• ‘“She’s changed my life” Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg. Nemutan doesn’t really have a leg. She’s a pillowcase‘ And, the subsequent backlash against the NYT.
If we had a new point-and-click adventure game for every time someone said: “That was definitely the last point-and-click adventure game,” then we’d pretty much be where we are today. Long pronounced dead, the adventure game never really departed. From Broken Sword 4 to Grim Fandango to Zack & Wiki, new releases in the genre may be sparse but they are undeniably steady. And as a slew of LucasArts and Sierra classics make their way onto the Steam download service, just as Monkey Island introduces a new generation of console gamers to insult sword-fighting, the genre is enjoying, if not a resurrection, then certainly something of a resurgence.
Beneath A Steel Sky (BASS) is the latest venerable adventure game to undergo a nip and a tuck in preparation for re-release. While less iconic than some of the LucasArts big-hitters, it is nevertheless the most widely played adventure game of all time. Nine years after its original release in 1994, British developer Revolution Software released the game’s source code as freeware, to be offered for free to all users of ScummVM, the popular adventure game emulator. As a result, millions have played it. So why now choose to bring it to the iPhone? And why charge players for the privilege? By combining a mobile telephone, a map and a diary, we solved these puzzles and more at a meeting with the game’s creator and MD of Revolution Software, Charles Cecil. And when it comes to talking to the grandfather of the adventure game about his genre’s future, passions run high.
“Everything is f***ed up.” Something dark flashes behind Cecil’s normally kind eyes and his bald pate turns a darker shade of rosy. “When it comes to retail, everything is f***ed up, all the way down the line. If we sell a game in a shop, the retailer takes 40 per cent of the cover price, the format holder takes 15 per cent and the publisher pays us 20 per cent of what’s left. That money has to be set against our development costs, so you can imagine how many copies of a game we have to sell to recoup. But on iPhone we receive 70 per cent of the game price immediately and we can sell direct to our audience. So we can charge a fraction of the price of a boxed product.”
So is this re-release just a quick way to make a quicker buck? “Not at all. We’ve put a lot of effort into this BASS port,” he explains. “It’s not shovelware. As with Broken Sword: Director’s Cut, we’ve added content that I think makes it a very justifiable and worthwhile project.” That new content includes, amongst other things, fully animated cut-scenes, notable for being created by renowned comic book artist Dave Gibbons. In motion the sequences are beautiful, perfectly capturing the game’s dystopian ambiance. But the proposed $2-3 asking price for the game isn’t all being spent on new art and re-sampled dialogue. Rather, as Cecil is quick to point out, buyers are investing in the genre’s future.
“Yes, you can jailbreak your phone and play the game for free. But if you like the game and like the kind of games we make, then pay us a little bit of money and, if it’s a big enough success, we can reinvest the funds. We can start to look at a potential BASS sequel. You know, I think a massive part of the piracy problem is due to a broken-down relationship between game makers and consumers. There’s no respect between the two parties anymore. So I’m very excited at the prospect of repairing the relationship. I think this is the model we’ll take with our future games. If you like adventures and like what we write, then please work with us. We’re looking at ways of including fans names in future games and so on. It’s more exciting than ever before. It reminds me of the early eighties where anything seemed possible for smaller game-makers.”
Yopu can read the rest of this interview over at Eurogamer here
• “Everything you own, it’s on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t begin to imagine” Fake Steve Jobs speaks truth to power.
• Miss you. Come to think of it, single paddle Pong is basically Bit.Trip.Beat, right?
• Fast food mascots re-imagined as mob bosses. 2 for 1 cheesburgers? An offer you literally can’t refuse.
• Rick Grohl’ed
• 3-yr-old boy floats 12km down Peace River. on toy truck “His mom said he really likes driving through puddles.”
• “Accept that everything you say will be forgotten and ignored but write as if you and your words are immortal”, “There is no career ladder. Only a downward spiral from the first thrill of seeing your name in print” On writing about music/ videogames.
It’s no secret that Xbox Live Arcade games that lack the buoyancy of a licence or well-known series often sink without trace. The first Geometry Wars may have sold and sold, but it was a novelty that benefited from exquisite timing: for the first few months it had precious little competition on Xbox’s new digital download service.
Today, your brand new IP, still gloopy in its womb juices, competes with venerable re-releases cherry-picked from the canon – Ikaruga, Gunstar Heroes, Street Fighter II HD and so on. Or, worse still, it goes toe-to-toe for players’ Microsoft Points with million-dollar, EA-marketed heavyweights such as Battlefield 1943, a game that’s one musket and a single-player campaign shy of a full-priced boxed release. So yeah: a license can be crucial.
