This dude, known as Space Sheriff Gavan but called X-Or in France. No kidding, it’s one of my oldest memory. Sitting in the dark in the afternoon, watching his adventures. I was like four or five years old and it was obviously amazing.
Badass
So yeah, 1982 Space Sheriff totally copied the light saber from 1977 Star Wars BUT the thing is, the first time I saw a light saber was through this dude half robot half alien and full human cop. And seriously, it was powerful too. Robot eyes lightening on and light saber -sorry, “laser blade”- appearing when the dude is angry? It was a HOLYSHIT moment that I still remember, with my eyes wide open, my little ass deep in the couch and my legs not touching the ground.
But wait, there’s more!
Now that’s a pose.
The robot alien sheriff had this crazy sidecar that is not a sidecar but whatevs, awesome. He would go super fast and jump out of it to do some Kung-Fu in the face of bad guys. But the thing that was killing me was that:
BYE
The hero had a spaceship that would transform into a MOTHERFUCKING MECHA DRAGON. Good god even today I think it’s cool. Imagine: when your first taste of fiction as a kid is that, a dude standing on top of a dragon robot with his red eyes and his light saber, it’s kind of over. Being cooler than that or surprising me with a story would be hard (I guess a large amount of mangas will change my mind later on).
Space sheriff is coming from another planet. He gets some help from sidekicks but he mostly operates alone. Justice, technology, design, funky music -show produced in the 70s- were part of Space Sheriff’s aesthetic and I realized that these themes followed me my entire life. And counting.
And maybe that’s why I hate Daft They Kinda Stole Everything Punk sometimes.
I think it’s the first time in my life that I feel that everything, everyone is in a precarious situation. At every scale, from family and close friends to the price of oil or the state of the game industry.
It seems like everything can happen and quite a lot in a negative way, in a matter of months. I feel that before, I always had an example of someone in control or something stable that I could look up to for a while. Not anymore. Maybe it was an illusion but it was comfy.
Things are chaotic and of course good can happen too from chaos, like Life. But the randomness and the lack of control of what is going on scares me. Because it shows how much we are technically advanced dumb animals and it doesn’t make me want to give a shit and care about people, even if I do. We’re like a disease on this little asteroid with water.
That might be the main problem for atheists, hard to keep smiling about the future and have hope for humans.
And this is where a religious person would add “you know, you should believe in something” making my point that we’re fucked.
The well known smell of Paris spring going toward summer. *yeah*
The bitter taste of a France being so disappointing. I’m not surprised having to find a third shop finally opened on a Monday or not hearing anything credible at all from our politics. Even my sister is rude, leaving shit stains all over the toilet and a trash can that smelled like a dead cat after using my apartment. France, taking care of business as usual I guess.
A few days ago I was in the desert and it was pretty different. So much shit in my mind. Brutal rollercoaster.
FEZ is out. I followed everything since the day they won the IGF in 2008 which feels like three decades ago.
The game is out and there are bugs. 5 years, one programmer and pretty nasty bugs -corrupted saved data, reboot and stuff-. I’m at the same time amazed that that kind of bug is making it to a finished and approved product on a console (MS, what the hell?) and at the same time, Renaud Bedard did a fantastic job at coding everything, even a complex audio system (we really need a realMIDIengine instead of reinventing the wheel each time). Chapeau bas.
It’s funny because Polytron/FEZ make me “love them and hate them” at the same time. Love the indie, hate the 360 (I hope nobody ever releases a small game as a console exclusive, ever. Oh shit, Sound Shapes). Love Phil’s open mouth, hate his open mouth. Love the colorful artistic direction, hate 8bits, old school platforms.
Like Jesper Juul says, “Fez is surely supposed to be interestingly old-school & challenging, but I think this type of puzzle worked much better when you were 12 and only had a single game – and you were playing it with your friends on long afternoons.”
Then this article (or this one) seems to nail what a lot of players find as a negative with FEZ: meh platforms and mind-fucking puzzles so hard that people wonder what’s the point.
FEZ was like the next Braid, the next “indie sensation”. Five years later, it seems like it’s not. It’s OK, making games is hard but I feel that winning the 2012 IGF Grand Prize, shouldn’t really had happened. Antichamber or Botanicula seem so fresh compared to FEZ, I don’t get why they didn’t win, they could have used some PR. I know Polytron is friend with IGF judges and game journalists and they all have parties together and stuff so when I hear that really, it doesn’t change anything with judging games I can’t help but think are you fucking serious?
And then it hits me: we are an incestuous micro scene focused a little too much on the past, our achievements and our limitless nostalgia.
