Created by linking together and looping a series of low resolution still images, the animated .gif is something of an anachronism in today’s internet. Streaming HD video is available to anyone with a broadband connection, so what need for these digital flickbooks-cum-zoetropes, whose raison d’être (to provide animation in a time when internet speeds meant video was too expensive to serve) is no longer relevant?
But the ongoing charm and usefulness of the animated .gif lies in this very economy. Like a good one-liner, the animated .gif can tell a joke with the impact of a one-inch punch, trimming away the fat of unnecessary frames to deliver its message with streamlined effectiveness.
The repetition too, whereby the animation cycles forever till you look or browse away, can make a funny image a hilarious one, or a poignant point mesmerising.
More recently, people have been taking antique photograph sequences and looping them together in 2-3 frame cycles, turing a detatched picture into an living scene.
The latest trend is to precision extract a second or two from a film sequence in order to create a tiny looping moment that plays out of context of the whole movie. Here the scene takes on a life of its own, communicating in shorthand the message of the broader canvas, or perhaps saying something altogether different.
Head over to the Tumblr site Three Frames for a steady feed of interesting examples.
Hey! So, I’m trying to write a FUNNY JOKE in my Resonance of Fate preview.
Ellie says:
“Neither Infinite Undiscovery nor Star Ocean: The Last Hope impressed our reviewers. And that’s despite the fact one of them was Simon Parkin – a man who likes JRPGs so much he’s picked Aeris’ death theme for the first dance at his wedding”.
Simon says:
How did you know?!
Ellie says:
a) is that sort of joke all right with you?
b) Is there a funnier joke than “Aeris’s Death Theme”
c) is “Aeris’s Death Theme” the actual name for it?
Simon says:
I think it’s just ‘Aeris’ Theme’ though, but ‘Aeris’ Death Theme’ is definitely funnier
Simon says:
(although: spoliers!)
Simon says:
I don’t mind you saying that it was the soundtrack to my wedding night instead.
Ellie says:
aha
hahahah
Simon says:
I like the idea of doing it to a dirge
(I mean, in comedy terms, not real life, obv)
although…
Ellie says:
I thought of saying you were going to have it at your funeral
but then I thought wedding dance was funnier
What would you have at your funeral?
Ever dropped a stone into a hole to find out how deep it goes? Had Jason Fleming done so while peering into the overgrown hollow that marks the start of Shadow Complex, no splash would have echoed back. This opening, into which his girlfriend descended not two minutes earlier, is the mouth of an abyss; a rabbit hole that will lead him unwittingly into an underground military complex, the role of would-be national saviour and the belly of one of gaming’s long lost genres. By the time he re-emerges, triple-jumping into the sun, you’ll have mapped tens of miles of subterranean corridors, thwarted a plot to blow up San Francisco and seen Jason Fleming transformed from country-bumpkin into cyber-ninja.
Shadow Complex is Super Metroid re-imagined by J.J.Abrams. Its story is pulp thriller, throwing an ordinary Joe into extraordinary circumstances under which he stiffens implausibly into a one-man army. Fleming is an all-American action hero, hurling grenades and missiles with thoughtless abandon one moment; creeping death through ventilation shafts in search of his snatched girlfriend the next. “You don’t look like the kind of guy who’d pull the trigger,” challenges one enemy he meets. Two seconds later, as Fleming steps over a puddle of warm, Unreal Engine-pumped blood, you can almost hear Mark Rein in the background, fist-pumping the air to chants of: “USA! USA!”
But for all its Hollywood bombast, Shadow Complex is born from nothing but the purest of Japanese pedigrees. For once the Super Metroid reference isn’t a lazy critic’s crutch. Epic Games has always declared its intention to resurrect the classic 2D side-scrolling exploration game, once popularized by Nintendo’s seminal space adventure, later perfected by Konami’s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. So while Shadow Complex’s story and setting may be popcorn nonsense, the mechanics they clothe are golden.
In reviving a genre that the Japanese left for dead, the game offers a telling snapshot of the global games industry in 2009. Here is an American developer so emboldened by recent successes that it feels qualified to reimagine one of Japan’s sacred classics. It’s like Bungie sat down to remake Super Mario. Unthinkable. Yet somehow, the gambit’s paid off. In fusing classic game design with contemporary techniques and sensibilities, Epic Games and Chair Entertainment have triumphed where Japanese developers continue to flounder. The result is nothing short of one the best games of this generation.
There’s a sense in which this interview may be 20 years premature. One hopes that Hollis, creator of the seminal Nintendo 64 Bond game, Goldeneye and, more recently, WiiWare’s Bonsai Barber, will have many more career successes before he’s done. As such, it would be more accurate to subtitle this conversation ‘The Story So Far’.
