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Twas a dark and stormy night (sorry folks. You'll have to figure out on your own whether or not the night was dark). Three years ago. My friend Ben Lansing (Dariakus) and I were bored on IRC, and we thought back to the gorgeous
old days of his Aeris resurrection rumor for FF7 that opened one of the largest can of worms in RPGaming history. We cried, we lamented, we pined.
I thought of something radical. An FF8 rumor. But it wasn't out yet, right? Not a problem.
FF8 was going to be cancelled.
No, Dar said. We should try for something smaller; it's too late for something that big, we have too little time. Besides, it would be easier to get people to believe something they actually wanted to believe.
Yes! I countered. Trying to reason away my ambition was (and in most cases, still is) like trying to reason away a riled up kitten when you happen to be a marble-shaped piece of catnip. Yes, I knew that it would be easier to tell people things they wanted to hear. I simply took it as a challenge to do the opposite. I decided we were going to go for broke. All we need now is a pseudonym and someone to use it.
I quickly spit out the name Stephen Gohan, knowing from my Japanese studies that the latter name meant something along the lines of 'cooked meal'. Dar whipped up a simple, semi-professional sounding message and fit it to the name, spamming it to as many message boards and newsgroups as he could squeeze into his free time:
My name is Stephen Gohan, and I have just been released from Square > >after the Final Fantasy 8 project fell through. I am sending this post > >to every possible message board I can find to spread the news. > >February will come and go in Japan without seeing the release of one > >of Square's most highly-anticipated games of 1999. That is correct. > > > > Final Fantasy 8 has been cancelled. > > > >Expect an official announcement to come soon, along with a full > >explanation and some news about what Square has planned for the ninth > >Final Fantasy installment. > > > >-Stephen >
Needless to say, no newsgroupie with more than a couple of grey cells kicking around bought into the post. Typical hostile, profanity-filled derision followed in its wake. When that finished flopping and sputtering, I myself whipped up This letter ('Continental lag' was my favorite bit of hogspinach here). We sent this to a few places, I told some of my real life friends to help spread the word, and it looked just a little more successful than the previous attempt, having made at least one major IRC channel topic. Sadly, "just a little" is all it ever achieved; while one or two small-scale freelance gamer news reporters mentioned it, I had not yet the connections necessary to spread this to the big playground.
So, with much regret and a dash of chagrin, we buried the FF8 cancellation rumor in a small plot of land in our sleepiest subconscious, right next to our grandmothers' phone numbers.
Months pass. Something wonderfully awesome happens, something that had been near the front of my hopes since that early fall and beyond the expectations of my wildest dreams since October. Drew Cosner, a friend who handled the weekend Q&A column on RPGamer (the most well-known RPG gaming site on the web) decides to quit and name me as his replacement. It takes me a few tries to shake off the inherent cheese and awkwardness of someone like myself, new to the trade with no experience in such things, but I eventually get rolling and (if I do say so myself) become pretty good. At least I can say ninety-something percent of my writers were fans, a handful were neutral, and a few here and there comprised the inevitable flaming contingent (no pun necessarily intended). Mike Tidwell was a nice enough boss, and the working environment was fun. In essence, I became a miniature weekend celebrity. My roommate, also a gamer, had friends who thought it was cool that he roomed with "Michael from RPGamer". I even had some female gamers call me Archangel and stalk me over ICQ.
Okay, enough of that; I dare not indulge more in light of the eventual feud between Thor Antrim (my mainstream weekday Q&A counterpart) and myself (another story, another time). At roughly the same time of my RPGamer employment, I started a website with Ben, Drew, Aaron Gover and a couple of others that I titled EGADS!* ("Enlightened Gamers Across Darkening Skies"), a site sort of like The Onion of the gaming world that tried to incorporate a lot more (The Mushroom loved to claim we ripped them off, even though none of us had ever heard of them prior to EGADS's inception). I was thus thrown even further into mischief mode, an effect that lingered beyond my time spent on the site. Note that I was also given charge of the editorials column on RPGamer...a very sagging, stagnating decrepit old column that was receiving far below the informal quota of necessary posts per week.
Let's step back, now, and examine our ingredients: A motherload of unbridled appetite for practical jokes. A dying editorials column run by me, on the numero uno RPG site, in sore need of some sort of rejuvenation or challenge. A vague memory of a dearly departed prank.
A little lightbulb went off somewhere, burning away the cobwebs and summoning my most devilish muse.
Without sacrificing any virgin gamers (oh, pick one), I conjured Gohan from the beyond.
This time it was me, not Ben, who wrote under the name. On the afternoon of April 28, 1999, I put the finished product, this editorial,
up for all to see.
By the next day I'd received well over one hundred outrageous responses and rebuttals, many of them from a previously silent contingent of female gamers, including Pteryx, a friend from the older days of Cafe Eblana. While there were a number of intelligent readers who strongly suspected the truth, a much larger number of at-least-as intelligent-if-not-more-so readers, Pteryx among them, were too enraged not to treat it as real with their reactions. Not only did the column flourish, but Gohan's infamy spread by word of key far beyond RPGamer. IRC channels and mailing lists grumbled about him. The satirical editorial was promptly submitted for MST3King on more than one site. A gamer by the handle of Draco Argenteus eventually referred to it as "One of the most well-known, most hated texts ever to be written" on his website. Devil's advocates were accused of "pulling a Stephen Gohan". Drew, by then working for the GIA, asked me personally to write another Gohan letter for his own Q&A column to spark up debate. I did so, and he received at least as much as he bargained for; my letter was also MSTed by at least one well-known group. I don't have all the links, but if you do a google search you should still, to this day, find some hanging around.
Gohan's influence can be seen even today - I just bet he worked his way into the subconscious of the new editorial guidelines on RPGamer. One imitation prankster (it HAS to be a prankster...) using the name Gwendolyn Snope ruffled a few feathers, but was ultimately forgotten. Gohan, on the other hand, will be immortal; when I die, I'll have my sidekick become him and walk into the next E3 with a paper bag over his head until the crucial moment, and then...
* Here's my little aside about the downfall of EGADS: My staff didn't work well together -
while Drew is an overall good guy he was something of a slave lord/control freak in that he used the
fact that he designed the site's graphics as his excuse to run everything. Poorly. While an adept web designer, he
was an atrocious team player and several other staffers constantly begged me to fire him. I would come very close
returning his design to him and letting him go; I would be literally moments away from doing this when he
would plead and pull an Ike Turner and go "oh baby I'm sorry, please, I'm sorry baby I'm sorry, I'll be more agreeable, let's work
together now!" and, lacking the killer instinct needed to run a real company, I would let him and any other not-entirely-competent person who
was working for us via the spoils system remain. Another of these types included Shawn Cooper, a.k.a. Denethor Greenleaf,
a talented humorist who approached us in a friendly manner but eventually became so nasty and inappropriate that we had to collectively and
forcefully oust him from our lives (he nearly ruined Ben's personal life with his lies, but I'm not at liberty to get into that; let's just say he was a major asshole and really threw Ben into a wreck). All that, combined with people I didn't know claiming to work for
EGADS and doing absolutely nothing when I asked, led me to drop the site completely and never return, save
once every six months or so to reminisce.
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