john tv said:
Hey, someone tell the story about them slipping acid in Halverson's coffee? (Or something like that.)
AC Styles dosed the office coffee pot. I'm told that it wasn't just Dave who got high, although it was certainly Dave whose trip was immortalized in print.
The Arc the Lad cover story. Okay. Goes like this. After the South Park Rally issue missed deadline, they had all this content left over. So Dave said, we'll do a big double issue, relaunch the magazine, draw new readers, woo-ha!
This issue would have a big-time world-exclusive cover story. So secret and sensitive nobody could be told about it until very late in the game. Dave actually told people about it at different times according to when he thought they would rebel, so the editors who were still in his camp found out before the designers -- Gerald Abraham, Jeremy Corby -- who pretty much hated his guts at that point. Corby quit after that issue shipped.
The world exclusive, of course, was Arc the Lad Collection.
What's worse, the story was laid on so quickly and the art assets that were available were so sparse that the cover turned out to have the same art on it as the two-page GameFan import spread on Arc the Lad II, from years before (Casey Loe wrote that, it was a good piece). Some wag at the office (I think JR Haugen, the little shit they hired as a temp who kept hanging around because Dave didn't have the heart to kick him out) brought in that issue of GameFan, scanned those pages, and tacked a pair of comparison printouts on the office bulletin board.
Oh, and the internet got the Arc Collection scoop before the issue hit stands anyway.
The Arc the Lad issue is still nine kinds of awesome, though, because it has Tom Stratton's immortal interview with Snoop Dogg, where Snoop outlines the kind of game he would like to make -- a Resident Evil-style horror adventure featuring urban gang-banging and lycanthropic dogs. I shit you not. It also has the Sakura Tsuushin review where I called for the public execution of ADV Films.
DFS.
