You don’t build an archive for no reason. And your case, it was because things would get reused or put in other publications. So an example I have is we have a CD from Hasbro Interactive that has– we have like, super high res art of like, the Mr. Potato Head educational game for PC, and it’s great, and that is part of our digital library. You can look at that like 600 DPI Mr. Potato Head. It’s wonderful.
Frank Cifaldi 52:41
You can zoom right in on that junk.
Phil Salvador 52:45
Actually, the texture on the render, they have on Mr. Potato Head is really good in that picture. But that CD was labeled Frogger 3D and it’s like, oh, that’s the one they cared about. That’s why you label.
Katrin Auch 52:58
Oh, yeah.
Frank Cifaldi 52:59
Yeah because you guys weren’t covering, like, children’s games for PC.
Phil Salvador 53:03
Yeah the Mr. Potato Head corner was axed early in GamePro’s history so at that point you weren’t even using that, but that makes a lot of sense to me. And something else you mentioned brought up another thing that we’ve been kind of dealing with as you’re working with this, you mentioned Freehand, and it’s really interesting, because a lot of the like, the formats for these images, or images or any other press materials, it’s things that I assume were publication ready for QuarkXPress at the time that are no longer that way now. So like, we have files from like, Freehand version five, and in order to get those into a format that people can look at in our digital archive, I’ve had to, like, install a Windows XP virtual machine and install an old version of Freehand and manually port those things over to PNG, and it’s like that for you, this was just the formats you were using, right? These were not esoteric file formats. It was just what you were using to make the magazine.
Katrin Auch 53:56
Yeah, we switched over to Illustrator fairly early on, but we did, like, sometimes get things that were like, we’d go back and forth, we’d use whatever, like, if something came in with freehand, we would use Freehand to get it into the thing. And I think you could import Freehand files into Quark at the time, or we had an extension that allowed us to do that. Like Shelly Reimer was, like, super diligent about going out and finding stuff that would allow us to do our jobs better, like they were always looking at, like, what will allow us to do our jobs better, which was why eventually we decided, okay, we’re just going to make the jump off the bridge and go to– we started InDesign 2, because InDesign 1 was pretty solid, but we didn’t get into it until it became it was InDesign 2.
Phil Salvador 54:45
Yeah and this answers a lot of questions and things I was wondering about some of this stuff, because, like, some of these CDs, they’ll have, you know, the same asset rendered in Freehand format, but also as a QuarkXPress file, also as an Illustrator file. So, like, it’s possible with just things in different formats. But now I was thinking specifically about one of the weirdest CDs I’ve been dealing with is we had a CD of art assets from the Area 51 arcade game, the old light gun game, which has live action actors, and it’s like the original art of the actors on the green screen. The format those images are on that CD, it was, I don’t know if you recall Kat. This will maybe bring back some horrible flashbacks, Kodak photo CD format, which was like, when you, like, got your photos developed at the store, and they burned you a CD. It was–
Katrin Auch 55:32
I think that it came from them that way, because I think they took it to Kodak to have it developed.
Phil Salvador 55:36
Okay, well, I was gonna say the nightmare is that if they weren’t in Kodak photo CD. It was in Macintosh Pixer format that the Kodak photo CD photos were then put into. So it was, like, converted into a more usable format. I don’t know if that was something you would have done, or if that was the people at Midway, just like, I don’t know what they were thinking, but–
Katrin Auch 55:56
I think it was Midway, because I don’t remember doing anything specifically with that.
Phil Salvador 56:01
Okay. You would have used, like, EPS format, like a normal magazine contributor, yeah.
Katrin Auch 56:06
Most of the time we used EPS. We used EPS and TIFF were our two main things that we used most of the time. And they, yeah, I can’t remember that we would use anything else. We would have, like, sometimes I think we would save the PSD file just for, like, if we were going to bring it into, you know, if we were going to work on it or we needed layers, we would save it as Photoshop. But, you know, that was if we were going to work on it again. And I have to say that one of the things, like, one of the biggest sins of GamePro was we would flip art if we needed to, it’s like, Oh, that doesn’t work. So we would flip art if we needed to. And we only got into big trouble with that once. Which was the cover of GamePro, I forget which issue it is, but was one of the, I want to say Ocarina of Time. Dan?
Dan Amrich 57:02
I think so.
Frank Cifaldi 57:03
Of course it was a Nintendo.
Dan Amrich 57:05
It was a Zelda cover.
Katrin Auch 57:06
It was a Zelda cover and they gave us art, and it didn’t work well the way they gave it to us, so we flipped it, and it was Francis’ call to flip it. And I don’t mean to throw him under the bus, but it’s like, he did it. And–
Frank Cifaldi 57:20
Oh wait, I’m predicting here: Link’s left handed so this might go really bad.
