Editor's Note

Best Of

There's something electric about starting over each week. Fifty one weeks out of the year, Team humidor knocks down the door on Tuesday with five new articles, fresh from the vat of deep, dark ichor distilled from pseudo-intellectual wankery about videogames. Each week, we leave the dust of the previous week's trials and tribulations behind, condemning our past efforts to the great archive in the sky, forgetting our accomplishments, our failures and our middle-of-the-road space-fillers. Each week, we start again with a clean slate, five new articles and a fresh perspective. We do it because we love you. We do it because we care. We do it because, dear reader, it's just what we do.

But what about those great, golden nuggets from weeks past? Whatever happened to them? And what would happen if we stopped for just a moment to look for a second and dream? What would happen if we stood out in the middle of the highway and flagged down the bullet train to call off five of our best, favorite articles and presented them again as pieces of a new whole, a brand new issue of The Escapist revisiting past themes in a fresh, new way; five articles that, while addressing five varied subjects, come together to form a giant mecha-article, chronicling a single moment in the time of gaming?

Let's find out. I present to you Issue 150, "Best Of," five articles, from five different issues, all of which, combined, present a near-perfect picture of games and gamer culture. Nova Barlow dives into the cult classic world of LucasArts's "Grim Fandango"; Brenda Brathwaite dispels the myth of the media myth, explaining why the mainstream's stereotype of gamers may not be too far from the truth; Erin Hoffman tells the story she's been sitting on for years, about the little studio that got royally screwed by a malevolent publisher; Wendy Despain studies games through the eyes of a child; and I take a long look at internet fame in the age of YouTube, interviewing a couple of folks who made videos, then history.

Enjoy!