Christian and Gunnar from Stay Forever leaf through issue 09/2000.
The GameStar issue 09/2000 made us blush for years. Not because the leopard motif on the cover looked eminently ugly, but because of the article the big cat was part of: a preview of Black & White.
“Peter Molyneux combines three worlds: development strategy, 3D splendor and noble Pokémon,” we rejoiced on the cover at the time. Only a few months later, however, it became apparent that the hype was crumbling. In the test, we gave Black & White one of the lowest scores in the world: 84 points.
The preview in issue 09/2000 was written by Gunnar Lott, who described these and other misconduct in the magazine review podcast by stay forever discussed with Christian Schmidt while leafing through the magazine.
If you want to leaf through it, you can of course find the PDF in the GameStar Plus magazine archive.
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Chris and Gunnar even have words of praise for the cover, even for the low-poly big cat, who was chosen by Gunnar and then “brutalized” with a scar and a snack villager.
Gunnar also talks about his visit to Lionhead and Peter Molyneux in England – and the bad pictures from Black & White, which only looked good in motion. That’s why the creature was always so huge in official images of the game.
And Gunnar was thrilled and enthused: »So many great ideas in one game!« Today he admits that he was dazzled by the game. Black & White was not a big hit in terms of play.
But at least Black & White was released for the PC at all – two other games in the preview part of this issue were only released for the consoles afterwards, a Buffy game was even exclusive to Xbox.
Good news was emblazoned in the news section: After Microsoft took over Bungie, Halo should not only come for the new Xbox, but “definitely for the PC too”. Ultimately with a two-year delay, but so be it.
In issue 09/2000 we also report on the first tournament of the now almost forgotten GameStar clan league – according to Gunnar a “great, tragic story” because the league was neglected by the publisher and ultimately collapsed.
And that, although we were already broadcasting live streams back then – with one frame per second if you were sitting on a leased line!
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