Katrin Auch 57:26
Yes. Very, very bad.
Phil Salvador 57:28
January 1999 GamePro issue 124 it is a righty Link on the cover of GamePro.
Frank Cifaldi 57:34
There you go. Well, flash forward to 2006 when Twilight Princess comes out and they flip Link to be right handed on the Wii, because most people are right handed and have to slash that way.
Phil Salvador 57:46
Well, I and this actually makes sense–
Frank Cifaldi 57:48
You guys invented Twilight Princess.
Phil Salvador 57:51
Actually, I encourage folks to look up GamePro 124, in the digital library, because looking at it, yeah, Link’s stance when it’s flipped, aligns really well with the slant of the GamePro logo. So I get why that decision was made.
Katrin Auch 58:06
It looks so solid that way. And Francis just made it because it’s like, this is a good cover. We all looked at it and said, This is a good cover. I don’t think anybody in the staff realized that Link had been left handed until that point. And then Nintendo called and we all knew that Link was left handed. That was– they were not happy campers. And we had to, we had to do a lot of making up to them.
Phil Salvador 58:30
You had to send a personal apology to Link.
Katrin Auch 58:33
Pretty much.
Phil Salvador 58:35
But that makes sense with what– from working with these collections this all makes a lot of sense. When we have layout formats, when there’s QuarkXPress things that likely was files you were working with, when we have really esoteric image formats that nobody has touched in 25 years, that was probably something that came from the publishers delivering you raw assets to work with.
Katrin Auch 58:53
Yeah.
Frank Cifaldi 58:53
So at this point, I think I’m gonna turn it over to some community questions. For those who’d like to ask their own questions in the future, right on our Discord, the Video Game History Foundation Discord, we, in advance, tell people which guests are coming in and allow for some community questions. If you’d like to join the Discord, well, it’s Patreon perk. You’ve got to give us some money. So it is patreon.com/gamehistoryorg, all kinds of perks there, most of them related to being able to talk to me and Phil. We’re stars. We charge for access.
Phil Salvador 59:30
You can talk to me about Myst all you want on there.
Dan Amrich 59:33
My check is in the mail.
Frank Cifaldi 59:34
So a couple questions from SGreenwell, in the Discord for Kat. Was there a design element or issue that you were especially happy with, or conversely, one you look back on and say, What was I thinking?
Katrin Auch 59:50
Yes, Dan and I were talking about this earlier. I don’t know if we talked– it was pre or post starting the conversation, but there was an article on XIII, which was a French game, and I don’t– do you remember what issue– You probably don’t remember what issue it’s on.
Dan Amrich 1:00:09
I have no idea what it was, but it’s–
Katrin Auch 1:00:11
Do you remember the company?
Dan Amrich 1:00:12
Yeah, it’s Ubisoft.
Katrin Auch 1:00:13
Oh yeah!
Dan Amrich 1:00:15
It’s Ubisoft. It was based on a French comic book and so they kept– and it was a first person shooter, so they kept the cell shaded look.
Katrin Auch 1:00:24
Way before Borderlands.
Dan Amrich 1:00:25
Yeah, it was, it was unique at the time. And, yeah, we– that was a really fun one to do together, because it had a very distinctive visual style, and Kat was like, Oh, I like this style, and I want to lean into it. And I was doing, I think it was a preview. I don’t think– I don’t know if it was a review or a preview, but it was called Lucky XIII, and it was a Roman numeral XIII. So, should be fairly easy–
Phil Salvador 1:00:47
There it goes. GamePro issue, 180, September, 2003. You can also look that up in our digital library.
Katrin Auch 1:00:53
Yeah. That was one of my favorites. One of the things that what we didn’t talk about is there was a set font for the body type and for the, like, standard section headlines, you know, game names. If it wasn’t a logo, there was a standard font that we used. But for features, not only did we have to pick, like, a color scheme that we were going to– and the thing I had to just explain in far more sessions than I am comfortable wrapping my head around, is that if you want to do red, but have it be a light red, light red is pink. I don’t care how much you want not a pink, but a light red, it is still pink, because people was like, Well, we’ve done a lot of blue. We’ve done, you know, we’ve done all these other colors. But can we do a light red? I’m like, You mean pink? No, not pink. How then? If you can give me the CMYK breakdown of a not pink, light red, I will do that for you. But, we would talk about, you know, color, and then it would be like, font. Like, font is a big thing. I was– Comicraft fonts. I, you know, we had for such a big publication, the amount of budget we had for art was zero. Like pretty much zero. Occasionally, we had Francis Mao, who we was spoken about before, who was our head of the creative department, and he would draw for us sometimes. He drew very a lot of covers. I’m sure I, you know, we could go through and name about, like, 50 covers.
