About Fangamer
My name is Reid Young, I’m a freelance designer/developer and co-founder of Starmen.Net, a gaming fansite dedicated to an old SNES game named ‘EarthBound‘. Fangamer is the name of a company I am founding based on my experiences at Starmen.Net.
My short-term goal for Fangamer is, essentially, to redesign and redevelop Starmen.Net with a focus on the community. If you’d like some information, I’ve made a long forum writeup explaining my plans for Starmen.Net.
My long term goal for Fangamer, however, is to apply the same code/principles which made Starmen.Net successful to other games; to create a series of gaming communities where fans are able to organize themselves and their information, art, and efforts.
I hope for each website to evolve into the kind of creativity hub that Starmen.Net has become, encouraging and enabling fans to get involved with projects, campaigns, and game-related art, music, writing, design, and development. One of my goals is to become licensed to produce/sell official, fan-made merchandise, a simple and exciting idea which I think holds a lot of potential.
The Backstory
In October 2007, my friend Ryan (ROFISH) and I both applied for YCombinator’s winter round. We each submitted our own separate ideas, with the agreement that if one of us got chosen, he would bring the other on as a cofounder.
We didn’t make the YC cut, but we got over it pretty quickly. As I began thinking about my next move, I realized that almost every project I’d approached with Starmen.Net had been wildly successful. And fun. And awesome. And time-consuming. Summer 2007 was the best/worst, as far as awesomeness/time-eating goes, respectively: planning and executing the Convention, Anthology, and Siege sapped most of my time (free time and work time) between late June and early August, but it was a summer I’ll never forget.
Unfortunately, as a freelancer with a decent amount of debt, I couldn’t afford to sustain that level of volunteered time on Starmen.Net anymore. However, if I could generate enough money to pay myself and Ryan to work on the site full-time for a few months — just long enough to get everything rewritten, redesigned, and relaunched — I could not only get paid to give some much-needed attention to the site, but we could use that new code to launch other websites.
A Brand-New 9-Year-Old Idea
We (Tomato and I) launched Starmen.Net, in its earliest form, in early 1999. Our goal was simple: organize all of the information we could about EarthBound and its fans. Why? Because the fans were creating some cool stuff, and there was a lot of information about the game that no one else was managing. None of the big gaming sites (IGN, UGO, etc) seemed interested in cataloging or organizing fan-made data about video games. Their main goal was to report video game news.
Fast forward 9 years, and things are pretty much the same. The big gaming sites have gotten bigger and multiplied (we’ve welcomed 1UP, Kotaku, Gamespot, Destructoid, and Joystiq to the online gaming community over the past several years), but their focus has stayed mostly the same. Some of them make active efforts to cultivate communities, but none of them attempt to do much specialization beyond specific companies/consoles. News+reviews is still the name of the game.
In the meantime, Starmen.Net has made a name for itself as home to some of the most dedicated fans in gaming. We’ve focused on one thing — EarthBound — and we’ve done some pretty incredible work, including the MOTHER 3 Petition, our super-detailed walkthroughs, the EB Siege (and Japan Siege), and about a million other small projects. We’ve discovered that creative games like EarthBound attract creative people; Starmen.Net’s art/music community, in particular, has produced some truly jaw-dropping work. Case in point: the EarthBound Anthology, the Halloween Funfest, and the Holiday Funfest.
So why hasn’t EGM or Gamespot jumped on this? Why did Nintendo shut down their NSider forums (not that that was a bad idea, but still)? I’m not sure, but I’ve had the good fortune to lead a fanbase brimming with talent and creative energy, and I’m excited by its potential. And I’m sure that there are other games which attract the same kind of creative, talented fans. EarthBound fans have taught us a lot, so we’re going to put that knowledge into practice as we begin branching into other communities.
The Plan
The plan, currently, is to focus 100% of our time on Starmen.Net. We’re planning to redesign and redevelop almost everything: the site, the CMS, and the forum. Our goal is to have the site relaunched … sometime. I’ll be posting designs, progress updates, demos, and other ‘behind the scenes’ things on this blog. Once we’ve relaunched Starmen.Net, we’ll be able to focus on our ideas for other gaming communities.
This, of course, isn’t something Ryan and I can do alone — we need the help and support of the community, and we also need money to make it happen (which will be a recurring theme in these blog posts). Luckily, the staff and community have been awesome and supportive so far, and I’ve got plans/ideas for raising the money we’ll need.
I started this blog because I want to get people involved and excited about the project, which is already underway. I also hope that it will keep me accountable, motivated, and encouraged while I’m working on the project. I’ll be writing about the politics, plans, designs, and progress of the Fangamer project over the next several months. So, please, feel free to jump in with your comments and suggestions!