Anyway, if you have a kid and live where rainy days are the default, FEZ might keep you warm. And busy.
Jon Blow interview, widely shared all across the internet. Once again feeling so close to his vision and processes, I would have probably done what he did after Braid except buying an electric car: I would have made me a prefab green house instead. But, same idea.
What the article and comments highlight one more time is the complete lack of understanding of how games are made and what is important when building them. The Witness’ dev blog doesn’t spend a lot of time on the story but quite a lot describing the world editor, cube map filtering techniques, puzzle count and architecture. Full-on game design.
I think people freak out on him talking about the juvenile, silly and intellectually lazy state of the game culture because the hardcore market is shrinking pretty fast and that makes a lot of people cranky. Less and less people are enjoying the juvenile and silly on consoles. So many mobile games are silly and juvenile but people play a few minutes here and there, it’s less embarrassing. I much prefer when people say “yes, it’s juvenile so what” than people feeling offended by this statement, kind of in denial.
Today’s game culture is silly but it doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun with it, nobody said that. I bought Just Cause 2 and I’d like to get Saint Row the Third because I know I’ll have a good time but that doesn’t mean that I have to love it to death. I still haven’t play these games and don’t feel like I failed at life not playing them either. Chill.
I didn’t like everything in Braid, haven’t finished it but I liked a lot of stuff. Brilliant stuff. Synapse-creating stuff.
I don’t get that part of the game culture where you have to vouch for everything or otherwise you are pointed out as a complete pretentious douchebag. If you like and search for different games, trying to expand this game culture, you are a complete pretentious douchebag too.
If it doesn’t show how juvenile we are, I don’t know what does.
And everybody writing about games for a living, fucking please: stop focusing on story in games. Just stop. That’s not what it’s about.
I left Paris right when it was getting effing cold. Jumped into the warm L.A. spring and then for a couple of days into summer, in Desert Hot Springs.
Now back to some Los Angeles rain and clouds, it’s totally uncool, man. Winter to end of spring to summer to start of spring. In terms of timeline it’s pretty disturbing, actually.
Still coding, learning through Unity. It’s fascinating, frustrating as hell, it really feels like I can do everything but everything is so tedious. Welcome to coding, I guess. I’ll write about it soon, showing how much game tools are shaped to create universes and worlds, not games. I just can’t give up but holy molly shit, it’s quite hard for a designer.
I’m thankful to be able to follow the sun as I want to.
I finished Ice T’s book (the terrifyingly cold but also warm heart of an orphan, I dig) and attacked Fred Wesley’s biography (this dude wanted to play bebop and all he got was James Brown and inventing Funk). I can’t really create music here but I make sure to stay in it, reading, listening and playing guitar.
“Instagram is a free photo sharing program that allows users to take a photo, apply a digital filter to it, and then share it on a variety of social networking services, including Instagram’s own.”
I never understood the appeal. Never. I mean I use filters and share pictures on the internet too but…
“With Instagram selling for $1bil & Draw Something selling for $200mm, why would any innovator bother trying to solve real world problems.”
@tomkrieglstein
Instagram became successful because they were exclusive. In one week, the Android app and the FB announcement made it everything but exclusive. Exclusivity brings power users, stars, fans and envy from the rest. The problem today is that it’s a little like privacy, exclusivity is dead. If it’s successful it can’t afford to be exclusive. Power users and big fans hate not feeling special.
Instagram grew fast because people somehow constantly want new stuff to make things easier, like an app with built-in filters and social network. Users just don’t care enough about giving their pictures away to a company with no business plan at all.
I thought Dys4ia was great. I have to my surprise been thinking about it days and weeks after playing it.
I’m with Danc and Raph Koster on thinking about games in terms of systems, mechanics, feedback and loops more than anything else. The fact that I started to prototype, design and code my game mechanics makes it even more clearer to me that it’s all about that.
But the story-based Dys4ia touched me because of its original story, a story that I rarely encountered before –except by reading the fantastic story of Lynn Conway or Rebecca Heineman’s– it gave me something new to understand. The everyday struggle, the mindset behind humans complexity.
Anna’s game worked for me, pushed the message in a better way than reading would have.
My point is if you want to do a story-based game, it needs to be different if you want a game to work around something as static as narrative. Because really, narrative is not a game mechanic (I’m totally going to make this t-shirt).
Dys4ia is so personal. We need real things to come through our games, too. We have a pretty high level of polish today (thanks to better and better tools) but people don’t throw themselves in, they don’t try to express anything, they call their game “Pew Pew You’re Dead” or “Robots and Bologna”. We shouldn’t just play around nostalgia with a twist in 2012 because hey, “they’re just games”. They are more than that and it’s a 35 year old culture now.