Dan Amrich 1:00:53
That’s late in the game for us.
Katrin Auch 1:01:01
If it’s not like official PR art, it’s Francis.
Katrin Auch 1:02:45
It’s Francis. Yep. And he, actually, he started off as a cartoonist, and he drew for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Dan Amrich 1:02:55
He did a backup story in one of the original, like 12 issues of Ninja Turtles back in the Eastman-Laird days. Yeah, he’s a legitimate, you know, illustrator, a comic book artist.
Katrin Auch 1:03:06
But, so he would do art, if we needed art, like and we had nothing, he would draw art. Or I would go to the internet and find the highest resolution of something that I, you know, things that I could find. And the same thing with fonts, it’s like I had to get fonts that were free or available or could be licensed very inexpensively. So, you know, we used a lot of Comicraft fonts, and I still like them. And DaFont, I don’t think, was a thing at during GamePro
Dan Amrich 1:03:37
Not at the time, no.
Katrin Auch 1:03:38
Yeah, as soon as I could start using it I did start using it. But we would find stuff and there’s a lot of stuff that probably was not licensed properly in GamePro. I’m gonna just say it. It’s out there that we used what we had to use. We were very scrappy and very, you know–
Dan Amrich 1:03:53
To be fair, in the early days of the internet, it felt like everything was free, right?
Katrin Auch 1:03:57
Yeah.
Dan Amrich 1:03:58
And so this is late ’90s, early 2000s when it’s just like, Yeah, I’ll just grab it from online. And unfortunately, we were sort of encouraged by management, Yeah, just grab it online. Just grab it online. We don’t want to have to pay for anything, you know.
Dan Amrich 1:04:09
And they would deal with it if somebody came to them.
Dan Amrich 1:04:12
Right. It was, you know, forgiveness rather than permission sometimes. So, yeah, there was some stuff, I mean. And honestly, this was not a unique program to GamePro– a problem to GamePro, I saw other magazines also just grabbing full FAQs and printing them as features and not giving any credit to the person that had written it or any money to the person that had written it. You know, so it was early, wild, lawless days.
Frank Cifaldi 1:04:34
It’s a good thing that we’ve gotten past stealing content on the internet. No one does that anymore. Yeah, it’s good.
Katrin Auch 1:04:42
But one of the things that I am most unhappy with was there were pieces of art that were grabbed that shouldn’t have been grabbed. And, yeah, it’s–
Frank Cifaldi 1:04:56
What does that mean?
Katrin Auch 1:04:59
So one of the things that I am just mortified by, I mean, literally mortified by, is that we were, I was working on a story with Dan that was about rumors or, like, fact checking things, right?
Dan Amrich 1:05:14
Yeah, it was video game urban legends.
Katrin Auch 1:05:16
Okay, yeah. And one of them was, was that E.T. cartridges were buried in the desert, right? That’s the–
Dan Amrich 1:05:24
Right. At the time, we didn’t know if it was true. It was something that people were still questioning, and it was long before they actually did the excavation.
Katrin Auch 1:05:34
So I ,you know, it’s like, okay, well, what can I use? It’s like, Oh, well, you know, it’d be great to get, like, a bulldozer, because I think you literally said bulldozed them in so I’m like, Okay, I’ll find a picture of a bulldozer online, and then we’ll put, was it? It was Atari, right? It was because I think we put the lambda on it.
Dan Amrich 1:05:52
Yeah, you put the Fuji logo on the bulldozer in the picture.
Katrin Auch 1:05:56
Yeah. So I went looking, and basically what I would do is I would just use a Google Image Search and, like, look for images that were above, because you could look for a resolution. So I was just looking at the images. I wasn’t looking at any of the context. So I looked, and I found a great image of what looked like a bulldozer in the desert with a bunch of brush in front of it, and I’m like, this, this is good resolution. This is exactly what I need. And I have the side of it. It’s very clear. I can make this work. So I made it work, and it went through– like you have to understand that when after I finish with something, it goes back to the editor. The editor looks at it. It goes to the copy editor. The copy editor looks at it. It goes through production. Production looks at it. Other people around see it like there are, like, I’m going to say at least six or seven more sets of eyes on something. It is not me, and then it’s out the door. That never happened. So the image was titled something I want to say either in French or Swedish, like the name of the image file, the way, when I got the file off, it was, it was not anything in English, so I had no idea what it was. I never saw the original context to the image after it comes out. It turns out that that image was a photo of a toy bulldozer pushing into women’s pubic hair. So I put porn in GamePro.
