The Escapist - Gaming's Fringe Cults

The latest Escapist looks at Gaming's Fringe Cults and who would have guessed that NMA would be one of the three groups interviewed and discussed?

Started on Geocities nearly a decade ago by a Serbian named "Miroslav" (who only left the site due to the Bosnian War), NMA has built a reputation as the definitive, and most vocal (read: kinda mean), Fallout community on the web. And to hear Thomas "Brother None" Beekers, Sebastian "Silencer" Lenartowicz and Sander Philipse - NMA's administrators - tell it, they're not going away any time soon. "With the times, our goals have changed," Beekers says. "Originally, we were formed to be as supportive as we could be of Fallout, and this was great between Fallout 1 and 2, before Tactics' release dashed our hopes of a good spin-off and no new release was forthcoming (there were two Fallout 3 start-ups that were cancelled before Van Buren [Black Isle's Fallout 3 tech demo, hosted on NMA]).

"Now, we're mostly evangelists of recreating the original Fallout experience. We try to convince the media and publishers that there is a viable niche market for Fallout-like games that has been under-serviced for years."

There's also another piece on gaming culture at The Escapist that's not really related to our coverage but it was written by Corvus Elrond who occasionally posts on RPGWatch.  Titled The Mythology of You, it looks at common forum personalities.