Today, February 28, 2003, marks the 4th anniversary of the LamerKatz website. Keeping a website running for 4 solid years with consistent updating* is no easy task (I define "consistent updating" to mean at least one update every 4 years), and I think LamerKatz has grown to be one of the best sources for gaming humor on the Internet. I’ve had the chance to not only expose the world to my own wacky sense of humor, but also to act as a gathering point for similar wackiness done by others.

A lot of exciting stuff has happened in the past 4 years. As the site’s creator (I’m DarkNova, if you didn’t know, and I’m still the only person that does any real work around here), I know nearly every square pixel of the site by heart. But the real fun comes in knowing what lies just beneath the surface of LamerKatz. The story behind the story. The secrets those Wall Street fat cats don’t want you to know about!

And what juicy secrets these are! …Well, not really, you’ll probably be bored out of your mind unless you are some kind of fanatic about this page. The good news is that even if you’re not, some of these things are pretty funny. "Like what?" you ask?

Bloopers, hidden messages, never-before-seen cancelled projects, inside jokes, amazing coincidences, and anything else remotely interesting that I could think of that’s happened since opening the page.

So, without further delay, let’s get on with the show!

12) DarkNova snuck a picture of himself into the H4x0r-d00d Interview!

Security camera footage? Or just DarkNova sneaking himself into the background?

One of the first features to hit the LamerKatz site was the (now incredibly old) Interview with H4x0r-d00d. The big joke here is that H4x0r-d00d (or "|-|@X0®-|)00|)" as he spells it, but I don’t have enough patience to type that more than once) talks entirely in some barely-readable hacker language, which I like to call "l337sp33k". In case you’re curious, no, I didn’t type the interview by hand… I wrote a simple MS Word macro to go through and change the characters. This was a lifesaver because without it, it probably would have taken me the full 4 years to write that interview!

H4x0r-d00d’s real name "Josh Phatman", is partially based my real life friend named Josh, who frequently used the nick "PhattyX". Amongst the grainy, out-of-focus pictures that supposedly show pictures of H4x0r-d00d is one that looks like it shows footage from a security camera at a LAN party. Notice anything odd about this picture?

No? That’s okay, I don’t even know if I could recognize myself by looking at the top of my head, but the truth is that the picture came from a LAN party called "Fragfest", the first commercial LAN party I ever attended. Through some random bit of luck, I managed to get into one of the pictures taken during the event, which was later posted on their website. I’m the tall guy on the left, in the green shirt, looking down.

Yep, that's me in the green shirt. Look how youthful I was!

Oh, and that other guy next to me, in the blue? That’s Josh (the real one, which H4x0r-d00d was based off). Amazing, huh? I have no idea who the guy is that I ended up "using" as H4x0r-d00d, but hopefully he won’t mind.

11) I wouldn’t drink the "Orange Smoothie!"

Looks delicious, no? You'd never guess what's in it.

Thanks to a rather humorous post on alt.games.quake3 by teddee about how the contents of the blender don’t obey the laws of gravity, I formulated my plan to debunk the Orange Smoothie Productions physics engine by using my brand new digital camera, some smoothie-like substance, and my roommate’s 1970’s-style blender. This seemed like the simplest of ideas, but proved to be easier said than done.

To put it mildly, have you ever tried to formulate a flamingly bright florescent orange liquid using only normal household products? Now I’m no chemist, but I figured that the right mixture of ingredients should do the trick. Minutes later, after using a few cups of milk, several servings of ground chili pepper, and about half a bottle of ketchup, I realized I wasn’t going to get anything resembling fluorescent orange. In fact, I’d be lucky to get something other that "diarrhea brown." No, using orange paint wasn’t an option (both because I didn’t have any and because I didn’t want to ingest paint particles next time I used the blender).

Luckily, some computer savvy saved the day. I took the picture (no, I don’t have telekinesis; I used some plastic soda tops to prop the blender up like that), and with a few simple paintbrush maneuvers in Adobe Photoshop, came out with the sort-of-bright-orange you see there. I did try making it brighter but it started looking too fake, and I was trying for realism.

And what happened to the "smoothie"? I did manage to dump it into the sink without gagging, but all that ketchup just didn’t want to go down the drain… it was pretty nasty.

10) The other LamerKatz Chronicles blooper!

If you’ve read the first Year in Review article, you probably heard about how the original release of LamerKatz Chronicles stored the "female/nude" skin in the wrong place, which caused the game not to recognize it, which caused Pr0n-GuY to run around yanking his crotch at grunts instead of nude women… not exactly what I had in mind, to say the least. But after watching the movie approximately 2000 more times since it’s release, I’ve managed to find one other blooper that seems to have gotten by undetected (though I’m sure after reading this, you’ll claim to have known about it all along). This one isn’t nearly as entertaining, but hey, I’m a picky guy…

Grenade or rocket? Sorry to say, we'll never know.

Around the 7:10 mark, we find Pr0n-GuY doing his usual thing in front of a ladder leading down to the water. A nude female leaps out of the water and up the ladder, clearly armed with a rocket launcher. Then she fires… but what comes out? Not a rocket, but a grenade! At least, I think it’s a grenade. The object is only visible for a spit second, although the grenade "bonk" launch sound can clearly be heard.

I don’t have any idea how this happened. It may have cropped up somewhere in the demo editing, caused by cropping together multiple demos filmed at different times… but I did that with all the movies and this is the only odd occurrence I’ve found. So, was she armed with a rocket launcher or a grenade launcher?? It will forever be a mystery… unless that player happens to come forward and reveal the truth!

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