But even so: Madballs. Really? That’s what you’re going with?
The 20-year-old toy line, for those too young (or too old) to remember, consisted of a selection of rubber balls moulded with ugly faces – sort of like a collectable set of decapitated Garbage Pail Kids. Likewise, Madballs in Babo: Invasion is an ugly game, all brown terrain, luminous green rivers and splurge gun splatter textures. The environments are robust and detailed but in this 12-year-old boy’s bedroom of a world there’s little beauty.
The Saturday morning kids’ TV aesthetic extends to the wailing guitar soundtrack, exclamation point-ridden dialogue and gunge-tank humour. But don’t dismiss this as a misguided anachronism. The licence may be aimed at the kind of eighties schoolkids who’d buy a Madballs character on eBay as an ironic student mantlepiece ornament, but the underlying experience is built for those who love games regardless of their licence.
You can read the rest of this review at Eurogamer here
“Play me, I’m Yours”. These were the words printed on 30 pianos left in public places throughout London last month. The instruments had been rescued by Luke Gerram, who pulled them from their purgatory of skips and recycling centres, to grant each a new lease of life in his ambitious interactive art project.
Secured to the ground with metal cables and shrouded in plastic to shrug off the capital’s summer showers, the pianos acted as a focal point, drawing Londoners to share music and performance in community with one another.
Over the month that the project ran, beginners and experts alike sat down to play, the performances as varied as their players’ musical tastes and abilities. From Chopsticks to Chopin’s Waltz in E Minor (see below) the point of the project wasn’t so much the quality of the recitals as their breadth; spectators were able to enjoy seasoned experts showboating complex pieces just as keenly as the beginners beaming at the chance to have a go in front of an friendly audience.
It’s a wonderful story (and you can catch more details in this New York Times piece). And it articulates clearly that which I love about videogame arcades.
Arcades are videogaming’s’ public installations, a shared focal point for performance, drama and wonder in front of an impromptu assembled audience. Today videogame arcades are dismissed by most as relics of a bygone era, a pastime that has little relevance to gaming’s contemporary landscape. And yes, in a sense that’s true. Once we looked to videogame arcades for a glimpse into the gaming’s potential. Their value, for many, was in providing a road map to interactive technology’s future, a tourism promo for the destinations to which console and PC gaming would arrive in a few years time.
But as console manufacturers closed that technological gap, it grew more difficult to draw players from the comfort of their homes to play games only slightly better-looking than those we already owned. So then the primary purpose of arcades become one of spectacle, cabinets introducing bombastic hydraulics to fling their players around, or presenting peripherals on a scale that made replication in the home an impossibility. But as so many dance mats, plastic guitars and maracas testify, the uniqueness of arcades in this regard was short-lived. Today arcades gather dust, the industry that fathered videogames now poor, homeless and all but forgotten by young gamers.
But the real tragedy is that arcades became primarily about technical prowess and eccentric hardware. This was never their core strength. Rather, their enduring power and appeal lies in their ability to bring a crowd together to watch a gaming performance.
Margaret Robertson writes of how music, not film, is the most relevant reference point for games. Videogame designers, she argues, like composers, create an experience that is lifeless until a performer picks it up. Games and music both allow their performers to interpret the experience that the creator devised, adding personal inflections and character to make the piece their own.
The best arcade games encourage crowds to gather and watch a player perform the game. Sometimes the crowd watches because, like seeing a beginner play Chopsticks at a publicly-stationed piano, so the man butchering Dance Dance Revolution counters his hopelessness with endearing committal and a winning smile.
But sometimes the crowd watches because the performance is beautiful, exciting, mesmerizing or life-affirming (those hyperlinks representing my own personal favorite tales of watching games as performance).
Just as a perceptive listener can tell a great deal about a musical performer’s character, training, dedication and sensibilities from the way in which they perform a piece, so a perceptive gamer can tell a great many similar things about the men competing at Street Fighter. And Street Fighter, like Dance Dance Revolution, or Raiden 3 or any other game that allows the performer the chance to exhibit flair, technique and character, is a game best played in public. Here the stakes are raised and the narrative becomes a communal one; the resulting stories are unforgettable.
This is why arcades are still important, still relevant and still the most compelling way in which to watch and play videogames. Someone needs to take a stencil and a spray-can to every arcade cabinet they can find and write “Play me, I’m Yours” on its side, lest we forget how to perform.
Last week Duncan Fyfe announced that his website, Hit Self-Destruct, will be closing in six posts time. This is awesome.
