Our goal is to celebrate, encourage, and advance the art of gaming. To that end, our daily business spans a few categories:
- Merchandise is, of course, our bread and butter. We design, produce, print, package, and ship a huge variety of merchandise from our office in Tucson, AZ.
- Events are how we reach out to our community.
- Fanfests are celebrations of the classic games we grew up with. Once or twice a year we'll pick a game and organize a play-through during which our colleagues and friends broadcast live from all over the world. The community turns out en masse to chat, play along, and submit art. There is usually pizza.
- Conventions are a yearly tradition for us. Currently we attend two: PAX East (Boston) each spring and PAX Prime (Seattle) each Fall.
- Charity events are our way of giving back. With a little help from our friends at Desert Bus, The Speed Gamers, and the Starmen.Net community, we donate thousands of dollars each year to charities like Child's Play, ACT Today!, The Michael J. Fox Foundation, and Civic Force.
- Community is our lifeblood!
- The Fangamer Podcast is our weekly gaming podcast. We bring on special guests each week to join us in talking about current events in gaming, gems from the past, and what's awesome/new.
- The Fangamer Forum is an advanced forum software package we wrote from scratch for the Starmen.Net Forum. We recently licensed the software to ArenaNet for use in their Guild Wars Support Forum.
- Videos are one of our favorite extracurricular activities.
History
Fangamer was founded in 2007 by a group of friends who grew up running an EarthBound fan site called Starmen.Net. We started off with hopes/plans of using Starmen.Net's software as a basis for other fansites, but we quickly realized that advertising wasn't going to pay the bills.
We launched the Fangamer Store in August 2008 with four products (two shirts, a pin set, and a mug). Within hours the orders were flooding in, and it quickly became apparent that there was a huge demand for merchandise inspired by the older SNES-era games we grew up with. We have worked diligently ever since to create merchandise inspired by (and in honor of) our favorite games.
2009 was a busy year of expansion during which we finished/shipped The MOTHER 3 Handbook, brought on our second full-time employee, and moved from a spare bedroom into an office.
In 2010 we brought on our third and fourth full-timers and began working with small, independent gaming companies including 2 Player Productions and Far From Subtle. We also nailed down a booth at PAX East -- the start of a yearly tradition.
So far in 2011 we've been working hard to expand our partnerships with independent game developers (like Vblank) and other small gaming companies. We brought on a variety of part-time employees and have been preparing our fifth full-timer to show up after Christmas. We've also managed to cram the office with more merchandise than it should probably hold.
What does 2012 hold? We don't know, but we heard there was gonna be pizza, so we'll be there.