Talk:Jamie Bunker

To do

Rerelease rambling

• Okay dang. The rerelease. Okay, so: how do I even start this... this isn't a rerelease of Gaiares. It's almost a release of Jamie Bunker featuring Gaiares. ... Them contracting Bunker after 31 years to do this, them getting him in the studio, them dedicating the money to contracts and a photographer and lighting and possibly a studio, but regardless- not an insignificant sum of money and effort. Them utilizing Bunker as the very core of this game's marketing! And straight up that's both awesome and smart. Ive actually got a (very poorly written) thing about this a few paragraphs down i think... oh frick maybe not, if I can remember its the "laughing with him" thing about how a lotta the western world gets introduced to gaiares through memes, and how thats actually a really cool thing because its both allaround pretty wholesome and its a very like- easy to celebrate piece of gaming history (and f yes that interview's gonna do a TON on that front). And also charming and genuine etc. Okay got off track but yeaah Retro-Bit honestly played this one really smart for identifying Bunker as the strongest point of association the western world has with the shmup property they acquired, and then using him as the tentpole (or some other analogy) for this campaign.
• The shirt! frick I knew this article wasnt finished
• Dude dude. a jamie. bunker. interview. ahhh theres so much that needs to be covered now. where do I even begin: one of the early mega drive's classic shmups is getting rereleased through the vehicle of a meme consisting of a 17-year old game tester smiling at you with his mullet!! And that it's awesome and the best thing they could do, and by including these extras, they're not only putting out a rerelease of a classic game that deserves the plays (and recognition and further interest in its history generated by the rerelease itself), but ensuring that all these good memories that everyone has of Bunker and his silly charming Gaiares ad can be experienced by others as well. I know it sounds like I'm overselling it, but culture is significant in different amounts to different people, and if you're going to write about that, you kinda have to take everything seriously and straight-faced. So we get this article. I'm both rambling and talking in circles, I'll dump this all onto the floor later and clean out the workable parts. But anyway- tbh, and depending on how you look at it, Bunker's inclusion here is- actually probably more notable than Gaiares itself. Rereleases are awesome, and this one looks like it's gonna be done very well, but in all fairness its not the first release, nor it is something thats aimed at a need (youve got emulators or flashcarts or just picking one up off ebay). It's more of a shrine (a Jamie Bunker shrin- stop) really, a collector's edition for more collecting's sake. And nothing wrong with that, but on its own, its just a cool collector's-oriented release of a cool old game...

But for them to go and include history and culture with ittttttt. my dudes. again, rereleases have happened and will happen, but information on Jamie is scarce. And that means the detail that we can go into here is also limited, which also limits the extent of what we're able to write about this shared culture. And when someone comes to us looking up info, out of curiosity or research, it's also going to limit the- "picture" of what we're trying to present to them... if i'm still making any sense. So this is huge on that front, a very cool thing.

Writing

• Summarize entire notability, consolidate into one sentence, and stick that at the end of the current summary.
• Brief section about the shirt (maybe second paragraph in Gaiares advertising campaign section?)
• Legacy section; "notable mullet"; that fake cover with his face, etc.
• From the 1up.com article: "James Bunker didn’t stay in the game business long — he had to finish high school, after all." So this tells us what we already knew; he didn't have much (any) other work in the video game industry after this. However, the finishing high school part is telling... he would have been... 17 when he finished high school (maybe 18?) Graduation was in 92, so is 1up.com saying he left Reno in/around 92? I don't want to read between the lines too much here but, why would that date be specifically written into the article? I have to do a little more digging but I think it's safe to say Bunker left Reno around 1992... which is right around the time the company went out of business... meaning Bunker was there pretty much the whole time. I wonder if he stayed until the end, or left shortly before they closed. Did they downsize upon being merged into SoA? He'd probably be able to answer a lot of this himself; he probably saw a loooot of interesting history.... note to self, get in touch with him.
• Thread with guy who made that fake cover that got so popular. Also, a mention about how ACTUAL REPRODUCTION CARTS using that cover are starting to pop up (and not just people being self-aware, but actual bootleggers)
• Mention of how Renovation Products used spokespeople like this, and the term "professional gamer". (and that Ciolek article on David Izat.)
• I've been researching this for only a few hours and I've already seen two separate posts say something like "those ads were cheesy but gosh Bunker just seems so wholesome and genuine". The Kid Fenris article even writes up a whole section on that feeling. I think part of the reason we remember him so well is because of how genuine he is. He's smiley and happy, and in a world of crazy/juvenile/inane advertisements, I think this was probably kind of refreshing. Which ties into the professional gamer term; it was their advertising's way of saying "Hey, you've seen a million ads where people just make up abstract shit about how their game rocks, how bout we just put a real nerd on the page and have him tell you he enjoys the gameplay." Which I totally get, and honestly the Renovation Products article should eventually have a section dedicated to this period in their history where they did this kinda ad style. Anyway! Minor mention about how he's genuine and real and how that helps, and how people are beginning to recognize that as a growing modern legacy.
• Objectively work in bits of this quote from Ciolek about the later Reno producer David Izat ad: "And there’s the difference. The Gaiares ad presents Jamie Bunker as average '90s guy who just really likes a particular Genesis shooter. The Arcus Odyssey ad transforms a normal Renovation game producer into a shadowy nerd-goblin whose obscene, knowing grin would strike terror into any child paging through a new Gamepro issue." and later "And David Izat probably didn’t deserve to be turned into that game's ghoulish overseer."
• Do we host web archives? I haven't seen any- and tbh theyre usually too large in filesize, broken in content, or spread over multiple weird pages and templates that it doesnt work for a lot of stuff. But a lot of companies are going with single-page stuff. Retro-Bit's Gaiares release page came out to 11.5mb, and it looks just like the real thing. and at this point... its essentially just a really long pdf file. And now that I'm thinking, a lot of Japanese games get simple one-page releases (or a couple subpages that are easily archived), especially as you go back in time.
• dtahaiotr

CartridgeCulture (talk) 05:04, 18 November 2021 (EST)