I've told this story before, in an angrier, more self-aware way, but it's probably useful to retell it now, in the way I'd tell it now. It may make it a cheat day for the blogging project, but it's something I can point to later.
This is how I started writing about video games for a living.
In the summer of 2001, I rented a game called Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare for the original PlayStation. I had about six bucks to my name but I started a new job in a week, so the game was to help distract me and kill time.
Towards that end, I also wrote a FAQ for it, which is still up on GameFAQs, which was ridiculously overwritten in a way meant to mimic the structure of the old Versus guide to Resident Evil 3. I got a compliment or two over it (there was one from a guy named Logan Decker that said he'd enjoyed the FAQ more than he had the game, which cheered me up immensely), and that was that.
I went off to work the overnight shift in a bakery, which is a harder job than one might expect (donut holes are surprisingly challenging), and more or less forgot about the FAQ until just after New Year's.
Back then, the GameFAQs site was an independent one-man show run by a guy with the handle CJayC. He emailed me and nineteen or twenty other guys to inform me that we'd all been ripped off. A British magazine called Tip Station had taken a bunch of FAQs off the site, then published them as if they were original work. (Mine in particular had received a slight rewrite to make it look more "British," because all British magazines of the period seemed to have a secondary goal of complete textual inaccessibility for anyone who wasn't also British, often by making up their own slang on the spot.) He included contact information for the magazine's publisher, who was already in damage-control mode, and who was offering people a single payment of two hundred pounds as a "shut up and go away" fee.
I almost went for that, but I talked to a couple of people I knew to get a second opinion. One was a games writer that I knew through the old ISCA BBS, and he suggested that I forego the check in favor of getting my foot in the door. I'd already been published in their magazine, after all, so that meant I was capable of doing the work they wanted.
(Writing this in 2014, it's incredible to me how much of it seems like a dispatch from an earlier time when it's only been 12 years: renting a game from a brick-and-mortar video store, GameFAQs before it turned into a GameSpot site, a BBS, a print magazine. I may as well be discussing the war against the Kaiser.)
To my surprise, they went for it. I was hired to write a guide for Final Fantasy X for two forthcoming issues of the magazine, in a total of 64 pages at a sweetheart rate. In retrospect, my theory is that the publisher was grotesquely overpaying me as an attempt to keep me from suing his company (and I'll admit that my initial counter-offer to him did have a certain aspect of implied blackmail to it), but at the time, I just saw dollar signs. They eventually brought me back down to a more realistic pay scale, but it was enough to get my foot in the door in the UK magazine market.
I went from there into a semi-regular job doing strategy guides for the British press, in the Official Xbox Magazine and NGamer/NGC. The exchange rate back then worked in my favor, as did living in the middle of nowhere in northern Missouri, and it was enough money to let me quit my job at the bakery. From there, I fast-talked Tim at DoubleJump Books into a job as a writer and editor, and shenanigans ensued.
Whenever people ask me how I got into this business, I usually say something like, "The short version is blackmail." This is why: my entire professional life ensued because some jackass in Britain was too lazy to earn his own check that week.
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