MTV aren’t the first outlet that I think of for quality games coverage but they actually have an interesting little feature up on the FAQ-writing community, which you can find here.

I used to be fairly active in that community over on GameFAQs, which was one of the first gaming sites that I visited after EGM featured it in a guide to importing games back around 1997/98 (must have been before Ocarina of Time came out because that was on the cover), and you can find all my stuff here. Yes, I was fairly liberal with the perfect scores back then.

My first FAQ ever was the Shenmue guide and it was actually my first work to be published in any form which had me quite excited at the time. It was the first ever complete walkthrough of the game on the Internet, even if it’s slightly slim by the standards of the other guides.

I repeated the achievement with Shenmue II, when I also managed to have a full walkthrough of the first disc on day one and had the guide serialised on one of the Shenmue forums for the people in the fruitless wait for the American Dreamcast release. I got a couple of paid jobs from those guides, and when I wrote the Shenmue II guide for Dreamcast Magazine I got access to an advance copy of the subtitled version and so turned my guide into the first one to feature the English translation.

In case you can’t tell I still have great fondness of those times when I could be in the vanguard of new game releases and spread my knowledge to others, and even if writing it for magazines pays a lot better it was good fun to get emails every day personally thanking me for the help. Almost more gratifying than getting a paycheque. Almost…