About Almar's Guides
Almar's Guides was created in 2008, the same year that I graduated from High School. I originally started this website to sell walkthroughs for World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. During that time I got into the beta for Wrath and I wrote Leveling Guides in beta to sell prior to the expansion's release. I still remember standing in lines outside of Gamestop on release night and talking to people in line about my Walkthrough and a few of them even bought it! Shout out to anyone who still remembers that and met me at that time.
Once Wrath of the Lich King released my guides sold amazingly well -- for two months and then I got 0 sales at all. This makes sense since everyone rushes to max level at a new Expansion then doesn't need leveling information anymore. Realizing this, I pivoted my focus onto Everquest Guides and information for other MMORPGs. I kept this as my main focus until about 2013/2014 when I stopped writing guides for MMORPGs altogether. My reason for this is that some of the games I covered (Aion, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft, The Secret World, Star Wars: The Old Republic) shut down or changed in fundamental ways that made my guides irrelevant. At this point in time I realized that continuing to write guides for MMORPGs was not a winning strategy and it would not be possible for me to continue down that road.
This resulted in me abandoning Almar's Guides for a few years until about 2017 which is when I got the idea to focus solely on retro video game content. My first Retro guides were for Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, Dark Cloud, Rogue Galaxy and all of these were hits and still get lots of views to this day. This is when the modern day version of Almar's Guides was born.
The Almar's Guides Team
Almar aka Ryan Tomasella
CEO/Founder
I feel weird writing this in third person so I am going to do first person. I am a long time gamer and writer, I have been playing games since I was about 5 years old and it started with the NES which was my first console. My favorite types of games are turn based JRPGs, specifically older retro games (hence my focus on Almar's Guides). In addition to the content I put out on this website I also have a Youtube Channel that I upload tons of video guides to as well.
Lovilla Tomasella
COO/Wife of Almar
What? Nepotism? Lovilla aka Lovi is the Wife of Ryan and also the COO of Almar's Guides.com. Lovilla handles many of the day to day operation(s) of this website including the business side of things and dealing with all of the paperwork, contract negotiations and things that Almar does not like doing. She is learning how to write guides and also work on the website in the same way that Almar does - but moreso her job is to handle the non-creative side of the business.
Armari Osnan
Senior Staff
Armari joined the Almar's Guides team around the same time as Lovilla. She works on various different aspects of the website and also helps with day to day operations depending on what is going on. Much like Lovi, Armari is still learning many many things and we look forward to seeing her grow and become more experienced as time goes on.