Dan Amrich 1:07:29
This is not Kat’s preferred legacy for Game Pro, I kind of want to point out. And this was– it sounds funny now, but like somebody from the sales team came over and said, like, Why did you put pornography in the magazine?
Katrin Auch 1:07:43
No, somebody from the sales department came over and said, I thought that was really funny that you did that. And he said he had seen it before it went out, and thought it was hysterical. And I was mortified, because I didn’t know what it was. I mean, there was no context. It was so close up, like the whole image is in the thing. It was so close up. I didn’t think that way. I was like, I would have never done that. And I was absolutely like, I remember when it happened, because I– literally having a flashback where I was, I probably white and shaking and crying, yeah, when I was finally told, and they were and apparently my the publisher wanted me fired, and my– Francis, like, went to bat for me and all that. But I was like, I was mortified and terrified and everything you could possibly be, because that was never my intention. And all I could think of is, if you gave us a budget, I wouldn’t be stealing art from the internet, and this never would have happened, but it’s like I didn’t even have the budget to go buy a toy bulldozer and take that photo. So, yeah.
Dan Amrich 1:08:52
Yeah, and I mean, it’s just as much on me because I saw the layout, and I said, Yeah, it looks good. I was looking for a bulldozer in the desert. I saw a bulldozer in a desert. Six other people saw a bulldozer in the desert. One dude in sales is like, girly parts, you know. And like, when, when did you see it? When would you have brought it up like, you know? So it was, it’s the one. I’m really surprised we’re telling the story, because it’s been like– it was really, really, really bad at the time. And to be fair, a handful of people noticed it, and other people like, You’re crazy, you know? So like–
Frank Cifaldi 1:09:30
No, we dug it out, when you were here, once, we dug it out and we looked at it as, like, now that I know sure, I can see it.
Dan Amrich 1:09:36
Once you know what it is, you’re like, Oh, well, yes, of course. And anybody who listens to the show will obviously be running to– I mean, this is probably their first chance seeing pornography on the Internet. But if they go to do that, you know, they’ll see it, and you’ll go, Well, of course, how could you not? But again, look at it with an innocent eye. Look at it on a deadline. Look at it with no budget, and look at it as this solves a problem and not knowing what the real source was in the wild, crazy days of the internet, and then it becomes more, much more possible. I’ll tell you that it’s 100% possible because it happened.
Phil Salvador 1:10:06
I think the takeaway there is, yeah, whenever this kind of thing happens, it is a like budget and project management issue.
Frank Cifaldi 1:10:13
Yep. I mean, I you know, it comes to mind, as you know, there’s much more embarrassing things that went out in video game magazines, in my opinion, than that photo. Well, I think famous sports column, which God, was that also GamePro?
Dan Amrich 1:10:27
No that was DieHard GameFan.
Katrin Auch 1:10:31
Is that the one where the art– well, I’ve seen art departments write things to the editorial the editorial doesn’t catch.
Dan Amrich 1:10:40
This was some, this was a completely different–
Frank Cifaldi 1:10:41
This was a little more racist.
Dan Amrich 1:10:43
Yeah, it was, it was lorem ipsum text. Instead of just using a generated lorem ipsum, it was an entire screed. It was supposed to be a joke internally, and it shipped. And then it was, you know, called sabotage and stuff. But yeah, in no way was this intentional. In no way, like, you know, it’s just, it’s the nature of working on a deadline with no budget, and, you know, not being aware, and not intending for it to be a rude thing. But there you go.
Katrin Auch 1:11:13
Well, when you look, I mean, it’s not like I looked for porn. I looked for a bulldozer.
Dan Amrich 1:11:19
Google, show me bulldozer porn. That’s not something you’re likely to type in at GamePro in the ’90s. So, but there you have it.
Frank Cifaldi 1:11:29
Okay, so another one from SGreenwell in the Discord probably a final one.
Dan Amrich 1:11:33
I think SGreenwell has done enough damage with that first question.
Frank Cifaldi 1:11:37
SGreenwellwell did not force that answer. No one forced that answer. This one’s for Dan. Dan, you came in as a video game fan. You were a video game player, so kind of an exciting career move, I would think. So question is, What was a game you got your hands on early that made you go, Oh my God. And then, inversely, maybe optionally, what was your worst experience having to work with a game?
