Jamie Bunker

To do

• I'm pretty sure all my "he's this old at these times" information is correct, but make sure to double-check those years against his month of birth (he might have had a birthday before/after these notable dates, depending.)
• Photoshop the red text out of his portrait?
• Make a decision on whether certain inline images should also be included in an article's Images/Gallery section. I've thought about this for a while, and while it kinda depends on context and usage, I've been deferring on the side of including them for the sake of completeness, and because it feels weird to have an Images section that doesn't list all the article's images... but again, all depends on usage, right? I don't know, give this some thought and come back to this, at least to make a definitive decision on it.
• Figure out if there's a way to get promotional material .PDFs to display the selected page as a thumbnail instead of the red icon.
• Gaiares photoshoots were in 1990. Do a little research into Gaiares' localization timeline, when Reno Products started working on it, and whether those photoshoots were early, mid, or late 90s.

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; modern identity. Not a section on memes, but a focus on the fact that part of his/Gaiares' modern identity association is pretty much a meme, but in a "we're laughing with him, not at him" sense. Like as much as there's all this history, THAT'S the main method people are experiencing this game; that's the channel they usually get exposed to Gaiares through, and how that's kinda given this relatively-straight laced shmup a tone of charming levity, or something like that.
• Please (do not) say the ad failed to help "renovate" the company's situation. Please.
• 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 new; 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 etc.)
• Mention of how Renovation Products used spokespeople like this, and the term "professional gamer".
• 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."

CartridgeCulture (talk) 00:25, 20 September 2021 (EDT)