There are mangas about wine (I mean, “The sale of fine wines in South Korea has increased significantly as a result of the popularity of the comic”) there are shows on TV about stuffing animals, dancing moms and thank god we have Octodad and some weird truck simulations but we are so bland compared to other mediums. Big lack of flavors and diversity. The other day I watched the 4D whale Futurama episode, it was brilliant. Just in one episode you had enough material, themes, funny shit to create multiple games on.
To me it’s not just about games being immature by really trying hard to be movies, it’s that even the immature part is not great or inspired.
Games are a thing onto themselves. They are human processes. They are loops. They illuminate complexity through hands-on mastery. They author artificial systems to generate culture. They can (and will!) advance forward to encompass a vast breadth of human interactions with the world.
We def should aim for that but those concepts are hard to grasp. Systems are annoying to most people, systems are the opposite of what a writer likes. Talking and writing about systems will never interest the public, it sadly, barely interests game developers. They’re busy with shaders :p
On the other hand, if you go the “narrative” way for your game, please reach for something wicked, interesting, personal, poignant and stop spreading generic fiction stories (I seriously can’t stand anymore any story about gods and mysterious civilizations and what not). We have enough of them.
Back in the 90s, at least in France they were pretty rare. My dad bought a huge one in Canada in ‘91 and I would totally use it a few years later because it’s great when it rains and in Paris, it rains often. I still have this hoodie and still use it to skateboard.
Hoodies are much better than any umbrella, especially on crowded sidewalks. I think a tight hoodie is super sexy on women.
But anyway, I was walking in the suburbs of Paris, in Champs sur marne (East Paris, a bit shady, projects around etc). Winter, rainy, 6 or 6:30pm. Dark. I’m wearing this hoodie and I remember thinking how neat the sound is inside the hood and how when rain is fat like it was, water was going through the hood like it was a piece of paper. I was a little lost and I needed the time.
I approached this woman who is trying to enter her car. Nobody around but me and her. I already feel tension as I’m getting closer. She tries to speed up. I try to get there before she jumps in and can’t hear me. I use my best white voice possible, avoiding the scary “HEY!” and ask her “excuse me madame, what time is it, please?” and she freaks the shit out of her before I end my sentence.
She’s scared, she’s a middle aged white woman who doesn’t know what time it is, she gradually sees a creepy black dude under a hood. She’s not surprised and going on with her life, she’s fucking scared. Frozen until I leave.
That day, I sadly understood that wearing a hoodie and being a black dude was socially incorrect, unstable. Annoying because I loved me some hoodie. Especially with no hair. It feels so good. But as it’s also used by thugs to hide, I’m screwed. Can’t wear them. I realized later that whatever I wear, I’ll be suspicious. A suit will make me suspicious. A hoodie too. But a suit is better.
This year, I bought my first two hoodies ever. Everybody is wearing some so I figured fuck it, I’m doing it too. I’m a musician/developer, not a criminal.
And then Trayvon.
Now I look at them and I kind of want to cry. Anger. Desperation.
The only constant between me scaring this woman with a hoodie 15 years ago and Trayvon Martin is the stigmatized young black man who’s simply wearing something convenient. Yes, at the end appearances are deceptive.
Meanwhile the shooter is free, and defended to death . Oh god, the anger.
Seven artists over a few years, inspired by video games as a culture phenomenon. The overused and terrible term that is “video games” doesn’t carry a lot of sense today but during the 80s it meant the future. The dirty, rasterized future with dark video arcade, cigarettes, beers and people shouting. It was street. No parents playing Wii Sports or Kinectimals.
Black music has always been really good at capturing what’s going on and arcade cabinets hit the 80s hard. I counted a dozen R&B funk songs with “video games aesthetics” from 1980 to 1985.
Sampled by Daft.
That’s a lot, there isn’t a single music genre hitting on the computer entertainment like that.
Beyond the obvious will to cash in on a new trend, the themes brought by the arcade culture -obsession, high score, science fiction, humor- seem to have sparkled a lot of ideas within the US black music community and I can understand why: obsession? love and drugs (it’s the 80s, crack startin’), high score? Black people struggling and aiming for better lives (also, NBA spreadin’), science-fiction? Yeah, the 80s were like a bad science-fiction movie for all of them. Humor? That’s how black people deal with things since forever.