Dan Amrich 1:12:03
Sure. The game that I remember being absolutely ecstatic to play was actually before GamePro. It was when I was a freelancer and I borrowed– I was at Harris, and I was working on– I wasn’t yet working on Flux, but they had started working on Flux. Other people there were also freelance video game reviewers, in addition to their day jobs doing music, and I was unable to get Mortal Kombat II for Genesis to review. I just wasn’t important enough to get an EPROM, so Jeff at work loaned me his, and I was over the moon, and then I used it for reviews in other outlets, and found myself on a claims blacklist. So I was really excited for a short period of time, and then I was in the doghouse for about three months until I had proven that I was legitimate and you know, that there was, I was somebody that they wanted to work with. And eventually it blew over. But at the time, obviously they were very concerned about who got EPROMS for which games. So that was one that I was super excited about. I was also really– let’s see. Well, I became the extreme sports guy at GamePro. Specifically in GamePro. I was– I didn’t do the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but I did 2 through infinity and all of the games that it spawned. So I became sort of the go-to guy that would go to Neversoft. The people at Neversoft were so nice. I’m still friends with some of them, and that was always a thrill to see the latest Tony Hawk build. So because I was really into those games. There were a couple of times that I was shown a demo where very pointedly, they would say, You see that, you see that? And I’m like, yeah, they’re like, because you brought that up last year in the review, and like, they were very specifically addressing concerns from the previous– I was super uncomfortable, you know, like, you have to take responsibility for what you’re writing as a reviewer, because you are affecting somebody’s life, right? And I got every year at Tony Hawk, they were like, Yeah, see this? This is our new vocal booth. We put this in there because you said that the voiceover only got a four out of five. like, that kind of feedback from the developer. And I’m like, I didn’t think I had this much power, you know, like, I’m speaking for the players of like,
Frank Cifaldi 1:14:16
Glad I could help improve your product!
Dan Amrich 1:14:18
I guess. I mean, but, also those guys were really funny and really good pranksters, so I think that they were like, we’re gonna get Amrich, you know. Like, there was one time that they gave me a Tony Hawk demo, where it was one of the first ones where you could build your own game, you could build your own character. And so they put together a character for me named Dan, skating in his underwear in front of Tony Hawk. And Tony Hawk was there for the demo. He goes nice tighty whities, Dan. So, I mean, this was just a setup to get me.
Katrin Auch 1:14:46
The demo, what was the demo that they came in, that I sat in? And I forget the name of the game.
Dan Amrich 1:14:54
This is the best story in the world. BMX XXX, all right, an infamous Acclaim game–
Frank Cifaldi 1:15:00
But you’re on that beat. So–
Dan Amrich 1:15:02
Right, yeah.
Phil Salvador 1:15:05
And you were off their blacklist too at this point.
Dan Amrich 1:15:07
Well, this was many years later, right? Yeah, so the proliferation of Tony Hawk and extreme sports games was at its peak in the early 2000s and so they were going to do a Dave Mira– Dave Mira’s BMX 2 or whatever it was, right? And that was Acclaim’s franchise, but they decided to go like, let’s make a raunchy version of these games. And Dave Mira’s name suddenly disappeared, but they forged head with, like, you know, very sophomoric humor, very Howard Stern. The license that appears in this game is from a strip club, right? It’s from Scores, so that tells you what the setup is. And there’s a lot of single entendre jokes, you know, there’s nut vendors, there’s guys selling peanuts in the park, and they shout out, Get your hot, salty nut sacks here. And, you know, like, very goofy 13 year old, hurhurhur kind of humor. So they said, Hey, we’re coming in to show you at GamePro, we’re coming in to show you BMX XXX, you know, anybody that wants to sit in on the demo, feel free.
Katrin Auch 1:16:09
So we had a room that, like, we would–
Dan Amrich 1:16:12
Right. We had a demo room. And, you know, you bring chairs in, and we have a demo kit, and the head of PR, who is somebody that I had known for many, many years. I’m not going to mention his name, because I’m still friends with him, and I don’t want him to feel bad about this. But, he comes in and he figures it’s gonna be like, you know, hey, bros, we’re gonna talk about this bro game and Kat who, again, always wanted to know what am I gonna be laying out in two months?
Katrin Auch 1:16:40
And I knew him, because I got art from him all the time.