Nevertheless, I’ve been eager to try a career retrospective with an esteemed game maker for some time. Too seldom do we ask our most successful creators about how they started writing games and why they continue to do so today. So thanks to Martin to agreeing to this extended conversation, and thanks to Gamasutra for commissioning it. It’s something I’d like to do more regularly with other game makers. If I manage it, you’ll be the first to know.
Head over to Gamasutra for the full transcript of our conversation. In the meantime, here’s my favourite bit:
Simon Parkin: Looking back now, of which of your games are you most proud? All the way back to those most formative titles on the BBC Micro?
Martin Hollis: Pride is an interesting question. I think it’s important. It’s classified as a sin, but I think it is important to be proud of your work, and I think if you’re not proud of it, that would be a big problem. I personally wouldn’t want to work on something I couldn’t be proud about. But for me, I tend to want to rely on my own judgment. I want to satisfy myself, it’s that kind of pride. And for me, right now, I feel the project that’s changed me the most is Bonsai Barber. I feel a really intense pride about that game. I know that Nintendo loves it, I love it, and I learned an immense amount through building it. I’m a changed person because of this game.
You used the word ‘changed’ twice there. What do you mean when you say that the game’s changed you?
Well, I like nature. And in a way, I’ve spent a lot more time with nature making Bonsai Barber, and that’s changed me.
Do you mean staring at Bonsai trees or…
I have always loved looking at trees. I think trees are amazing things. I love looking at the sky, I love looking at trees and parks.
But surely, the virtue of trees and parks is their tangible reality, the counterpoint they provide to the virtual nature of our games? The trees and plants in Bonsai Barber are fake, no?
Yeah, they are. But we’re holding a mirror up to nature.
So, you still found that enriching.
Yes. Because I spend a lot of time looking at virtual trees, and I can see real trees better now.
Did that happen with the guns in GoldenEye?
Yeah, certainly. When I went into GoldenEye, I wasn’t interested in guns at all. When I came out, I knew quite a bit about guns.
Through that game you could better understand the beauty of Hollywood combat?
I think it’s a fact that can’t be denied. The stories you are told or the stories you tell yourself have an immense influence on you. I think that’s an important fact.
Does that belief lead you to challenge not just game designers, but also artists to consider the responsibility they have for the things they build into their worlds?
I believe there is a great responsibility, very much so. I’d like to make games that enrich the world somehow. But I don’t think that… This might sound evil, but I don’t think that guns are evil. I think that in general, conflict is a part of the world, and that can’t be eliminated. I think the black and the white, they can’t exist without each other.
There’s also an aspect of making videogames where guns perform a real utilitarian function. They’re something that enables player to interact with a world with more efficiency and reach than almost any other human tool.
Yeah, I agree with that, but even so, I feel regret that almost everything in games is funneled through the interface of the gun.
Yes but we don’t really have anything better do we? I guess maybe a bow and arrow?
On one hand, it’s a pattern of thought that people have fallen into because there are so many games that function like that. But it’s also a security blanket. Maybe that sounds patronizing, but it’s a positive thing as well as a negative thing because you can actually make a game more reliably if you use design scaffolding from previous games on proven successes. Nonetheless, I have to be honest and say I do feel sad that I see so many things funneled through the interface of a gun. And I’d like to try and make a small contribution to opening out games to think about other tools, other human tools and other methods of interaction tool-free.
Thanks to Goldeneye, do you feel some responsibility for guns becoming the primary tool in videogames?
Yeah, I do, but it’s important to not get weighed down by anything. You have to relax to get into a place where you can think of ideas. I don’t think you can get in the ropes about it and feel a great Atlas-like burden.
I’ve been nominated for a Games Media Award in the ‘Specialist Writer (Online)’ category.
Specialist, in case you’re wondering, refers not to the fact that nominees are special, but rather to our membership of the specialist press, which covers the games industry exclusively, as oppose to the mainstream press, whose games coverage is but one piece in a bigger editorial jigsaw. Members of the specialist press are more likely to be experts but, on the flipside, are less likely to have, y’know, readers.
2009 marks the third anniversary of the GMAs. Each year the selection process has changed. In its first year, only PRs voted for nominees, a decision that caused no amount of consternation for some writers. Kieron Gillen described the process as being a bit like “the prisoners voting for their favourite prison guard.” After all, what PR is going to celebrate the writer who rubbished a game whose Metacritic rating was tied to their end of year bonus?
