Numlock Sunday: Ty Schalter on the dawn of video games media and Fun Factor
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Ty Schalter who’s out with a really delightful project called Fun Factor Pod.
You may Ty from his accomplishments in football analytics or some of the feature writing he’s done in the past, including The next generation of great strategists aren’t bothering with chess or poker over at Sherwood, but this project — Fun Factor —covers the early history of the video game magazine, and it’s a fascinating look back in time at a really crucial era in media that continues to reverberate to this very day.
Ty can be found at FunFactorPod.com, the podcast is available wherever you listen, I love the show and you should consider checking it out.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Ty, thanks for coming on.
Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
You are out with this really fun new project that I have just really dug, Fun Factor Podcast. It's a fun conceit, by this point you're a few weeks into it, do you have your elevator pitch down?
So the starting point is basically If Books Could Kill, my co-host, Aidan and I had been batting around what we both think about what we love, we're long time critique partners, it was basically like, "Let's do If Books Could Kill but every issue is just a different issue of a video game magazine."
Amazing.
We go through and obviously we're snarking on some of it and we're shocked by some of it and some of it's instant recognition, but also with that love of, "Hey, a lot of times we loved this or we love parts of this, and sometimes the very best parts are a sentence away from the very worst parts." We took from these magazines a love of understanding media and games. They help us think about deeply the way that we play games, the way that we think about games, the way that we appreciate the art and media, and help us examine like, "Why do we love games? What do we love about games?" And if I'm saving up my allowance to buy a game, I can get one game in between birthday and Christmas, what's it going to be and why? I depended on those reviews and all the scoring and all that other stuff.
There's stuff that we know that we took from this, and then there's other stuff that we tried to forget and then there's other stuff that we maybe had no idea that we were soaking in or taking away from, so it's running the whole gamut. It also opens a little window for us to talk about games now, games media now, now that we're both pro freelancers and authors and everything else.
I really enjoy it. It is just such a reminder that the past is a different country. There's so many unique things that either would not fly today, and I am not even necessarily talking about anything, there's some gnarly stuff in there, but at one point you remark like, "Oh, this just lists the addresses of children who wrote in letters into a magazine."
Yes! Yes! Yes. It's wild.
And there's also some very 90s attitude around publishing and publishing independence and what does it mean to be unbiased? What does it mean to be independent? Okay. Yeah. We work, for example, Ziff Davis, this really big publishing company that employs 120 writers to churn out 30 magazines a month between them, but we're fiercely independent, right? "We cover one console, but we're independent, don't worry, you can trust us." The official PlayStation Magazine that their bills are being paid by Sony is like, "Hey, just because our bills are being paid by Sony does not mean we are not a 100% fiercely independent." It's like,Okay. Yeah. I mean, it does, it really does.
So, contrasting that with now we have this personality-driven landscape where people have deep trust relationships with writers and podcasters and reviewers and streamers, but we have this sort of raised-in-captivity generation now of Zoomers who are just starting to go, "Hey, wait a minute. My favorite streamer is getting paid to stream this game means maybe I can't actually trust what they have to say about this game. What?!" They don't have those defenses, those antibodies.
But seeing how the audience and the developers and the advertising money flows and sloshes around as everybody competes for this same or similar audience 20 years later, it's just fascinating.
Yeah, I would like to just hear you speak on this in general because games, I think the media around games in general is absolutely instrumental in setting the stakes for how people eventually perceive and enjoy them. Even just the ideas of walkthroughs or Easter eggs or even just telling people how to beat it.
It seems like the games media is so inimical to the entire games industry, and it's just so cool when you're able to dive in to some of the deepest fossils that we have within this strata. Can you speak a little bit to what you're experiencing as how games media intersects with gaming?
It's interesting because one of the number one things is the level of access that some of these magazines are getting is so much greater than journalists today because there's so fewer options for the PR and attention to go, right? They have the influencer marketing now, they have direct digital ad spend in a way that just magazine ads, that was all they had for these publishers, right?
