The unheralded heroes of the gaming world, FAQ writers trade their late nights for bragging rights simply to say that their walkthroughs, their secrets, their perfect paths through what seem like impossible missions work best. And what rewards do these slaves to countless pixels and polygons seek or receive? The knowledge that their sleepless nights detailing every last hidden item help gamers in desperate need of completing 100% of every game.

But here at IGN, we say enough with the gushy feelings and e-mail "thank you's" being all these tireless and sometimes tortured gaming souls receive. That's why we started the FAQ Writer of the Week. Every week IGN will pick the person we see as the best FAQ writer going and reward them with two games off of his or her wish list. But that's not all. We also feel that it's important for gamers to get to know these writers, the very ones that have helped them out of so many jams in the past. That's why every week we'll also sit down and talk to the Writer of the Week so you can get to know the person, and not just their moves.IGN's first FAQ Writer of the Week is Colin Moriarty. From Mega Man to Super Mario Sunshine, Colin's been at the top of his game for a few years now. Here's how it all got started.I remember the first day I wrote an FAQ, it was January 3, 2000. I was online reading FAQs all the time, and I just thought I could do a better job writing guides than the majority of the people who were doing it. After writing the first one, I just got addicted to it. Mega Man on the NES. It wasn't very big, but it was good for a first FAQ.The entire thing, actually. [laughs] It's not badly written, but my style as a writer has evolved so much from that point. You have to be able to discern between simply writing and FAQ writing. The Mega Man FAQ just isn't as creative as my other FAQs are, and I'd like to rewrite it, but at the same time I like to keep it up just so I can see how I used to write. I'm not entirely impressed with it. My favorite FAQs are the one's I just wrote because my writing continues to mature the more I write.The one I'm most impressed with is, well, really it's a tie between my Super Mario Sunshine FAQ and my Zelda: Link to the Past FAQ. I wrote both of those within a month of each other. I was in a real writing streak at the time, and those are also my two most recent walkthroughs.I've actually written 30 of them so far. All of the Mega Man games on Nintendo, all of the old Zelda games on the NES and SNES, both Onimusha games on the PlayStation 2?I jumped around a lot! I tried to keep it old school first, but then I got working on some new favorites.I'm not sure. Sometimes I think about it and I'm not sure why I'm even doing it. I like to write. I like to share my knowledge of these games with other people. I also really like the e-mails I get, the props I get from other people who read my work. Three years ago, people didn't look to me for the knowledge, but now they know my name and look for my FAQs, so that's something I like to live up to. I want to give the people the best guides to work with. That's something I constantly strive to achieve.The respect you get from the gaming community. Even though I'm a hard-core gamer, I don't really consider myself as a gamer, I consider myself more as a scribe of the gaming world. As FAQ writers, we write down what we do and it's almost like we're recording the history of video games so that twenty years from now there will be a text document detailing games that have been lost and long forgotten. And maybe by reading some of these FAQs, it will make someone want to go find some of these classics and start playing them again. We're almost like the historians, trying to keep the games alive for all time.The constant e-mails that I get. E-mails are nice, and it's great when people make comments telling you that they enjoyed your guide, but at the end of their sentence, there always seems to be a "but". [laughs] They ask questions that are so obscure I wouldn't know unless I had the game on in front of me. People think I retain all of this knowledge about every game I ever wrote an FAQ for, and I wish I could, but that's just impossible.I've been changing it up a bit lately. When I first started, I wrote FAQs for games that I was already familiar with, games I had already beaten. But when I wrote Super Mario Sunshine, that was the first game I ever jumped into cold turkey. It's a totally different experience to do an FAQ like that. I had to play the game a little bit just to get a feel for it, then restart the game to start writing about it. You have to take the game a little slower and write down step-by-step what you're doing. But back in the day, games like Mega Man, I could play through an entire stage and then write just because I was so familiar with the game.Not really. Ever since I got into college, I just don't have the time to spend late nights with my GameCube. I also work at the school I go to, doing landscaping at the University, so I don't have a tremendous amount of time for gaming right now. I tried to stay up as late as I could the other night to play Metroid Prime, but I was so tired from work that I fell asleep in like ten minutes. [laughs]Cashews, especially if I can get a big bag of wholesale ones, those are tremendous. Cashews and a bottle of Pepsi, always a bottle of Pepsi.When you play games, do you listen to the game music or do you prefer a CD of your own?I almost always mute the game music. I'm actually a drummer, so I like to listen to some different beats in the background. If I'm not listening to beats, my favorite band is 311, and I listen to them all the time. Game music is lame.I have a lot of respect for a series of games like Mega Man and Castlevania, but I've got to go with Wild Arms as my all-time favorite game. The game doesn't get any respect, but it's totally the best game in my opinion.Actually, I splurged fifty dollars on Animal Crossing and I just can't see why it's so popular. The first time I played it, I thought I was really going to get into it, but a few days later I realized I never wanted to play it again and I haven't touched it since.Chun-Li from Street Fighter is pretty cool. I like her, but I don't really look at the females in games like that.No, not at all. Besides that game's for the Xbox and I wouldn't touch an Xbox with a ten-foot pole!Video gaming to me is like politics -- there's no room for a third company. There's room for a third company in the background, say how you have Microsoft, Apple, and then Linux in the background. Or in politics how you have the Republicans and Democrats as the two front runners, and then you have the Green Party in the background. But in video gaming, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are all huge companies, and it's just natural that one of these companies is going to get destroyed. In my opinion, Microsoft is upsetting the balance. We had a tremendous age of gaming with the PlayStation and N64, and now Microsoft steps in, and in my opinion isn't offering anything new. All the system offers is a bunch of old Dreamcast games and games like Metal Gear Solid that I already played a year ago. I don't feel like I should spend any money on a system that I think will upset the balance of power for the worse.I never really looked at it like that until recently. Now I see people already in the industry are starting to appreciate my work and I'd love to write guides for a living if that opportunity ever presented itself, but it was never something I was looking for. I'm actually a history nerd. That's my major and I'd actually like to do something with that like become a historian.It's vital that you read the work of other people. Be familiar with other people's FAQs, and try to formulate your own style based on a writer that you admire. I see a lot of young writers, and when you read their stuff, it's like they've never read an FAQ before. You need to be familiar with what you're writing before you just jump into it. And when you're starting out, don't write for a game that you're not interested in. Write your first FAQ on a game you've beaten multiple times, and the process will be a lot easier. New writers have to understand that their writings are valuable contributions to the game industry, and the better you get at writing, the more people will know your name. Now that's what I call props.Check out all of Colin's FAQs, from Mega Man to Super Mario Sunshine at Colin's User Page