Feature Anatomy: Kid, Inc./Top 50

Every month I'll break down an article (or two) from EGM and write about how our art concepts make it to the final printed page. ...well, for the most part. I'll leave out the arguing, the phone call from #24 telling me we were back in business, and subsequent beating at the hands of Brock Samson.

"Evergreen" stories are articles that can be run anytime. Issue 206's Kid, Inc. story is an example of that (page 38 in the August EGM for those playing along at home). It was scheduled to run a couple of months ago, but because of space concerns and E3 coverage, this piece had to be moved back on the calendar.

It was a great concept, a 10-year old, Julian Finnegan, created his own game and now he's selling it. The story talked about his rise to the top, but also showed the dark side of fame--from orange cheetoh fingers to swiping everlasting gobstoppers... I might have that wrong, so you'll have to check it out for yourself. And if you read the article, you'll see that we even sicced EGM's review crew on the game, called Sharpshooter. ...but uhhh, it may have actually scored better than all the games we reviewed that month.

So Crispin was in charge of this one, and it was up to me and Mo to come up with concepts. After some brainstorming, I came up with some thumbnails (click to enlarge ...wait, why did I draw these thumbnails so big?):





I kind of liked the idea of showing the kid acting like a kid and having fun. Like the one of him jumping on a couch with a game controller--but everyone noted that I completely missed the point of the story (whuuut a dummy) of a kid who made a game and was selling it. The lemonade stand concept was perfect for this story.

Much props to Mo and her husband Kevin for actually building a lemonade stand for the photo shoot! They met up with Julian, his sister, and his mother and took photos on a busy sidewalk down 2nd Street in San Francisco. I don't remember if he actually sold any games, though... but Mo and Kevin were nice enough to let him keep the lemonade stand for future use.

On a side note, Bryan happened to be driving by as they were doing the shoot and heckled Mo with, "EGM SUCKS!" ...Awesome.



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The cover story for the August ish is The Top 50 Coolest New Games. "Enough of the sequels and licensed crap, already! We count down the most exciting original titles headed your way"...

Cool, huh? But, man, that's FIFTY games to lay out! And it was Bryan's job to get things organized for this monster. The countdown runs for about 20 pages and then the number one game gets featured for another six pages. Since this was also the cover story, Mo and I worked as a tag team to put the layout together. Go, Team Venture! (I wanted to make a British Bulldogs reference there, but that's not as timely)

The running theme through the feature was that each game had a "Cool Factor" that we were going to represent with an illustrated icon. So Bryan, Shane, Mo, and I holed up in Shoe's office and went down the list game by game and concepted 50 ideas for icons.

Thankfully we employed the services of 1UP's uber-artist, Sander (not to be confused with 1UP's uber-art-thang, Karen) to draw up the icons. And despite battling a horrible cold that had him wandering around like a zombie (not the fast-running kind, thankfully) he was able to come up with 50 different amazing illustrations. My only regret is that they were icons, so they had to run fairly small on the page ...here's a preview of some of the awesome work he came up with:




Be sure to listen to EGM LIVE* --the new podcast from our team... *not actually live

-Mike

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Check out what my ne'er-do-well alter ego, Freefall Jones, is up to:
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