These boys are vulgar, violent and subject to the alcoholic whims of a rogue piece of obsolete hardware. And yet, Penny Arcade just might be the funniest comic on the web. Mike Krahulik (AKA Gabe) and Jerry Holkins (AKA Tycho Brahe), the creators of Penny Arcade, recently took some time off from playing video games to talk to a stuttering fanboy about their comic, the future of Electronic Arts, Child’s Play and how to get offers for sex from creepy guys online.
From Passion to Profession
Just read the news posts at www.Penny-Arcade.com, you’ll find that Jerry and Mike keep themselves informed on just about everything video game. But unlike a regular game news site, you can tell there is a definite love for gaming behind every word. Even though PA can be amazingly brutal to developers and their products, you can tell that they do so out of reverence for the medium dating back almost to when video games came on the scene.
“I mean, we had the Sears Pong machine,” Mike recalled. “My dad worked at Sears and I remember him bringing that home one day. And since then it’s been nonstop gaming.”
The fact that it’s been nonstop gaming is no better revealed than when you ask them what games started it for them. Mike recalls classic console games Rez for PlayStation and Resident Evil: Code Veronica for the Dreamcast. As for Jerry, his interests are from all over the gaming map.
“I would probably go all the way back,” he said. “The games that really inspired an affection for the medium; Wasteland, which was an old RPG on Commodore 64, Shenmue on the DC [SEGA Dreamcast] was a real treat as well, and there’s a classic text adventure called Adventure, strangely enough, that probably had a lot to do with forming my opinions about games.”
While their love for games brought them together like two star-crossed lovers or Voltron, the progression to Penny Arcade didn’t really start until after high school.
“When we started the comic strip, we were both right out of high school. We had an apartment and we were playing a lot of games. We had s*** jobs we had to go to and we would do the comics as sort of a hobby. In the middle of the night we would draw them,” recalled Jerry. “After both of us got home from work.”
It became a passion that really didn’t go anywhere until they started harassing the people at Next Generation Magazine. Back in 1998 the magazine was looking for a cartoonist to draw a comic strip about video games for their website and Mike and Jerry decided to give it an aggressive go.
“I made a couple (comics) and I showed them to Jerry and he kind of liked the idea so he wrote a couple and I drew those,” Mike said. “We turned them all in and they rejected them, but we kept sending them comics until finally they mailed us and said don’t send us any more comics.”
The shoot-down by Next Generation hardly discouraged them. By that point, they were having too much fun writing PA and decided to turn their efforts toward posting the comic online. The Internet is where it really took off.
“We didn’t really have high hopes for it,” Jerry remembered. “And over the course of five or six years it sort of just bloomed into this thing that we barely control anymore.”
What’s In a Name?
For most people their online handle is a fairly simple process. For Mike and Jerry it was a journey of teen angst, poor spelling and homosexual cybersex requests. Jerry started with “Sawblaide”.
“When I was 16 or 17, I switched it up to Pariah. Because my s*** was all tortured.” He eventually settled on Tycho Brahe, named after the eccentric 16th century astronomer who was famous for his kick-ass Quake skills. “And it’s just a little bit esoteric. He was a super weird guy and it works well in any game. It always sort of sounds right, regardless of the context.”
According to Jerry, Mike’s name progression took a more confusing route.
“It was sort of late in the game that he got into PC gaming. He’d always largely been a console gamer. And so when he started playing games online, he finally got this old 486. And I was like, what’s your handle going to be? The concept was alien to him and so he became Peach.”
Of course Mike attempts to justify the less than masculine moniker. “At the time, the Presidents of the United States of America were huge. They had that song Peaches and I was listening to the song, I really liked that song, yeah, I’ll be Peach.” The name made him very popular in Internet chat rooms.
“Then guys, weird guys,” Jerry specified, “kept sending him instant messages and they wanted to cyber with him.” Needless to say, this grave warning was enough for Mike to drastically change his handle. “And so then he decided, ‘man I need to change my handle.’” Jerry explained while Mike remained strangely quiet. “‘I need to have my handle mean something sort of dangerous so these guys stay away.’ So he switches it up to Deadly Peach.”
“I was like 16,” Mike finally chimed in. “I ended up with Gabriel and it’s served me well so far.” Thank God too, otherwise his son might have been named Deadly Peach, instead of Gabe.
So why settle on his current handle? It seemed to him that after requests for dirty, sexual acts via sweaty chat rooms, the right thing to do would be to turn to angels.
“All the stuff we did before Penny-Arcade, we were actually trying to do serious comic books and our stories always revolved around angels and demons and I was just always into angel lore,” Mike said. “So I ended up with Gabriel.”
Penance
In 2003 Penny-Arcade, much like Superman, decided to use their powers for good. They asked the gaming community to step up and show the world that we’re not all anti-social baby killers. With that, Child’s Play was born.
Child’s Play asked the readers of PA to donate money or toys for the Seattle Children’s Hospital to help make Christmas a little brighter for some sick kids. To the surprise of right-wing Christian groups and loud-mouthed lawyers everywhere, gamers stepped up and helped in amazing proportions to the tune of $250,000 in games, toys and cash. All of this was organized and executed in just over a month.
2004 came and after 2003’s staggering numbers, Mike and Jerry realized they had to raise the stakes. To better 2003’s Child’s Play, they added hospitals from four more cities that would benefit from this mighty charity; Oakland, San Diego, Houston and Washington D.C. Some may wonder why they picked the hospitals they did.
“The reality is that those are the only ones that got back to us,” Jerry explained. “A lot of hospitals weren’t willing. We say the F word a lot, you know. The things that we do under ordinary circumstances aren’t things you would associate with charities. I understand that.”
