Follow-up to previous post.
A weirdly large number of people decided to email/IM me instead of commenting, which is curious. Are you all SECRET FILM MAKERS?
Anywho, to clarify a couple of things:
Yes, I realize that no “big” studio would grant the kind of access necessary to make a good documentary on game making. That being said, it’s far more likely that indie developers would be willing to consider it, if for no other reason than the promise of free advertising. And the story you’d get there would almost certainly be a good one, as there are only two likely outcomes:
1) Plucky underdogs make good and achieve success against all odds.
2) Wide-eyed dreamers crushed by factors beyond their control.
I’d watch either version!
An honest question.
Why hasn’t anyone tried to make a documentary on video game DEVELOPMENT?
I’m not talking some sort of post-mortem, deeply controlled Q&A deal. I want to see somebody tag along during ACTUAL development and tell the story of how games are really made.
I promise there are all sorts of indie-film honors just WAITING for the Bright Spark who first manages to pull it off.
Happy New Year.
My vacation is nearly over. Regular blogging will recommence shortly. Stay safe, have fun and have a great New Years holiday!
Dear Fan Sites.
You should always make sure you have some sort of direct contact info (email, AIM, etc.) visible somewhere on your page, just in case a certain BELOVED GAME DEV wants to get in touch with you personally without posting HIS contact info in your sites comments pages. Especially over the holidays, when I – er… a certain BELOVED GAME DEV has oodles of free time and is obsessively reading your sites.
That is all.
This pleases me.
‘Tis the Season
A handful of lunatics are playing the Desert Bus portion of the old (and unreleased) Penn and Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors game non-stop, raising money for Child’s Play. For those who aren’t familiar with Desert Bus, allow me to shamelessly steal from Wikipedia:
The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.
The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other cars on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson—for another point (a decision they must make in a few seconds or the game ends). Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance holds out. Some players who have completed the trip have also noted that, although the scenery never changes, a bug splats on the windscreen about five hours through the first trip, and on the return trip the light does fade, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights.
As you can see, volunteering to play this game non-stop for 120 hours straight is an act of benign holiday madness. So you should make sure to donate. After all, how often can you do something good while ALSO causing a stranger to suffer?
Public Service Announcement
As the holiday season kicks into full gear, I’ll be on the road a bit and doing less bloggery whatnot. I will, however, continue to relentlessly post on Twitter.
So if you’re interested in tracking that sort of stuff, my Twitter profile is:
http://twitter.com/JoshDrescher
If you’re not interested, I’ll get back to more regular blogging in the New Year (which is not to say that I’m on full blogging hiatus, just… ya know… I’m LAZY).
WordPress is annoying.
A week or so ago, WP stopped parsing its own WYSIWYG code, meaning I keep having to manually enter things like line breaks and formatting. Now, they seem to have changed the rules for pingbacks so that any time anyone who – for example – has me in their blogroll updates ANYTHING on their page, I get spammed with a pingback notice.
Over the weekend I learned that some of you update a LOT.
I just felt like sharing.
Barnett calls it “gaming archaeology”.
In addition to WAR and DAoC, Mythic takes care of the Granddaddy of modern MMOs (well, ONE of them, anyway), Ultima Online. When we took over some time after EA acquired us, we were sent a HUGE shipment of “stuff” that the old Origin Systems stduio had packed up and put into storage many moons ago.
There were obvious gems in the shipment (like original Hildebrandt Brothers paintings and a Kilrathi battle suit), but most of it was seemingly random and hard to appreciate. So it went back into storage for a while.
At some point, Barnett got in touch with the fans who run the Origin Museum. Not wanting to see this wealth of Origin goodies go all “Indiana Jones” on us and disappear into some beureaucratic memory hole forever, we invited them to come to the studio and see what they could make of it all.
They arrived with a vast array of machinery (both new and old) to help them decipher, document and archive everything. While they were in, we’d occasionally pop our heads in and check out what they were up to, but they were generally so intensely focused that we felt like we were getting in the way, so we left them alone most of the time. After a week, they boxed everything up and headed home.
The Stash went back into storage and we got back to the business of building WAR.
Earlier today, I got to wondering what ever came of their efforts. A bit of googling later unearthed a really cool write-up they did of their trip. I’ll leave it to them to detail the whole event.
This sort of thing is important to our industry (as I’ve mentioned before). The folks who built those old games have all moved on to other things (some of them have seemingly left the industry entirely), but their work is important and deserves to be remembered and appreciated. We got lucky and had a cache of amazing stuff fall into our laps when EA bought us and – luckier still – we were able to get the guys from the Origin Museum to come in and make sense of it all.
It’s sad to think of the number of great old games whose history and background stories have already been lost to the ages, but it’s also heartening to see that we’re starting to take better care of our legacy as an industry.
Halloween Costume (in progress).
So, in a fit of lunacy, I decided to opt out of my standard costume of “zombie wearing whatever Josh had on at work that day” this year. Instead, I’m going as a medieval Plague Doctor. I figure it’s a pretty “Warhammery” sort of costume already, but I’m going to ramp that up with a belt full of random totems and potions and such (so far, I’ve got a cross made of “Sigmar’s Bones” and a wax-sealed jar with a witch’s toe inside… oh, and a dead rat).
This is the image I’m working off of:
After a few nights of fussing about, I’ve got this much done:
It gets REALLY hot in the mask (and I may want to let the paint dry a bit more before trying it on again… fuuumes…), but I’m pleased with how it worked out.
The hat’s not quite right, but I think the floppy look of it is somewhat creepier. I don’t like how bunchy the robe is, so I’m going to look into getting a 5’x5′ square of leather (or pleather or some such) to make a bib/cassock type deal. I need to do something with my hands also. Probably weird gloves and skull rings or some such.
Anywho, I’ve got two days to finish the damn thing for use at Paul’s party. Pictures of the final deal to follow at some point.