Rock-n-roll!
Somehow, I managed to forget to draw your attention to the fact that I am now – officially – a rock deity:
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| From WAR-Misc |
That’s a picture of our office “garage band” – The Hamtouchers – hanging out with members of Blue Öyster Cult (they of “More Cowbell” fame) in our local recording studio.
Why, you ask?
Because we were recording a track together. An EPIC track. A track dedicated to Warhammer’s Slayers (newly added to Warhammer Online).
You can download it here, but be warned – it may melt your face off with ALL THE AWESOME.
ROCK.
May I have your attention, please.
At the following link.
[EDIT] This post is deeply “meta”, apparently. Which is just fine by me.
The Twitter Game Dev List
Sam Houston from GamerDNA put this together. It’s a list of Game Devs and studios on Twitter. I found a fair number of interesting folks who I hadn’t been following previously. Definitely worth a look!
Blog Warhammer
So it seems I’ve been derelict in my duties. Why? Because I’ve failed to point out the most-excellent “Age of Blogging” event that the folks at Blog Warhammer are organizing (and that OODLES of sites are participating in).
Some quick advice to bloggers new and old:
We love constructive criticism. Let’s face it – if you’re running a WAR blog you’re part of the most passionate, “plugged in” part of our community. You represent an important part of the “voice” of the community and part of that relationship means voicing concerns. While I usually won’t read ranting or aimless whining, but I’ve always got time for even-handed, considerate criticism of what we’re doing. Be tough, be honest, be fair.
That being said:
It’s okay to be a fan. I like reading about people having fun with our game. While it’s fun for Devs to read about people enjoying their work, it’s actually also an important feedback mechanism. Just like constructive criticism helps us know where there’s room for improvement, positive feedback helps us know what people are enjoying the most and, thus, what sorts of things they’d like to see MORE of.
Make sure we can contact you. We really DO read most of the WAR blogs we’re aware of and sometimes that means we have questions to ask or feedback to offer that don’t belong in blog comments.
So… yeah. Get out there and blog! If you start a new site, make sure to let me know!
‘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?
More Halloween pics.
I know, I know. I’m stupidly late, but a couple of folks asked if I managed to look less like a “Spy vs. Spy” character in the end, so here are some shots from Paul’s Halloween party:
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.
The “New” E3 – Bigger, not public.
Apparently, the rumors of public-access to E3 ’09 were false.
Instead, the show will be bigger than last year, but smaller by a full order of magnitude than when the event mattered. And with no access for the general public.
I can’t say I understand this decision at all.
Launch party!
Our Launch Party was held last Thursday in the Sequoia Club in Georgetown (a neighborhood in DC).
I didn’t take a ton of pictures because… ya know… open bar + all my friends = distracting. Nevertheless, what shots I DID get can be viewed here.
I tossed in some other shots from various launch-related events that have happened over the past month.
[UPDATE] Here’s a quick video pan-around of the club where we held the party: