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Prologue 3: The Lansing Story
By Schala
Because our list is centered around a Square game, many of us are necessarily Square fans. We eagerly read and share news about Square, its upcoming games, its workings, its problems, and, of course, its employees. Nobuo Uematsu is one name that comes to mind...
...But how many have heard of Ben Lansing? Sometime in February 1997, or even earlier than that, a person subscribed who called himself "Lansing" and claimed to be a Square employee. I, being under the demands of college and what not, didn't pay attention to many of the posts, but suffice it to say that a lot of people on our mailing list did not believe Lansing's claims. I don't know how it escalated, but it did.
What he did to try and prove his claim was to send us a spoiler of FF7, which described the scene at the end of disk 1. Lansing said he helped with the translation, that when the game came out we were going to see his name in the credits, and that he expected some apologies after that. Whatever he hoped the spoiler would prove, it didn't convince a lot of people. Eventually, we stopped hearing from him, although we weren't sure whether he had actually unsubscribed from our list, or whether he just didn't post.
I deleted his post when I found out it was a spoiler. However, someone else on the list saved the post, and MUCH later forwarded it to the list again, saying that what Lansing had described was very different from what actually went on. I didn't read the spoiler until I acquired the English version of FF7 and had played past the first disk, and I had to agree with that member. Although Lansing's description was generally what happened, the exact dialogue was different, the actions were different, the movements were different. Several list members suggested that all Lansing had done was get a copy of the Japanese FF7 and translate it from there.
Thanks to his editorial that appeared on the Unofficial Squaresoft page, we found out this is exactly what he did. Lansing was no Square employee. Apparently he was trying to see how many people he could fool into believing him. But apparently he underestimated the volume of mail he'd receive from the FFML, and so he didn't really have time to put his plan into action on us.
Oh well.
Back to the FFML fanfic page, my main fanfic page, my Final Fantasy Page, or my main page (dang that's a lotta pages! ^_^)
Send me your comments! I'm big on typos, too, so if you spot one, e-mail me!
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