This year, however, the selection and voting process has been handled differently. In June the UK games industry was invited to nominate across 10 categories from ‘Best Games Magazine’ to ‘Best Regional Columnist’. Those publications and writers with the highest number of votes in each category were then shortlisted and now a panel of “over 200 members of the games media and industry PRs will be asked to deliver their verdict”. I’m not sure if it’s a good or a bad system (that sort of depends on the wisdom and motivations of the panel, I guess) but nevertheless, that’s how it is.
Despite the legitimate reservations of a number of my contemporaries, I’m excited to be nominated. I didn’t ask for anyone to vote for me and, as I’ve never worked at a magazine or website, instead working from home, on the train or at the local library, there’s a good chance I’ve been selected because of my writing, rather than my contacts. Regardless of what happens next, that’s something to be happy about, I think.
More generally, I’m grateful for the editors who have funded my mistakes — and you only need to look back through the Chewing Pixels archives to see quite how many of those I’ve made in my time. Because mistakes (and the freedom to make them) are super important. Especially the big mistakes outplayed on a public stage where the embarrassment is so keen you either walk away forever, or grit your teeth, dust off your pen and write and write till you better find what you have to say and the voice with which to say it. Without those opportunities, I wouldn’t be here.
Videogames are ridiculous, frivolous things. Any honest person who dedicates sustained time and energy to writing about them (or indeed playing them) must, sooner or later, acknowledge this fact. But that’s OK. Because sometimes foolish things confound the wise; because, sometimes, videogames reveal truths about the human condition, and the way in which our world is put together in ways that their creators never intended. After all, what is a videogame if not a man-made universe? If a games writer can catch those revelations and somehow articulate them in a useful way, then they are joining in the great tradition of all writers.
Also, sometimes people just really need to sit about in their underwear and shoot aliens in the face. They do this as a way to escape worries about where the next mortgage payment is going to come from, or how they can help stop their kid from being bullied at school. Or they do it to distract themselves from the voices that tell them they’re never going to be kissed, or that nobody will notice very much when they’re gone. Games don’t solve those problems, but they can provide some space in which to find a solution, or, at very least, a some relief from having to find one.
And those people need to know which is the very best shooting-aliens-in-the-face game to help them with that. And that’s where we come in. And there are worse jobs to do well.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Charles Darwin.
The quotation that opens this, the latest reinvention of Taito’s most venerable arcade classic, does more than establish the game’s overarching theme of evolution. It’s also justification. For the first time in 31 years, a game bearing the Space Invaders name allows players to move up and down the screen as well as across it. Orthodox gamers steady yourselves: this is the first of the series’ defining rules to be broken by this plucky upstart of an iPhone game, but it’s far from the last.
It’s clear a selfish gene has driven this development, steering it with rare clarity and purpose, but also with a brazen disregard for tradition. Nothing is sacred. In addition to the 1×1-pixel pea-shooter of the original, you now have a clutch of different weapon types to choose from. The eponymous invaders no longer march down the screen in tidy, staccato-shuffle rows, but instead sweep around in hyperactive, Galaxian arcs. No more is the challenge one of everlasting survival, the experience is now broken down into distinct stages, each with a start, a middle, an end and its own high-score table.
So, through Darwin’s words, Taito preempts any indignation. “Yeah, we messed with Space Invaders,” they admit. “But don’t get mad. This is the way of all life. Fail to adapt and the Game Over’s eternal. You don’t want that, do you?” By the end of this sucker punch of miniaturised wonder, the answer is an emphatic no. Space Invaders: Infinity Gene is the very best game for the iPhone. But, more significantly perhaps, it’s also the very best Space Invaders. Considering its grandfather popularised not only the shoot-’em-up genre but also the very medium itself, that’s no mean feat.
The game begins at the origin of the species, stage ‘zero’ wading back into videogaming’s primordial soup to revisit the black and white blobs and dots that approximated alien invasion in 1978. After a few moments playing here – during which time you wonder if you accidentally downloaded the original by mistake – the first transformation takes place. The screen burns out in a blaze of white pixels, before time and space explodes back into glorious long-screen view, your ship broken from its x-axis restriction, the game lighting up with a bold exclamation: “The King of Games is Back!”
Of course, Infinity Gene’s evolutions are far from revolutionary outside the context of Space Invaders. Shoot-’em-ups have allowed their players to move freely around vertically-aligned screens for decades, and the idea of weapon upgrades that fall from downed flying saucers is as old as videogame time. But Space Invaders has always been defined by what it doesn’t do as much as by what it does. The recent Extreme makeovers for DS and PSP may have introduced Flashdance pinks and greens to its deep space, but, by locking ship movement to the bottom of the screen and maintaining the crablike advance motif of the invaders themselves, maintained consistency. By choosing to throw these staples out of the window, the question and challenge for Infinity Gene’s designers has become: how can we make a canonical Space Invaders game that obeys none of its rules?
