Well, if everyone else and their mother is going to tell their secret origin, I might as well throw in mine as well...
Back in October of 2004, I was working at this Nintendo fansite called N-Insanity.com (it's no longer active). With the promise of free (!!!) games the tiniest bit of clout in the industry (in that I had an email address that wasn't Yahoo! or Hotmail), I really couldn't have been more psyched. And everybody else was pretty much just as inexperienced as I was, so it was fun learning how to write news, reviews, etc along with people I still call friends today.
Anywho, one of my fellow staffers at NI, as we called it, alerted me to PGC putting out an open request for writers back in November of '04. I sent in my application, in which I kissed a bunch of ass, and referred to a debug as a "decoder" (oy!). I think I threw in an editorial where I was pretty critical of then-new Nintendo marketing dude, Reggie Fils-Aime.
So like two months went by, and even though Jonny had sent me an email some time after my application went in answering a few questions, things were pretty much silent on that end. And in the mean time, I'd become the Editor-in-Chief of N-Insanity (we were actually starting to do pretty well - we had a Resident Evil feature that got some press on a bunch of RE fansites). But then came that cold, Miami night. January 19th, 2005. I got an email from Jonny saying something to the effect of, "So... you still want the job?" I was so ****ing excited, I actually called a bunch of my friends to tell them the news. I was (and still am, really) such a nerd.
The funny thing about it all is that, like two days before this all happened, I totally aped one of Lindy's previews to put together my own for NI. Hah.
So I joined the site, becoming the youngest person ever to do so (I was hired eight days before my 16th birthday), and the rest is documented for your reading pleasure. My first article was the 2004 Louie Awards (where I commented on a ton of games I hadn't played, and summed up a year for the site I hadn't been a part of), and I think my first review was Fight Night Round 2 (7.5/10, mostly because the GameCube's octagonal base for the C-Stick made pulling of haymakers a pain in the ass).
There are a couple memories that stick out vividly. Every once in a while, there'd be a game to show up at Jonny's then-place in Alabama (he was the guy who shipped games at the time - later on Mike Gamin did it, and I'm not sure if he still is now) that nobody wanted. And being such a busy dude himself (running the site, being the PR guy, holding a separate job of his own), Jonny had to bribe one of us into taking it via a "secret prize."
Little known fact: I always was, and still would be, a sucker for those damn secret prizes.
So in one such case, Jonny had to offload Ghost Recon 2 for GameCube, and seriously, NOBODY wanted this one. At the time, I was still new and eager to prove my worth, so when Jonny threw in a "secret prize," I signed up ASAP. The prize turned out to be a Limited Zelda Edition Gold GBA SP, along with a copy of Minish Cap. Ghost Recon ended up being pretty terrible (I think it might've been the worst game I reviewed in all three years of my working here), but hot damn did I dig that prize.
Another would be my first Monday in Tallahassee, FL, which was the first time I recorded Radio Free Nintendo actually being in the same room as Mike Sklens. We'd always made do with Skype, but man, actually being able to play off of each other in the same apartment was awesome. I later got the chance to do the same thing with Lindy while visiting Atlanta.
Tons of other things stick out (recording Nintendo Pirate Radio with Stan, arguing with Burchfield, the ridiculous days of media wrangling on the E3 Home Crew), but this is starting to get really long. So to wrap it all up, Happy Birthday NintendoWorldReport.com, PlanetGameCube.com, PlanetN2000.com, and N2000HQ.com. Thank you to Billy Berghammer, Jonny Metts, Steven Rodriguez, Jon Lindemann, and every other hard-working staffer who put their sweat, blood, and tears into making this a website that didn't just read with integrity, but soul as well.
Topic: Happy 10th Birthday, Nintendo World Report! (Read 25045 times)