Black culture and video game culture were totally understanding each other. That’s why there’s about 2% of black people in the game industry today. /trollface
Street Beat album. The Deele is a funk band from Ohio which will give Kenneth Babyface Edmonds something to do after playing with Bootsy Collins and before becoming a hugely successful producer during the 90s. It’s totally my jam. F.U.N.K.
“Don’t hold back, don’t give me no slack, how are you gonna party with Donkey Kong on your back?”
The Chilly Kids – At the Ice Arcade, 1983
“Hey everybody! You’ve got it where? At the Ice Arcade!” Very early hip-hop band on Sugar Hill Records. They only released this single, which talks about not caring about anything but video games and rocking the Ice Arcade, scoring on all these cabinets. The music is probably composed by the Sugar Hill in-house band. Silly, very 80s.
“Don’t push us cuz we’re close to the edge, we’re trying not to loose our head!” *at the Ice Arcade*
The Gap Band – Video Junkie, 1985
From the Gap Band VI album. It starts like a Japanese classic music rip-off video game music straight from both the Genesis and the Super NES sound chips. Huge synth bass, atmospheric and anxious feeling (playing 80s games, you bet), hypnotic beat that’s the Gap Band in action right here.
“Every time I call her on the phone, that Space Invaders got my girl and gone.”
The end of the song is a nice jam. Bluesy guitar solo, distorted trumpet and sampling experiments, it feels like The Gap Band can just link the oldest form of US black music with the most recent in a song with cultural allusions to video games. In 1985. I love them.
George Clinton – Computer Games, 1982
“Hello! I am the computer game Dracula! I’d like to suck necks”. Pure and perfect P-funk jam with big slap bass, infectious fuzz guitar lick and blips and blobs. Also, Junie Morrison’s and Bernie Worrell’s keyboards controlled insanity.
Ozone – Video King, 1983
“People wonder where I get my speed, I tell ’em I, get another breakfast on the Centipede.”
From the Glasses album. Ozone is an early 80s Motown funk band with a heavy jazz tone (Jazzfunk, that’s it). This is their last album ever and they thought that would be cool to talk about being the Video King. Biggest name-dropping ever: Batman, Space Invaders, Centipede, Astro Blaster, Tron, Donkey Kong, Missile Combat, Frogger, Defender, Asteroids, ???, Zaxxon, Battlezone. And always this mix of synthetic sounds and live instruments. Also, humor.
Dazz Band – Joystick, 1983
From the album Joystick. You can’t represent Funk without a band from Ohio and here’s another one! Dazz Band and its heavy melodic bass lines. The lyrics mixing video game culture and sex are rather smart, considering what we sometimes hear these days:
I can prove that love
Is just live a video game
Just take control of the stick
Of the stick, of the stick
I’ll let you play your game
I know what you’re looking for
And all I want to do is score, yeah
I just want you to be mine
Just take control I’ll let you play me all the time
Take control of the stick
Of the stick, of the stick
Of the stick, of the joystick, baby
The creepy bridge with robotic voice makes me think about a final boss. Would the one you want to be with, be The Final Boss? I’ll let you answer that.
Klymaxx – Video Kid, 1984
“Hello baby, can I play games with youuu?”
From the Meeting in the Ladies Room album. All girl band playing some hard and tight funk. I saw them live a few years ago, they are bad and have irresistible grooves. I love this innocent and easy one. What not to love about a girl singing straight “I’m in love with the video kid”. My nerdy heart from the glory days of the Arcade feels it.
It’s also funny to realize that some of the synthesizers used in all these songs (totally unheard new sounds at that time like the Prophet 5, Oberheim OB-8, Moog or Jupiter8) use the same CPU as our beloved arcade machines, C64, Game Boy or Neo-Geo: the mighty Z80.
The relationship between funk and games goes further. Listen to this 1985 Stevie Wonder’s song and tell me you don’t hear some of the future Genesis tunes in every way. Or listen to Yuzo Koshiro loving him some Soul II Soul. Later on, Michael Jackson himself will get involved with Sonic and Space Channel 5. Funk is fun, fun is a heavy part of games if not the core and so Japanese composers naturally, rationally used its power from illegal James Brown samples in 90s arcade games (I can’t remember which ones, sorry) to Jet Set Radio soundtrack.
Going back to this mix, the 80s video game aesthetic -sharp, synthetic, weird sounds, silliness, anxiety feelings- is incorporated into the music, it’s not just some lyrics saying “I play videogames on the couch” as we have today.
Almost like a love declaration to the “video game” medium or at least acknowledgement of its legacy, early on.
As the medium is still fighting to be truly recognized as a cultural force in 2012, I think it’s cool to witness that it hasn’t always been the case.