Dan Amrich 1:16:42
Yeah, this was somebody she had a relationship with professionally anyway, but she’s like, Yeah, I’ll sit in on the demo. I said, Hey, you know, Acclaim’s here to show BMX XXX. Anybody that wants to sit in– Wes Nihei, our editor sat in on that one. John Robinson, Johnny Ballgame, he sat in and Kat sat in, and the presence of a female in this room shook our friend from Acclaim. I mean, this was hilarious, because he’s like, Alright, so, and he starts his regular like, you know, frat boy kind of pitch, and he goes, Alright. So we’ve got this new game, and we are gonna break through a lot of, you know, break through a lot of taboos. And the game is called BMX XXX, and look, Kat, I’m sorry. He just breaks. He just breaks character. Stops the demo cold and says, Kat, I’m really sorry. You know this, this goes into the whole like, you know, who does porn hurt? Well, think about your mother. Think about your sister. This guy had one of those moments where he was like, oh my god, I have a personal relationship with this woman, and I’m about to show them a game that objectifies women to the eighth degree, you know? So he said, you know, this is all just intended and fun. This is just supposed to be really funny, but it is pretty crass in some places. So I really, I don’t, I’m hoping you’ll be okay with this. And Kat just sort of said, No, it’s fine. Just show me your game. Just didn’t comment, didn’t say, like, I think you should be terrified. You should be horrified about– she just said, No, I totally understand it. Go ahead. And didn’t make any editor–. And I am, like, dying, I, Oh, I couldn’t–
Katrin Auch 1:18:17
Because he would constantly be, like, showing something in the thing and turning around like, Aha,
Dan Amrich 1:18:22
Right, right? She’s topless, right?
Katrin Auch 1:18:24
Like his face would fall, like he’d look at– like he’d see me there again and goes like, Oh.
Dan Amrich 1:18:29
It was my– I was– I have never been more proud of Kat in a professional capacity, I think, than her just saying Thank you very much for showing me the demo. Not showing any emotion, just poker face all the way through, and this poor guy just stumbled through the rest of the demo, and I’m like, just stifling a laugh all the way through. So that was a high point and a low point. And, of course, the game kind of wasn’t–
Frank Cifaldi 1:18:51
Kind of in one, yeah. And then Acclaim went bankrupt. So–
Dan Amrich 1:18:55
And then Acclaim went bankrupt. So that’s probably– I’m not going to soul search for any other answers to S, if that is S’ actual initial. I’m not going to come up with any more stories. Those two are pretty good.
Phil Salvador 1:19:09
I know we have other questions, but that one just brought together every theme of this podcast. It was both Dan and Kat. There was Accclaim, and extreme sports, and pornography. It was like everything we talked about. That was incredible.
Dan Amrich 1:19:21
Kat, do you want to blame Acclaim for giving you the idea to put a pornographic image in the magazine? I mean–
Katrin Auch 1:19:25
It was not their idea.
Dan Amrich 1:19:28
Because this was your chance to rewrite history.
Katrin Auch 1:19:31
Yeah. No. I’m not gonna do that.
Frank Cifaldi 1:19:32
I want to just kind of end by pointing one thing people might not think about that comes along with this collection, which is that, because they were EPS files, meaning they’re vectors, we have a lot of Francis’s art in infinite resolution.
Katrin Auch 1:19:49
Oh, wow.
Dan Amrich 1:19:50
That’s cool.
Phil Salvador 1:19:50
In the layout files?
Frank Cifaldi 1:19:52
In the layout files, including the original ratings heads. So–
Katrin Auch 1:19:59
oh wow, yeah.
Dan Amrich 1:19:59
Yeah, these have since been recreated by the fandom, so I only have recreations.
Frank Cifaldi 1:20:04
Yeah well we got the real ones. We got the real ones.
Dan Amrich 1:20:05
I didn’t know you had the original ones. One of the nice things about being a cartoon character was that Francis loved drawing the characters. All the– Francis, in addition to what he did in GamePro, people don’t know Francis Mao created the concept drawings for the Biker Mice from Mars. And he also–
Frank Cifaldi 1:20:07
Those are back, I just came back from New York, sorry, from San Diego Comic Con. And there’s, like, Biker Mice stuff.
Dan Amrich 1:20:28
And he created the Burger King Kids Club as well. So, like–
Katrin Auch 1:20:34
He did the logo for the Dummies.
Dan Amrich 1:20:36
Oh yes, the For Dummies logo. Francis created the For Dummies logo. So he has, like, he has done a lot of very interesting cultural things, but Francis loved drawing the characters. Unfortunately, the Internet was young when we were doing this, and so I would write a lot of stories about how, you know, the Dreamcast was going to have a modem that was going to let you go online. And so regularly, just to screw with him, I would write notes in the news, because I was the news writer and editor. So I would write those little news stories at the beginning of the magazine, and I would just say, Francis, please draw the internet. And I probably did that five or six times over the course of the magazine. And he would come up with really clever illustrations, clip art of the globe with Ethernet cords wrapped around it and stuff. But any chance that he had to create the characters in a different situation, he would do that. Oh, we need Dan Elektro as a cowboy. Great. My favorite was Kat’s character was Miss Spell and she was–
Frank Cifaldi 1:21:32
And you’re, let’s be clear, you are Dan Electro.
