I’ve been very slowly working my way through this amazing book, Art of Atari put together by Tim Lapetino. Every single page reveals a new beautiful image that I have to study for a few minutes before moving on. This makes reading the actual text of the book take a lot longer than I would have expected, but I can’t really complain. It’s all just cover to cover gorgeous. I have read several books on the history of video games and the history of silicon valley. As you might expect, stories about the inner workings of Atari come up fairly often. Tales of the work hard, play hard lifestyle Atari had going are pretty entertaining. Since those histories tend to focus on the games, the game developers, and the fledgling business of games, a lot of this book is pretty new territory for me. As the title would suggest, the book is mainly focused on the artists and designers that created the Atari look of the late 70s and early 80s. The state of the art in actual on screen graphics at the time consisted mainly of chunky abstract blocks of color. If you were going to suspend disbelief and accept that those few yellow squares are actually a medieval warrior, bridging that gulf had to start somewhere. Playing a video game in the early 80s didn’t start when you put the cartridge in the console. It started with the box art, and the pictures in the manual. It started with the brief tales of galactic adventure that accompanied them. the work that went into that art and design are every bit as fascinating as stories about the games they complimented. At least for me. What I was particularly taken by was how all of the art, all of the design, had to be filtered through the production technology available at the time. When I started creating commercial art, the world was well into the Photoshop era. Getting digital art out of the computer and into the physical world was still a bit janky, but creating in the computer was rapidly becoming the standard. None of these folks had that available to them. Everything had to be hand done and prepped for screen printing. Large format Inkjet printers that spray the images directly onto vinyl just didn’t exist. The had some four colour process printers that could do the smaller stuff, like cartridge decals and product boxes, but even those lacked the fidelity of modern printers. Working to the technology available, the Atari artist and designers created some amazing things. For several years I worked designing and manufacturing signs. While most of the technology for that industry has advanced significantly since the late 70s, there are still some places where it has lagged behind print production. I have, for example, hand cut a rubylith, which is something only old timers in print and screen printing hipsters will understand. It still comes up from time to time in the sign industry though. Most of it is robots with knives issued marching orders by custom software not too dissimilar from Illustrator. Even with that experience, I have some difficulty wrapping my brain around the hurdles a designer would have to leap to get a six foot tall graphic produced and applied to an arcade cabinet. Well, I have some more amazing pictures to stare at, so I’m going to go do that.

Best Games - One Must Fall 2097 The early 90s were the era of the fighting game. Entire arcades could be filled with nothing but fighting game machines and they would still draw a crowd. It was not uncommon to see multiple versions of the same game, stood beside each other with a line queued up in front of each. Street Fighter 2 was the undisputed champion amongst fighting games, but Mortal Kombat was a strong contender. With it’s large digitized characters and outlandish violence, Mortal Kombat was designed to catch people’s attention. It was brash and blunt in a way that most games at the time just weren’t. Most games that lean heavily on a flashy gimmick tend to have very little depth. There usually isn’t a real game there. Mortal Kombat was a notable exception to that rule. Mortal Kombat was a solid, nuanced fighting game. Great artists steal, right? One Must Fall 2097 apes Mortal Kombat in all the ways that matter. The pace of the game. The snappy back and forth sparring paired with movement that feels deliberately languid. A less twitchy game than Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat could be slightly more tactical. It rewards patience and timing over aggression. One Must Fall borrows, or steals, all of these elements. It also shamelessly lifts many animations and moves from the celebrated arcade game. It does all that and replaces the gimmick of violence and digitized humans with giant cg rendered fighting robots. A solid gimmick. That could have been it. The developers of One Must Fall could have settled for making a sturdy Mortal Kombat clone, and it would have sold well. This was the early 90s after all, and fighting games on any platform would sell. One Must Fall 2097 was released on the pc in 1994, at a time when pc gaming was just starting to get exciting. Doom was installed on more computers than windows, and internet access was on the rise. One Must Fall was the right game at the right time. Popularity is great, but this is why One Must Fall gets on my best games list. They could have done a straight clone of Mortal Kombat, but they didn’t. They built a game that plays to the strengths of the pc, rather than copying a game that was designed to digest quarters at a phenomenal rate. One Must Fall includes a deep robot customization system, and a campaign that could take hours to play, rather than the 20 or som minutes of an arcade machine. There were a surprising large roster of playable robots, and an equal array of human pilots, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. This mean that the total number of pilot / robot combinations is somewhere around 100, which is bonkers for a fighting game. Variety, play time, customization, these are the things that pc games excel at compared to their arcade counterparts. That is why One Must Fall was great. They took an established genre, with well defined boundaries and conventions, and then changed them all to best fit the pc platform. It was risky and strange and not the type of thing that an established company like Capcom or Midway would have done, at least not at that time. The game also uses a very simplified control system for a fighting game. 2 buttons, tapped rather than rolled inputs for specials. This might be thought of as a dumbing down, but One Must Fall is just as satisfying to play as its arcade cousins. Just as fast, just as tactical, just as fun. The soundtracks for Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat are good, but they were made to be heard in a noisy arcade, so there are a lot of small musical stings and baselines, but that’s the height of it. The soundtrack for One Must Fall was made to be heard in your quiet home, on your pc speakers. It rocks. Fantastic era standard techno music plays behind every metallic clang and dense thud. This isn’t arcade sounds at home, this is sound designed for, and around the pc gaming experience. In other words, sound you can listen to for a long time without it ever becoming repetative or grating. It might have started as a clone, but One Must Fall 2097 rose above its origins to become one of the best games.