So you'll be reading a game magazine and go, Oh yeah, cool. Well, Nintendo flew us out to Kyoto and showed us what they're working on, and we sat down with Gunpei Yokoi, and he just told us all about the Virtual Boy. And that's one page of a 300-page magazine! And you're like, I cannot imagine Nintendo flying anyone from the late Polygon out to Kyoto and being like, 'Yeah, sure, here's our top devs, here's Sakurai, just pick his brain.' But, yeah, I cannot imagine that.
At the same time it is because at least it's partially an enthusiast press, right? We can really see these are 18 to 23-year-old writers getting edited by 22 to 25-year-old editors. These are not seasoned, ink-stained wretches, it's not an adversarial press, this is an enthusiast press, and even when they're being critical and even when they're being objective, they're still coming from this understood place of passion and understood place of they're asking the game industry to be better for them, the gamers.
So that's again, different where you go, okay, well now we have an increasingly boutique, unfortunately, set of video game reviewers and journalists who are much better trained journalists and much more thoughtful critics who are, when they have jobs or when they get paid, have jobs and get paid to critique much like the same way any other movie or TV show or whatever. And in fact, we have a surplus of brain power being spent on mass media culture. There's so much more rich, thoughtful critique that's so much more sociologically aware than it was back in the 90s.
But at the same time, everybody was reading this, everybody was reading GamePlays, everybody was reading EGM, it was everywhere, and you look at the base of who is everybody who plays video games and who is everybody seeking out Kotaku, Polygon, let alone 404, Aftermath, the audience of people who are seeking the serious games to critique that basically didn't exist 20 years ago is much smaller than the audience of people who were just buying these things, "Wow, Yeah! Game mags!"
It's a really fascinating document for some of this. I remember at one point, I forget whether it was you or Aidan, but you were reminiscing on Chrono Trigger review that actually was very important to you when you were younger, and then you looked at the fellow who wrote it and you were like, "This person's a teenager. This is his first job."
Yes! Yes, yes, absolutely. And that guy, Chris Slate is now, he's been the director of PR at Nintendo for a decade, which is wild.
Then it's also that thing of you had a month in between, with no news, no reviews, no previews, and if you didn't have the money or the access or the time. Aidan, he is from and still lives on Vancouver Island, so to just even go to the store and get the game magazine, let alone go to the store and buy the game, was a four and a half hour boat journey. It was a whole big thing.
Then all he had to do was just read that magazine over and over and same thing. I'd be saving up or between birthday and going, "Oh my gosh, I'm looking at all these previews, I'm looking at all these reviews, and then I get to the end of the magazine and it's like, 'Well, I guess I could read it again? I could read last month's.'" Or, "Oh, here's the review for that game, what did they say in the preview? How did that line up?" And go back and reread and reread and reread, and you have the visions of sugar plums dancing in your head because all you had to go on was these magazines, because that was the only source of information.
I mean, sure they had access, but i recall at one point you were talking about PlayStation Magazine -- again, the official magazine of PlayStation -- was writing about Final Fantasy VII, and you piece together that the person who is writing about the game did not get a translated copy of the game and does not speak Japanese.
Yes! Right! 100 percent. So, they're going through all these menus and everything, and you can see a lot of it is pieced together from syllable, wherever there was Katakana, I guess, and just doing a fan translation or maybe they got a fan translation from the internet, right?
They put in the magazine, "Oh, hey, our time for beating disc one was 27 hours. See if you can top it!" It's like, buddy, what?! That should take you a third of that time.
You could not waterboard that information out of me.
Right! If your first play through of Final Fantasy VII's first disc took you 27 hours, put the CD on a chain and hang it around your neck in shame because you cannot play video games. But that's what they had to work with.
And of course know Aidan wrote damn near a whole book, Fight, Magic, Items, The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of JRPGs in the West, talking about how little time and attention was paid to translating these games at this time for Western audiences, how few of the games even came over. You had a college kid given an Excel spreadsheet of like, "Here are all the lines in Japanese, put all the lines in English over here, and we'll translate them."
While we're talking about video and long-form analysis and deep media criticism becoming this video medium, Tim Rogers has this series of multi-hour videos called Let's Mosey, which starts as a deep dive into the localization of Final Fantasy VII and goes into a deep dive of existential crisis. But it is definitely just a completely different world, and they're going on these long lag times.
