2012 Halloween Special

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2012 Halloween Special

This is something we did just for fun.

HomeStation tends to be, on balance, a fairly serious publication. We tackle Home’s product releases, social issues and business trends, all in our pursuit of elevating the overall level of Home community journalism. And, in recent times, we’ve made a concerted effort to deliver more news and insights from Home’s developers, as well as notable parties throughout the gaming world. Given how our audience has grown since we began this trend — HSM is now read by more than 12,000 unique visitors per month, in 188 different countries (and forty percent of our audience is outside the United States) — we know that we’re delivering the sort of content you’ve wanted to experience.

But HomeStation is also designed to be a platform for creative and artistic expression. We are, after all, a community publication. So, for Halloween, we decided to stretch ourselves in a new direction: creative writing.

Journalism — including the sort of long-form literary journalism HSM employs, a format inspired by people such as Gay Talese — requires a very different set of tools than fiction writing. And just as we stretch ourselves with machinima and other endeavors, we must stretch ourselves as writers. Halloween seemed as good a time as any; after all, who doesn’t enjoy a good ghost story?

So this Halloween Special isn’t a regular HSM issue; it’s just something we did for fun. A compilation of spooky stories, set within Home, written by the enormously talented HomeStation team. It also gave us a wonderful opportunity to feature something from the Home community on the cover — and considering the last time we ran a community-related cover was just over a year ago, when we featured our friends over at PSTalent (who have gone on to become a legitimate production house in their own right), we felt it was important to tip our hat to the Home community.

Spooky VICKIE, by Seth-Ris

The cover art is a combination of what Mike and BONZO came up with (I think they take a perverse pleasure in coming up with new and increasingly bizarre ways to turn my avatar into Home’s equivalent of Alfred E. Neuman), coupled with a fantastic “Spooky VICKIE” piece of original artwork from HSM reader Seth-Ris, who won our recent art contest which was sponsored by Lockwood. Lockwood’s been exceptionally generous with us over the years — even allowing us to run a contest to come up with VICKIE’s canonical backstory, in which the winner (tdarb) was published inside PlayStation Home itself, via the Gift Machine — and so when Mike suggested putting the contest winner on the cover, it was a no-brainer. We also used another finalist entry, from HSM reader fonix, as our back cover — and all of the entries are featured in the pages of this issue.

What’s also liberally sprinkled throughout this issue are codes. Lots of codes. Yes, they’re all single-use, and yes, they’re all for SCEA Home only (we’re holding our SCEE codes for an upcoming special event), but we’ve hidden a whole bunch of ‘em throughout the issue. Some of them can be can assembled immediately, whereas some of them will have their final segments tweeted on Halloween itself — so you’ll need to write down what you see in this issue and have that list ready to go when the tweets are sent out on the last day of October!

We hope you enjoy HSM’s Halloween Special; it was fun for the team to divert from their usual news coverage to pen some original stories, and they pulled it off brilliantly whilst still maintaining the workload required to keep HomeStation running. There are a lot of very entertaining stories in this issue, and we hope you find them to your liking.

From all of us at the HomeStation, thank you again for coming with us on this ride.

NorseGamer