The Webcomic Overlook #135: Virtual Shackles

It’s the dream of every little gamer to want to grow up to be a video game programmer. That’s because they don’t know about the 20 hour work days and the suffocating deadlines and the bucketloads of shovelware that needs coding that makes you eventually want to give it all up and take a job selling mattresses. No, when you don’t know any better, programming is all about seeing your imagination come to life on a video game screen and, to a far lesser extent, dreaming of the a chance to date Playboy model Stevie Case.

Jeremy Vinar and Mike Fahmie are two such programmers. Both have worked around the gaming industry, toiling on illustrious content like High School Musical 3: Senior Year DANCE! (XBox 360, PS2, Wii, and PC), Tomb Raider: Underworld (Nintendo DS), and Superman Returns (Nintendo DS, Nintendo GBA).

While their computing efforts may not exactly make them candidates for the next PC Gamer “New Game Gods” feature, these two do stand a chance at making their mark on webcomics with Virtual Shackles, with Vinar doing the art and Fahmie doing the humor. Some of the strips look like they’re based on their their experiences, since the two protagonists, Orion and Jack, also work as video game company employees. Of course, as with all video game comics that part’s just window dressing for the multitude of parodies and caricatures of popular characters, the life blood of the video game webomic industry.