Here’s our first junket interview to be released—our talk with Fred Gallagher, the artist behind the Megatokyo comic! Megatokyo was, as readers might know, a formative influence in my early fandom years at the turn of the last decade. I was able to talk to Fred about his influences from the visual novel/dating sim scene, his thoughts about current anime, his artistic habits, and even something about Ping vs Hatsune Miku. Check it out!
It’s strange to think how different fandom was back in 2000 when Megatokyo started. To use a specific example, there were maybe a dozen visual novels and romance games in English at the time. Almost everything was poorly written porn games, which didn’t seem to mesh with the general audience anime/manga which were already common at the time. It seemed very unlikely that any all-ages games with complex gameplay, such as the Sakura Wars and Tokimeki Memorial franchises, would ever see English release.
In 2011, there’s still a good number of poorly written porn games. However, we have more official English translations, including a few which fans are more likely to discuss with friends (such as Higurashi, Ever17, and Demonbane). We have one professional translation of a Sakura Wars game, even though the franchise’s best days are over. We have fan made translations of the first two Tokimeki Memorial Girls Side games. And we have English speaking fans who are making their own games, and sometimes releasing them commercially.
I remember him from back before 2000 from the Kimagure Orange Road Mailing List before he was famous.