The box quote. We all have our favorite oddball ones – “under-water-based levels very reminiscent of Mario 64” for Bubsy 3D, “our frothing demand for this game increases” for Ikaruga, and so on. (Please leave a comment for what your favorite oddball quote is.) A somewhat lost art, you’d see so many gaming publications make such oddball quotes that makes you wonder who were the ad wizards who were thinking of that one. But there’s been one boxquote that’s been stuck in my head for years, literal years that I had to figure out if it was real.
“Halo with Chips.”
This is a quote from Maxim magazine about the game Stacked with Daniel Negreanu. I already wrote about Stacked back in 2020, and even when I was playing the game for the article, that particular quote kept jumping out at me. It’s so absurd when you think about it: It’s pretty clear they’re saying it’s as addictive as Halo, but it feels very hamfisted.
At the time I wrote about Stacked, I had no idea where it came from. Saying it came from Maxim could really mean anything at the time: Was it in the magazine, or the website? Did it come from the US or UK branch of the magazine? Was it even something printed or was it just something made up by Maxim’s PR department? These were some lightly burning questions, so when I wrote about Stacked and a handful of times after publication, I kept trying to find the source.
Initially I started using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to look through Maxim’s homepage around this time. While there were a good chunk of pages archived from 2005-06, nothing came of Stacked beyond a small review on the gaming side of things. So I ruled out it being on the website, so now I started looking back at past issues of the magazine. Which isn’t 100% preserved.
Now, for quotes from gaming publications, it’s pretty easy to source whatever preview or positive early review they used for the box. Doubly so nowadays, what with The Video Game History Foundation’s incredibly well received Library feature introduced last month. But for general men’s magazines, this is a bit more scarce. Especially for something like Maxim, where there isn’t really a comprehensive archive of past issues beyond the past few years.
Thankfully those who understand preservation being important had been doing god’s work by scanning and archiving these magazines online. I went back to the Internet Archive and started searching for any issues from 2005-06 that were available. My first instinct was to check the small reviews section for games, and as far as I could tell they never reviewed Stacked. (Unfortunately not every issue is archived there, so if it turns out they did, I’ll put a correction here.) I kept checking around the May-August timeframe, thinking maybe they covered E3 in an issue or two and it got mentioned there. No luck.
Then I looked into June 2005’s issue of the US magazine. Cover girl: Vanessa Marcil of General Hospital and Las Vegas fame. There’s a section on three Pro Texas Hold’em Players, written by Brad Reagan. One of those people featured was Daniel Negreanu. I kept combing through the article, thinking I’d maybe find it mentioned there, as game development takes time.
On page 102, I saw a caption that caught my eye, and when I saw it, I basically lost it.
There it is. “Halo with chips.” A caption put under a promotional image for Stacked. I genuinely got excited. I had a feeling it was real and there it was. It was in a place I didn’t think to look, an article about the rise of Poker and some of its big players. Of course Texas Hold’em was popular at the time, I didn’t think to check for articles covering it instead of the gaming section. In short, this taught me to research the topic it’s based on and not the entertainment medium it’s depicted.
So yeah. “Halo with chips” is real. It’s in Issue #90 of Maxim magazine (the US version), June 2005, with Vanessa Marcil on the cover. If you wanna own a piece of gaming ephemera that’s only tangentially games related, there you go. Almost makes me wanna buy a copy just to have it for myself. But I got enough magazines that I don’t read, so maybe I’ll settle with this for now.
Honestly, compared to Stacked itself, which is a perfectly okay poker video game, this was honestly more interesting to discover. And I’m glad to share this info with y’all.
This is not the only article I have ready for this month, I currently have on Patreon an article about the 2015 Mad Max game made by the Just Cause folks. It’ll be on this blog proper in a few days, but if you wanna read it now (or just support independent games journalism/critique, I guess?) you can support my Patreon. Every dollar helps out!
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