Yesterday, my epic article about the influence of the Golden Age of Japanese RPGs (from the SNES to the PlayStation 2) went up on Kotaku, and it’s been a blast seeing so many people reach out on Twitter and message boards to tell me about their similar experiences. I spoke to several SFF writers, such as Scott Lynch, Tamsyn Muir, Peng Shepherd, and Troy L. Wiggins, about their experience growing up as gamers and how that’s influenced their popular SFF work.

The final version of “How Japanese RPGs Inspired A New Generation Of Fantasy Authors” clocked in at a weighty 5,500 words, but the original draft was over 10,000 words long before we started whipping it into shape. And, even then, there was a TON of great content from the authors I interviewed that didn’t find a home in the piece. They didn’t fit into the overall narrative, they were too much a divergence from the main path, etc. So, I wanted to use this space to pull a few of those stories forward and given them the home on the Internet they deserve.

If you haven’t already, go and give it a read, and then come back here for the juicy outtakes after the jump.

Thanks for reading!