Awesome because we are too quick to start things and too slow to finish them. Awesome because blogs are an exhaling balloon and his words deserve a more enduring platform. Awesome because the announcement reminded me a little of Careless Talk Costs Lives, the music magazine which started with an end date, counting down from issue twelve to issue one. But also tragic because, when a post of his pops up in google reader it’s one of the first things I click to. I will miss that.
Before any of this, Duncan e-mailed me with a question. It was: “When was the closest you came to thinking, even just for an second, that writing about videogames is a great job?”
This is a really difficult question. Not because those moments don’t exist; they absolutely do. But because, in selecting just one, you are revealing your core, genuine, unflinching, bald motivation. You can cloak that truth in the detail and flair of the anecdote, but for those with eyes to see, in your answer you show your hand. You’re saying: this is why I choose to do what I do.
Try it for yourself, now: “When was the closest you came to thinking, even just for an second, that what you do is great?” If you’re a doctor or a teacher then the chances are that your motivation is one to be proud of. But when you have a non-job such as writing about videogames, who knows what you’ll find?
Duncan asked a few other writers the same question. Head here to see what everyone said. For now, here’s my response:
………………………………………………………………………………………………..
There are lots of reasons to write about videogames for money: videogames and money, for instance. Of course, in time you discover that neither the money nor the videogames are usually much good but even so, for the passionate adolescent gamer (which is still how most videogame journalists enter the field), the perks of free games and exclusive access can be persuasive.
But these perks don’t sustain or nourish over the long-term, which is probably why so few game journalists remain in the job past thirty-five. As with any vocation, true job satisfaction comes from doing enjoyable work and doing it well. In terms of writing about videogames, that can be the moment you describe a game world or system in a way that puts into words what readers were feeling but unable to articulate themselves, or the moment that you make some fresh analysis that frames the discussion in a new way.
But for all good journalists, no matter what their field, the height of professional satisfaction is surely found in rooting out an interesting story and telling it in an interesting way to an interested readership. This is a rare opportunity in game journalism because so much of our story-writing is PR-led, writers acting as mere conduits for publishers, passing preset information from developer to consumer. As such, most of the stories the gaming press deals in aren’t really stories at all.
Indeed, the tussle to be the first to publish a list of developer facts is as undignified as it is un-enduring. Once Wikipedia has been filled with the details of your latest Final Fantasy, Metal Gear or Halo interview, what value is left in the remaining husk of your work? There may be a certain frisson in being the first to report on a new title in a beloved franchise, but that story would have broken with or without you, in much the same way. The realization of that reality brings with it little to pull you from your bed each day.
So, for me, the times when I’ve felt most fulfilled in this industry have been those times I’ve been able to write a story about a game that’s somehow enduring, usually by exploring the humanity behind or within a product, or the culture that surrounds it. It’s in writing something of value that, in one way or another, might not have appeared if it weren’t for your seeking it out and writing it down.
By way of illustration, last year I had the chance to interview the maker of an obscure Japanese-only Sega Dreamcast title, Segagaga. It’s a videogame about a console-maker on the verge of collapse, made by a console-maker on the verge of collapse. Released in 2001, on almost the exact same day the Dreamcast was discontinued and Sega began their withdrawal from the console manufacturing business, it offers its player the chance to rewrite history. A kind of business-RPG, you’re charged with turning Sega’s ailing fortunes around, making the console side of its business a success and taking the company to the top of the industry.
The idea that a Japanese company whose hardware division was in terminal decline should fund a game in which players were offered the chance to address the very same issues its executives were wrestling with is unprecedented. That the game even exists illustrates why many people hold the Sega of that era so dearly, and yet very little is known about the game’s gestation in Japan or the West.
In interviewing Tez Okano, the man who single-handedly came up with the concept and managed to shepherd it through a difficult and underfunded development to release, I had the chance to tell a fascinating story that touches on all manner of issues pertinent to the industry today.
Okano-san was extremely chatty, in a way that Japanese interviewees rarely are, and the strong flavour of his anecdotes turned a good story into a great one: things that I can in no way take credit for. Nevertheless, it was, in very real terms, a neat story that might have remained untold without my telling it. I wish I could do that more often.
When your teeth decay you cannot
Grow new ones. When your hair falls
Out you cannot plant it again.
I get up at dawn and look
At myself in the mirror.
My face is wrinkled, my hair
Is grey. I am filled with pity
For the years that are gone like
Spilt water. It can’t be helped.
I take a cup of wine and
Turn to the bookcase once more.