Dan Amrich 1:21:35
Sorry, yes, I was Dan Electro. I was also Bad Hare. I actually started out as Bad Hare, which was–
Phil Salvador 1:21:40
If you had read Country Music Hairstyles magazine, you wouldn’t have been Bad Hair.
Dan Amrich 1:21:44
I know, that’s true. Bad Hare was supposed to be an ill tempered rabbit and I thought that was funny, because I also kind of had bad hair. But when we started going, I realized, you know, Major Mike and Scary Larry, and these guys had their names in their personas, and I felt like I would have more credibility. So I asked to change my name. And they’re like, that’s fine. Wes Nihei had seven names, you know, I mean, like, you could have infinite number of characters, so–
Katrin Auch 1:22:09
You also were MC–
Dan Amrich 1:22:11
MC Squared the– for a technical column where I would break down things like anti-aliasing or some of the other technical terms of the day as a white boy rapper. It’s a very cringy now, I can tell you that, but yeah, MC Squared was my nerdy white rapper who would explain tech stuff. But So Francis would often– also a GamePro tradition was Francis would draw your character and that would be on poster board, and he would do like a giant, you know, piece of art that everybody would sign, and that was your birthday card.
Katrin Auch 1:22:44
For your birthday card, yeah.
Dan Amrich 1:22:45
So, you know, like, Kat you were doing Tae Bo at the time, and so he drew Kat, like, in sweats, doing Tae Bo. Sometimes he would draw a Miss Spell. Sometimes he would draw Dan. Sometimes he would draw Dan Elektro, you know, stuff like that. Well, one of my favorites was that Crimson Skies, the alternate reality flight game. I said, Yeah, I’d like some artwork, you know. And he’s like, Oh, do you want? You know, you want, like, you know, Dan Elektro as a pilot with the leather helmet and the goggles and all that? I’m like, No, it doesn’t have to be that. I don’t care. So he drew Kat as, like, the ingenue on the nose of the World War II planes. He, you know. So I still have a really high res scan of Kat’s, like red-headed witch character in this sort of cheesecake pose. And I said, you know, like, Well, it seems a little racy. He goes, Oh, you have no idea what I’ve been asked to draw at comic conventions. I have done terrible things with Wonder Woman, you know. So, like, that was, that was soft core to Francis, and it was, it’s still something that I love. I had it as my desktop for a long time, and people were like, What’s that? I’m like, well, that’s my wife. You know, that’s my wife.
Katrin Auch 1:23:52
We also, for a while, Dan and I co-wrote a comic strip in the front pages of GamePro, and we would write it. And I think one of our best ones was the one when we did the Spider-Dan.
Dan Amrich 1:24:07
Spider-Dan was definitely the greatest hit of that so we called it Hidden Characters. And we realized we were always looking for fresh elements in the magazine, something that was that would be the other companies wouldn’t have, the other magazines wouldn’t have. And at this point, we had leaned into the fact that our audience was younger. You know, you’d age out of GamePro, and EGM was cooler and harder in a lot of ways. Ultra Game Players was a little bit more serious. And, you know, like, sort of– it just– GamePro was, that’s the baby magazine, and we dealt with that for years, but we were like, You know, what? Heck with it, let’s have fun. And so we had all these goofy little characters, and we would just put them in three panel comic strips called Hidden Characters. And one of them, I have a hobby on the side, which is writing parody lyrics. And so I wrote to the theme of Spider-Man, Spider-Dan, when this– for a cover that was one of the Spider-Man games. And Francis just drew it and it just, you know, Kat and I just worked on the lyrics together, and again, small jokes. But we did that for about a year and a half, two years.
Katrin Auch 1:25:07
Yeah, and then after that, we did the– for like a– we had a disc for a while. We had to do concept content for the disc. And then we also did, like ads where I made puppets. And I know you guys have our puppets, but I made puppets of four of the characters.
Dan Amrich 1:25:26
Yes, it was Dan Elektro and Miss Spell, because you were like, Well, I’m making our characters first.
Katrin Auch 1:25:31
Yeah.
Dan Amrich 1:25:31
And then Major Mike, because that was an easier one to do, because he was a Battletoad. So we just had to get a beret, sunglasses and green felt, and Four-Eyed Dragon, which was Lindsay Young.
Katrin Auch 1:25:42
That was the most complicated one, but that was probably one of my favorites.