Those five hospitals benefited greatly, as gamers, businesses and web personalities like Websnark and Shaw Island showered children with over $310,000 in cash and prizes.
Let’s see Monty Hall top that.
The duo expects the program to continue to grow and help more kids. When asked what they expect for the event in 2005, Mike said, “Same as this year’s, just bigger, more hospitals, more money, more toys.”
On Things Nintendo
2005 promises to be one of the biggest years ever for gaming. Aside from three new consoles hitting the scene, serious questions have been raised as to what will happen concerning Nintendo and Electronic Arts. Nintendo has only hinted at what their new console, the Revolution, can do, creating wild speculation.
“God only knows what that thing can do or will look like,” said Jerry, exasperated. Very little concrete knowledge is available as to what the system is going to be and everyone wants to know, proving once again Nintendo’s superior ability to power a hype engine.
“I’m wondering what they have actually in store outside the hype. I wonder what they actually have brewing with that system.”
But it’s hard to tell if that’s enough to keep the company in the console game when they only release three or four games worth owning a year. Mike thinks Nintendo’s future might be in the hands of some mutant pets.
“As long as they have Pokemon, I think they’ll be alright,” he said.
“They could just ride Pikachu,” adds Jerry.
Will that be enough, though? Can a creepy yellow rodent be the key to keeping a company that began gaming for a lot of us, above water? It’s not necessarily Pikachu that is keeping Nintendo relevant; it’s their ability to innovate.
“It’s like they started out with this super-vague notion with the DS as well as you’ll recall,” Mike said. “And that ended up being kind of an interesting system.”
Like the concept of LucasArts putting out a sequel to Day of the Tentacle, we have to keep hope alive.
“I choose to clap my hands and believe that everything will be alright.” Jerry said.
Goliath
Up until 2004, Microsoft held court as the archetype of what it was to be a monopoly in the gaming industry, trying to buy every developer that wasn’t nailed down. Electronic Arts remedied this problem by trying to buy everything else that wasn’t nailed down. The main difference between MS and EA in this area, according to Jerry and Mike, is end product.
“So far I’ve been more impressed with the stuff that Microsoft has been putting out, as far as the quality of their games once they purchase a company.” Mike said. “I just don’t trust EA to make good stuff most of the time.”
Aside from the exclusivity deal EA made with the NFL in 2004, they recently made maneuvers that could definitely be seen as an attempt to take over UbiSoft, the developer behind Splinter Cell and Myst. Mike and Jerry both seem to be negative as to how it’ll turn out.
“I think it’s obvious that EA wants them pretty bad.” Mike said.
Jerry said. “But I think it’s only a matter of time. They’re really, really, really, really, really, really, really big.”
“UbiSoft is a pretty big publisher,” Mike added. “But they still make good s*** most of the time and it would be a bummer to see them get bought up like that.”
The Next Level
The comic has seen the birth of Child’s Play, the Penny-Arcade Expo (PAX), miscellaneous feuds with random miscreants and, in terms of actual living things, Mike’s son: Gabe.
Child’s Play obviously shows no signs of stopping. Plans are already underway as Bellevue, Washington hides its jewelry and prepares for the onslaught of twitchy fingered gamers for PAX ’05. Lord knows the feuds will not stop as they continue to piss off thin-skinned people and Mike’s son will eventually be old enough to kill hookers in GTA himself.
“Part of me wants to get him into games early,” Mike kids. “But then I’m worried that when he gets to that stage where he has to rebel against his dad, he’ll push aside video games because that’s what I’m into.”
So that leaves whatever new stuff Mike and Jerry can throw at their faithful readers. Tim Buckley over at Ctrl+Alt+Del is currently in the works for making a game based on his gamer webcomic. Will the Cardboard Tube Samurai be making an appearance in the pixeled medium eventually? Highly unlikely. “I think it would be fun and we certainly have ideas,” Jerry said. “I think it would be hard to take us seriously as commentors if we were also doing that. The fact of the matter is that I think that part of what makes us a source for video games commentary is the fact that we don’t produce them. I think that we will stay in a position right now where we just play video games and talk about them.”
But there’s always a possibility. “You know, if EA comes to me tomorrow with a huge check and they want to make Penny-Arcade Snowboarding… its hard to say,” Mike added.
“Yeah. We love checks,” Jerry said.
They will continue to work for companies like UbiSoft, though, making comics for release titles like they did for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Brothers in Arms. Unfortunately, they won’t say what any of those would be. But they did say that their stuff will eventually be published in paperback.
“We will be making our way into comic books,” Mike said. “Like actual print comic books pretty soon. I think I’m allowed to say that. But it probably won’t be Penny-Arcade right away.”
Part of a Culture
Penny-Arcade started off as a crazy obsession to bother magazines and write comics about their passion for gaming. Seven years later, its turned into an obsession to scare game developers and write comics about their passion for gaming. It’s also become a meeting ground for gamers everywhere to just catch up on video game news, read a comic related to something they enjoy and just hang out in the forums.
“I see it as more of a community site then anything,” Mike said.
But it’s more than just a community site; it’s become a part of gaming culture itself. Instead of just reflecting on the gaming industry, they now are being reflected on themselves. You can hardly play a game online anymore without someone mentioning PA, or jump on a forum without seeing at least one Fruit F*cker user icon, but to bring up their influence is to get a lesson in genuine humility.
“I’m not really steering it (the gaming culture). I’m not at the helm. We still just hang out, play video games and write comics,” Jerry added. “The biggest change is that there’s more people looking at them (the comic).”
They might not agree, but there’s no denying their ability to alter the community that they love with a couple of drawings and an online diary. And they get paid to do it. How much do you hate them now?
“It’s pretty good as far as jobs go,” Mike admits. “You could do worse.”
