2003 - I want YOU to be a HERO

At the end of 2002, I quit my job at Broadcom and began working at Cryptic Studios, a small game developer who is developing City of Heroes.

City of Heroes is an online role-playing game where you get to create and play a hero. (Note that "superhero" is actually a jointly held trademark of Marvel and DC Comics. We can't use the word superhero to describe our game, leading to the silly sounding "super-powered heroes." But I digress...)

And so, I wanted to call on everyone to find their inner hero and come to the 2003 event. I immediately thought of the famous Uncle Sam "I want YOU" poster.

It turns out that CoH has a perfect character to replace Uncle Sam on the poster. CoH has a huge and very complete backplot (which you can go to the website to learn about). One of the first heroes to appear openly in the world was Statesman, who basically opened the door for others to follow.

Statesman's red, white, and blue costume and position as defacto spokesman for heroes made him perfect for the poster and for Fourth of July.

So, I begged one of our artists (thanks Jeremy) to make me a stern, pointing Statesman. I then took this image and put in the text, borders, and so on (thanks Paint Shop Pro).

Then, once again to Kinko's where I made color copies of the originals. It turns out the color copies are pretty expensive (though less expensive than having them print them from computer files). I should have just printed them with the color printer. A brand new set of color ink would have cost less than the copies. The copies look really good, though, and were on high-wuality paper. It also only took 10 minutes to make the copies.

Finally, after sending them, I had a concern that people would just throw them away without looking at them. The exterior looks an awful lot like junk-mail from "Freedom Phalanx Recruitment."