Back through the centuries I
Visit Shun and Yu the Great
And Kue Lung, that famous rowdy.
Across three thousand years I
Can still see them plainly.
What does it matter? My flesh,
Like theirs, wears away with time.
- Lu Yu, translated by Kenneth Rexroth (Via This Recording)
This week I’ve been at Develop 2009, the UK’s annual game developer’s conference, covering the event for Gamasutra. You can read my write ups of some of the sessions at the following links:
As with any conference of this size and scope, the content was mixed. I found the first day of the event, dubbed “Evolve”, the most exciting of the week. Its emphasis on the emerging platforms of Flash and iPhone, and on digital distribution channels was both timely and insightful.
Sadly, this day of the conference is often dismissed by traditional development studios who rarely bother turning up. But for those who did attend, the message was a vibrant and exciting one and there seemed to be a palpable sense of our being on the crest of a new wave of development opportunities that could alter the landscape of gaming in significant ways. In fact, with the stats being bandied around for daily plays of some Facebook games and free-to-play browser titles, it may already have changed, and no-one’s really noticed.
Charles Cecil, creator of Broken Sword, told me that the atmosphere surrounding Flash and iPhone developers right now reminds him of the mid-1980s, where the new avenues and platforms open to developers were yet to settle and there was a sense that anything might be possible. This feeling generally contrasted with the second two days of the conference, where the sessions, while often full of interesting ideas, analysis and conversation points, lacked the coiled spring energy of, say, casual game maker Playfish’s Kristian Segerstrale or iPhone publisher ngmoco’s Alan Yu’s presentations on day one.
That said, I learned a few things I didn’t know before, such as the revelation that Half-Life 2’s artists wrote three supporting pieces of fiction for every location on the game, one describing what happened there two days ago, one two weeks ago and another two years in the past. “This historical record (which ran longer than the entire story for the game) gave every location in the game a sense of place, history and verisimilitude,” said Viktor Antonov, the game’s art director, “something far more nuanced and rich than simply slapping some graffiti on a wall.”
Also, Half-Life 2 cost $50 million to make. Fifty!
It was good to see so many journalists in attendance this year, especially those from the mainstream consumer-facing press. The more often that press and developers get to meet each other in a casual and relaxed context (quite unlike that of a typical PR-led event), the better.
While at Develop I also carried out two 60-minute interviews with Revolution’s Charles Cecil and Zoonami’s Martin Hollis. As soon as they go live on the Internet I’ll link to them, as both men offered interesting insights into their journey into and through making games, before talking about their current successes and hopes for the future. Debrief and trailer complete. Now, to bed.
Over the past fortnight the team at Rock, Paper Shotgun has been running a series of articles on the games that shaped them called, appropriately enough, ‘Gaming Made Me’.
Last week, Kieron e-mailed a few of the collective’s friends to invite contributions on their own formative videogame experiences. Here’s what I wrote:
Your mind races to the games that you’d be proud to have made you: a revisionist history that cherry picks classics from the tree of critical consensus.
So I am Defender and Yoshi’s Island and Ocarina of Time and Symphony of the Night and Ico and Portal and all the games that top the all-time best lists; an impeccable pedigree.
But in truth you don’t get to choose the games that make you. Rather, these are the ones that time and circumstance pair you with. You don’t get to pick your DNA.
So really, I am an import copy of Smash Court Tennis 2 on the PlayStation, a game that my brother and I spent one summer playing, perched on the end of my bed in a kick-ass super-deformed doubles team, having the best time of our lives.
I am Castle of Illusion on the Megadrive, a game that I played for four hours straight one Christmas till my parents gently led me downstairs to have a break by, um, watching some TV instead. I am Centipede on the Atari XE, the insect twitch terror distracting me from any sense of not being cool or rich enough to have an ST. I am Tetris on the Gameboy, which made my 12-year-old brain spasm with joy, in much the same way it does today. I am Goldeneye on the N64 because that’s all we did for one year of university, sleeping the day, waking in the evening to laugh at the guy lumbered with the klobb.
I am the first hour of Final Fantasy VII, which I played through with my dad a few months before he left, trying desperately to get him to see what I was seeing, and catching him catching a glimpse of it. I am Dance Dance Revolution because that’s the first game I wanted to get really good at, just to see if I could. And I could.
I am Disney Think Fast on the Wii, because that’sthe game currently making my daughter and it makes her happier than anything else about this hobby, and in her joy I catch the reflection of why I do what I do.
Some of these games are good, some of them are not. That’s kind of the point of the things that make you.
