Published two years after the highly acclaimed Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8 he certainly had a tall order upon his release. While remaining a very valid title, the 1999 JRPG failed to hold a candle to its predecessor, but that doesn't mean there's a lack of players who still managed to appreciate the experience.
Among the fans of Final Fantasy 8 we also find the director of the “Video Game History Foundation” library, Phil Salvador. Salvador recently created a site dedicated to avid fans of the Square-Enix gamewhich proclaims that the 1999 JRPG is simply “the best“. Sharing some interesting anecdotes about Final Fantasy 8, Salvador also told a rather funny story about how the North American magazine GameNow has been making fun of a Final Fantasy VIII hater for two years. GameNOW has 27 publications in total, but its history spans 20 years, as it was initially known as EGM2, then Expert Gamer.
As Salvador explains, the first issue of the relaunched magazine it contained a letter from Tim Spollena reader expressing his dislike of Final Fantasy VIII and the fact that, when Expert Gamer had previously covered the game, tended to always use the same screenshot in which Artemisia's throne room appeared.
“I have to tell you that there is something that bothers me,” Spollen's letter reads. “In what seems like every issue of Expert Gamer, I've found the same screenshot of Final Fantasy VIII over and over again. Let me express my feelings: Final Fantasy VIII sucked compared to Final Fantasy 7 and 9. If you're going to show the same screen over and over again, at least have a good one. However, I know that you will probably bring it up again just to annoy me.”
No sooner said than done: the letter kicked off a magazine campaign for print the screenshot as many times as possible. Despite the magazine's assurances that “we honestly don't know what you're talking about. We haven't noticed anything of the sort” and the statement that “we certainly won't publish anything in our magazine that deliberately seeks to upset our readers,” it was clearly done an effort to ensure the image was included in every subsequent issue of GameNOW.
In January 2004, publisher Ziff Davis closed GameNOW, and in the final issue, the screenshot was printed as a full-page poster. This was the final touch, you might say? Well, not really. As Salvador pointed out during one of his shifts in the VGHF library, when all issues of GameNOW from 2003 onwards are placed next to each other, this image appears.