Frank Cifaldi 1:25:46
But it’s true, we do have the original puppets donated to us by Kat, so–
Dan Amrich 1:25:51
God help us.
Phil Salvador 1:25:52
How the hell– How do I catalog puppets?
Dan Amrich 1:25:56
Under P obviously. Do I have to do your work for you, Phil? Come on.
Frank Cifaldi 1:26:02
Well, guys, this is great. I think we should wrap up there. Kat, you were just put your finger up though. Were you gonna sneak one last thing in there?
Katrin Auch 1:26:08
I was just gonna say under GPP for a GamePro puppet.
Dan Amrich 1:26:12
You down with GPP?
Frank Cifaldi 1:26:14
We’re not– I’m not gonna respond to that.
Phil Salvador 1:26:15
Thanks to MC Squared, thanks for that one.
Dan Amrich 1:26:17
You’re welcome.
Frank Cifaldi 1:26:19
But yeah, we’ll end it there. This is the part of the show where we ask you both if you have anything you want to plug and/or where people can keep up with you on the internet, which made a lot more sense when we were all on Twitter, didn’t it?
Dan Amrich 1:26:32
Yeah. Kat, you wanna go first? Do you wanna talk about–
Katrin Auch 1:26:36
Well, I was just gonna talk about, like, one of my hobbies now, like, after leaving GamePro, I did a bunch of freelance game magazine stuff and but then I got into photography, because working on Scrapbook Answers, I actually had to work with photographers a lot, and they would never do what I wanted them to do. So I’m like, how hard is this? Let me see. So I started taking pictures myself, and I ended up in this very weird niche that I love, which is fine art fantasy photography. So I do, like rework, like I imagine fairy tales and other fantasy things in photos, and then play with them in Photoshop. And that’s what I’ve been doing. So if you go to katrinauch.com you can see some of my stuff. And, yeah, I exist as KatrinAuch on Twitter. I don’t go on there very often, but I also I actually plug my new employer, which is I work for Supernatural, which is owned by Meta, and we make a VR app. And I am a choreographer for Supernatural. So I– if you want to box on the Great Wall of China to, like, I don’t know, I’m going to say, Bang the Drum All Day, because I’ve done that so many times. But we have, like, popular music, and it’s a lot of fun, and it’s a great– we have factual evidence that it is a good workout. So if you want to work out in VR, come work out with us.
Dan Amrich 1:28:04
I’ll plug my day job, which is down the hall from you guys at Digital Eclipse. I’m a content editor there. And of course, we have many, many, many, many things coming out this year. But on a personal level, Kat and I are in a band. Kat and I and a friend, Jude Kelly, have put together a Star Wars band. We do original cantina core music under the name The Kyberpunks. So we are the Kyberpunks everywhere, including the .com and every social network you can think of. We write original songs, we perform and produce them ourselves, and our drummer is a droid, and that’s because we don’t have a drummer, so we just use electronic drums. But we will be playing on stage later this year, and the drummer will physically be an animated droid, and the voice of the droid is none other than Katrin Auch. So thank you. Yes, Kat is B3-4T, our drummer. And so if you are interested at all in hearing songs that are half sung in the fictional language of Huttese. We do dance and party music as if we were a band in a cantina that you would find in Star Wars. That is the high concept of the thing. So there you go.
Dan Amrich 1:28:14
And if you like Star Wars and The Beatles there’s also Dan’s original band Palette Swap Ninja. Well, not original, but parody bands, Palette Swap Ninja with Jude, where they did all of the story of New Hope to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and that’s on.
Dan Amrich 1:29:30
That’s bit.ly/starwarsbeatleswars, all lowercase. That’s the easiest way to get there.
Phil Salvador 1:29:35
Dan, any chance your band can cover Spider-Dan?
Dan Amrich 1:29:39
Probably not for legal reasons.
Phil Salvador 1:29:41
Aw, that’s fine.
Frank Cifaldi 1:29:43
Well, we’ll leave it at there, and I think it’s very funny that you call it cantina core and not its canonical name. So thanks everybody for listening to the Video Game History Hour, and thanks you two for being our guests today. Thank you so, so much for listening to the Video Game History Hour brought to you by the Video Game History Foundation. If you have questions or comments for the show, you can email us at podcast@gamehistory.org. The Video Game History Foundation is a 501(c)(3), non-profit, and all of your contributions are tax deductible. You can support us right now by going to game history.org/donate, or by joining our patreon at patreon.com/gamehistoryorg, one word. This episode of the Video Game History Hour was produced by Robin Kunimune and edited by Michael Carrell. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.