Alfred “Alf” Gamble (8 April 1926 - 8 January 2006), an Oddworld fan from the United Kingdom, corresponded with the Oddworld Inhabitants frequently via hand-written letters. The fanmail-reading character Alf was named in his honour.
“I don’t know if you ever read about this guy that we named Alf’s Rehab and Tea after,” says [Lorne] Lanning, “but he was basically a 70-year-old guy, out of the UK, who was on the verge of suicide and somehow found our game, and playing our game brought him back the brink, from the edge. Reading this six-page handwritten letter, from this elderly person who had been a war hero, who had lost a wife after a long illness, lost a daughter after another tragic accident, just this heart-wrenching story…”
[Sherry] McKenna adds, “At the end of the mail, we’re all crying, because he said, ‘You’ve literally saved my life. I had gone out to kill myself, I took all the money I had and thought about what to buy with this last money,’ and for some reason he bought Abe’s Oddysee. Who knows why? And the end of the letter was, ‘You saved my life.’ I’m reading this to the group there and we’re all crying hysterically. So to me, the happiest things, the things that meant the most, were every time I got a fan letter that said something to the extent of, ‘If Abe can do it, I can do it.’ Or ‘If Munch is in a wheelchair, is able to achieve this, then you know what? I’m going to achieve it.’ The more that the fans identified with our characters and the more that it really did change their lives, those were the happy stories, and that, to me, still is what matters the most.” (x)