Hello There Ladies and Gentlemen
As you know, Games First! is under new management now. Al Wildey and I have purchased the site from our good friend and longtime compatriot Zap Riecken, who in this last year has married, relocated, and begun a new career. In other words, he got a life. (Which he needed, by the way). However, it left him little time to manage the trying and interminable business of an online gaming magazine. We, on the other hand, have no lives, which makes us perfect candidates to run this monster.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. We both have families with cool wives and two boys, we both teach at the University of Idaho, we both enjoy beer, ESPN, and loud music that annoys our cool wives. But mostly we both love games and gaming—we’ll play just about anything anywhere. And we hope to communicate that enthusiasm in the pages of Games First!.
There will be a few changes to the site. First, we’re going to a weekly publication schedule. Think of us as the Sports Illustrated or Time of gaming. Every Monday we’ll post a new issue full of the latest reviews, previews, features, and a recap of the week’s gaming news. Second, we’ll be publishing reviews of console games as well; we’ve overlooked these up until now, but the increasing amount of crossover between PC and console platforms (think Final Fantasy VII, NFL Gameday 99, Abe’s Oddysee) has convinced us to cover both. Third, we’ll be developing a section dedicated to family and educational games. Hey, we love Starcraft and Resident Evil 2 as much as the next gamer, but we also think there’s a big game review void out there when it comes to such games as the Jump Start series, Scrabble, and Freddie the Fish. Finally, the site will get an entirely new flashy look—this will take a while, probably until about Thanksgiving. In the interim, we’ll continue posting new reviews on the site—but be aware that we are still very much a work in progress.
We know we’ve got a big pair of shoes to fill (actually, only metaphorically—Zap’s a real, real, little guy, like 4’2" or something, and his feet are tiny), and we only hope we can continue the good work that Zap did. He took this magazine from nothing to an award-winner in his four year’s tenure as editor, and we are proud of and grateful for his accomplishment. And he’ll still write reviews for us.
So welcome to the new Games First!; we hope you’ll enjoy the magazine as much as we enjoy putting it together. And remember, as Hamlet said, “The play’s the thing.”
Fehrenbacher & Al Wildey