We're focusing on what we call the generation gap, 1995 to 1997, for the first season of this show where we've all been playing Super Nintendo for our entire conscious lives, right? We're constantly being teased with all these new Saturn or PlayStation, and then Sega stealth drops the Saturn at CES in May and does the Steve Jobs, "And it's out now." It was like, well, what are you talking about? "It's out now! It's Toys R Us across the U.S., already has them, they're already on shelves. Boom!"
And then all these writers had to fly back and write, and they're on a three-month production pipeline. Maybe they got a Saturn in stores?? sticker on the cover, nobody's going to find out until August. There's no way to tell consumers, your audience, "We stealth dropped the Saturn, you can buy it now." It was a huge bungling of the Saturn release because there was no hype, kids didn't have money saved for it, it was like 400 bucks, so it's just a completely different information world.
You can see we're getting into 96 and 97 and magazines are running screenshots of websites in the magazines because it's just, that is, "Hey, have you heard of the internet? Here you could go." We just looked at, for an upcoming episode, Next Generation literally has a column of, "Hey, if you want to look at video games, check out this page. If you want tips and tricks, go to this page." And you can see they're literally just college students, home website, mit.edu/jsmith/~dadadadada/doom.whatever. Oh, go to this FTP site for fan translator or whatever. There's just all these URLs and they're all college kids own home websites. If you want to talk about gaming on the web, here's how you do it. It's wild to see how fast and how slow things we're evolving.
It sounds like a very exciting view of Pandora opening the box, putting gamers on the internet.
Yes! And that disconnect too is that's something that we look at because in a way, there's parallels to everything that we see now. Game Players, the parasociality of the letters section, right? Where they very much encouraged goofy in-jokes. All the magazines had goofy in-jokes. But there's this three-month lag time between when you write in your letter to the editor and maybe it gets printed and maybe it doesn't, and they can mess around with you. "Oh, this month's secret word is blah, blah, blah." But of course the kids are writing in 3, 4, 5 months earlier, so you can never know what the secret word is. And then they go, "Ha! You didn't say the secret word this month. Sorry, kids." Just goofing on the kids, right?
And you can build that parasocial relationship up in your mind, but there's no actual connection, can't be any actual connection the way there. So you have that three, four-month delay, you cannot have that toxic feedback loop of creator and audience in the same way of where I post the new episode of Fun Factor, I can immediately see YouTube comments filtering in, I can immediately see Bluesky replies and get that instant feedback. In our Discord, our subscribers are going, "Oh, great episode. Oh, I love this. I love that." People are running and having that conversation, that's great, but also you have streamers and their chat going, "I am dependent upon these people from my livelihood, and I am getting instant feedback on everything I do as I do it."
And Aidan and I both feel that is corrosive for both the creator and the audience. You can see the beginnings of that in these letters sections of that three, four, five-month time lag just means there's a critical space there, especially when the target audience is kids and I don't have a great answer for how we get back to that, but it is interesting to see the foundation being laid there.
Well, again, the podcast is Fun Factor. I really dig it. You can be found in a lot of different places. You also write a bit about sports as well and football in particular, so I guess, where can folks find you and then where can they find Fun Factor?
Yeah, absolutely. Go to funfactorpod.com, we have all the free feeds there on and the subscription for our premium episodes and all the bonus stuff, access to our members only area of the Discord, everything is there, funfactorpod.com. We're @funfactorpod everywhere, @funfactorpod on Bluesky. And then me, I'm also on Bluesky @tyschalter, Also, tyschalter.com has all my stuff as well.
Amazing. Well, again, I really, really dig the podcast. It's a lot of fun. Even if my era was potentially a little bit after this when cheatcc.com had basically taken over the world on that kind of stuff. It's still such a great look at just a really interesting segment of the media, and particularly enthusiast media, entertainment media and that kind of stuff. I am really digging it, man. Thanks again for coming on.
Absolutely. My pleasure. Anytime, Walt, your support has been awesome, and we hope you keep digging it as we keep doing it.
All photos from Archive.org’s copy of PlayStation Magazine #1
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