You can read the rest of thie piece over at Eurogamer here.
“It’s painful, living with this constant threat. You go home for the weekend and it’s all you can talk about with your friends, yet not one of them can help you. You feel alone and there seems to be no way out. It is hard to sleep and to concentrate. We do our best to stay positive but it’s difficult. We’re finding it hard to start work on our next game.”
Eight months ago David Papazian was on top of the world. His company, Mobigame, had just released its first videogame for the iPhone. In the space of just a few weeks it had won two prestigious awards. The past two years of early mornings, late nights and tireless endeavour were set to pay off; the sacrifices had been worth it, the indie developer dream was coming true.
Today, he sits dejected and worn. Banned in the UK, USA and Germany, his game may be critically acclaimed but, for most, it is also impossible to buy. On 15th July, 2009, just one week after Apple nominated Mobigame’s debut title as one of their ‘Top 30 Favourite iPhone Games’, it was removed from the App Store. Not because it’s unfinished, or because it might damage your hardware, nor any of the usual reasons that software is removed from sale. Rather, it’s banned because of its name: Edge.
London, 1979
This story begins in Covent Garden, London at the end of the 1970s. It was here that a young entrepreneur, Timothy Langdell, founded the game publishing company Softek: Masters of the Game. Softek hired young game makers, offered to bankroll their developments, publish their games, and then split the proceeds. The set-up worked well and, while Softek’s releases could hardly be called blockbusters, they were successful enough to fuel the enterprise.
But Langdell was unhappy. The company name, chosen to reflect the young, fresh vibrancy of an emergent industry, seemed a little embarrassing five years down the line. So in 1984 Langdell changed its name to The Edge, simultaneously registering the trademark in both the US and the UK. In this moment the seeds of a thousand lawsuits were sown: nobody but nobody could use the words ‘The Edge’ in relation to a videogame-related product without first agreeing it with Langdell. Of that, he would make certain.
By 1990 Langdell was yet to file any lawsuits, but he was no stranger to the courts. That year Michael and Ian Jones, two programmers who worked for The Edge porting the arcade game Soldier of Light to Commodore 64, won a court battle against the publisher for withholding payments. But before they saw any money, Langdell and The Edge had relocated from London to Los Angeles. Langdell claims that the move had nothing to do with avoiding paying his developers. Rather, it was due to a combination of “the weather, an addiction to Pukka Pies and Mushy Peas and a deal involving several hundreds of thousands of pounds paid by Commodore International for The Edge to become a leading Amiga developer assisting with the launch of the CDTV”. No one from Commodore was able to verify his claim. Nevertheless, one way or another, The Edge moved stateside.
Los Angeles, 1990
The move to the sunnier climes of Los Angeles brought with it more than an alleged windfall from Commodore. From 1990, perhaps realising what a valuable and wide-ranging trademark it had at its disposal, The Edge’s primary business shifted from publishing videogames to vigorously pursuing companies whose products it believed infringed ‘The Edge’ mark.
From Namco’s PlayStation release Soul Edge (which had its name changed to Soul Blade for the West) to Sony’s PlayStation Edge to the UK’s own Edge magazine, Langdell confronted anyone who used his trademark in relation to videogames. In every case the message was clear: change the name of your product, pay us a licence fee or face a court hearing. Some paid the fee quietly. Others, faced with legal threats that they believed were dubious, turned the tables and instead took The Edge to court. No matter what the outcome of these cases, Langdell’s energy in protecting his trademark never faltered, even if the trickle of games that bore the name had long since dried up.
France, 2007
In 2007 David Papazian founded Mobigame with his associate, Matthieu Malot. For two years the pair worked on their debut iPhone title under the working title Cube, changing the name to Edge when they read previews of another developer’s game of the same name. Edge was released in December 2008 to critical acclaim, winning the prestigious Milthon award for Best Mobile Game in Paris and the IMGA (International Mobile Game Award) at the mobile world congress in Barcelona. These accomplishments provided a ringing endorsement of Apple’s emerging platform, proving that two men could turn a good idea into a global success without the backing of a major publisher.
But not everyone shared in the celebration. On 7th April, 2009, five months after its release, Papazian received an email from Apple. It stated: “We have received notice from Edge Games, Inc. (‘Edge’) that Edge believes your application named Edge infringes Edge’s rights. Accordingly, please take steps to review your application to ensure that it does not violate the rights of another party.
Langdell had found Mobigame.
You can read the rest of this feature at Eurogamer here
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