Now, I suppose all you nay-sayers out there are saying (or nay-saying I suppose) that I put this link here in a sad attempt to keep up with "Sporkman".  Not quite, my furry little friend.  As it is, the idea of a "Raiders" computer game is even older than the comic itself.  

It all started long ago, in a time when Britney Spears had only three songs that sounded exactly the same (as opposed to the five out there now) Elian Gonzalez was barely news and Alan Keyes was sad and desperate, but still not quite pathetic.  Yes, I'm talking about the "20th" Century.  1998 to be exact, when I discovered a little game engine called "SCRAMM".  In fact, if you go to the SCRAMM links page right now, you'll find a link called Booyah Games.  Yeah, that's me.  And that epic adventure they talk about is "In Search of the Funky Monkey", which was to be our showcase game.

Now, I'm sure your all asking (or leaving) what does this all have to do with "Raiders of the Lost Punchline"?  Well, as it turns out a game is nothing without characters and a plot.  For a plot, I decided it would be fun to spoof those Indiana Jones movies I'm so fond of.  The plot in detail would find a young (and rather incompetent) archaeologist attempting to find a lost artifact (the Funky Monkey, respectively) that could destroy the world, before the dastardly villains did.  All of this was to play out over exotic locales, a cast of hundreds, daring stunts and puzzles and enough laughs to keep you, well, laughing.

And that young (and rather incompetent) archaeologist?  Theodore Valour, a hero I named in the Eddie Valiant mold.  (Just for future reference the villain's name was Zadist.)  Anyways, after a while I decided that Valour was a stupid name, so I changed it to Arbuckle.  Simple as that.  And a hero was born.

So where does the comic come in?  Well, my friend and partner decided to try to get us affiliates since the only people visiting our page were us.  The search began (and ended) with the then titled "Legends of Sporkman".  That was way back when John Troutman had his old web design.  Even older than the one now.  Yeah, I remember it.  Anyways, to make a long story short, since Sporkman was a comic based web page, my partner thought that I should write an online comic on our page to make our new affiliate happy.  I agreed to do a weekly comic and then realised that I had no idea what to write about.  The characters in the game meet for the first time during the course of the action, and I wasn't about to change the script.  So we both decided to create new characters.

Roland was the first to be created.  I thought a rival for Ted would be interesting for stories in the future.  Sandy Ferrell came next, though I later changed her name to Rachel.  Bernie Frank was my next creation, and soon became Bernie Larson.  Henderson was based on Bernard Lee from the early Bond movies, so he wasn't really created.  Now I had a cast for my comic, and I could get back to working on the game.  But...

Frankly, I got sick and tired of waiting for SCRAMM.  I am not a patient man after all.  So, I decided to forget the game and redirect my attention to the comic.  And thus a weekly comic based on a soon to be designed game became a daily comic that would (hopefully) someday have a game based on it.