Well, it’s 2017 now. I have been thinking about branching out a little on here for a while. This blog started as a development blog, because I thought that was the thing you did when you wanted to be an indie game developer. Back then I was using Microsoft XNA and just trying to learn C#. I only had the most basic grasp on a few other programming languages at the time, a few versions of basic, some rudimentary C++, a smattering of LISP and Pascal. I could make some sense of the code if I saw it, but lacked the fluency to really write much. I figured that C# was probably going to be around for a while, so I might as well focus on that. As it turned out C# has persisted, and become fairly popular, which is nice since that means there are always lots of answers available when I have questions. Now I typically use a combination of simple visual scripting with a graphical state machine system and very small C# scripts that do only one or two things, but do them well and predictably. The current tools for game development let you do a lot with small, well planned, effort. I wouldn’t say that it is easy exactly, but it is easier than it has ever been. So that is sort of how the development part of this has gone. At some point I started writing about video games in more abstract and non specific ways. I would write about remembrances of particular games that I think are important. I would write more generally about the industry and the culture surrounding video games. Mostly I would just write. Consistently, at least once a week, I would write something. Videogames was just a topic I knew well. A resource I could mine for words on a regular schedule. Videogames were never really the point. At least not for me. Writing was the point. Writing had to become a habit. I experimented a bit, and tried to “find my voice”, whatever that means. I also put every post out there in public so I couldn’t be precious with them. I rarely edit, and when I do, it is for readability and clarity, not content. I have written a few sentences that are real clunkers, and they will stay that way until this small corner of the internet is scoured from history. Here is what I think I will do going forward. Most of the time it will be the usual nonsense. A write up about an old game that only I care about. A commentary on something in the larger gaming culture that I think I might have a take on. Some of it might be personal, some of it not as much. I’ll check in from time to time on my own work, art or development related. Once in awhile though, I will write something very different here. I might just post up a short story from my childhood, as I shakily remember it. Or I may, from time to time, post up a short bit of fiction that probably has very little to do with videogames. These I will write at times other than a few hours before I post them. I will edit them slightly more rigorously. I may even edit them and repost them with the changes. I still love videogames, and I like talking and writing about them more than I like most other things. And when I say that I mean all the things. That exist. In the world. It’s sort of a problem. Anyway, I will continue to write and post at least one piece a week, but they might not all be about videogames. Some of them might be about bikes.

As I am writing this on Christmas night, I would just like to wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday with family and friends. Also, I spent most of yesterday immobile with illness, so I don’t really feel like writing more. Goodnight.

Dev Update! Believe it or not I have been doing some small amount of game development these last few months. In a sporadic fashion I reopen my project, consult my sparse documentation to see what sort of checklist items I had open, and proceed to decipher what it was I worked on last. The last time this happened, I went ahead and reworked the way my game used physics. I also looked at the next item on my list and started working on that, only to discover that my past self had already completed that particular system ( a way of dynamically creating objects from sub objects ) and had devised a simple and elegant solution to the problem. I haven’t done nearly enough work on this game, which is too bad, because it already controls pretty well. There isn’t nearly enough game there to be fun yet, but the connection between your fingers and the game feels nice. I’m not going to go into any detail though. I’m not going to write about what it took to revise the physics interactions. I’m not going to write about the slowly, but steadily congealing game mechanics. I’m not going to write about my concept sketches, the theme, title, influences, or game loop. The next time I write about it will be when I have something to show, and I have something for people to play and offer feedback on. Until then, I’m just not going to talk about it.

Best Games - Might and Magic Clash of Heroes During the reign of the nintendo DS a cavalcade of excellent games poured out of development studios and onto that small, two screened console. Many of them were overlooked, or had one or two weeks of notoriety before the next release from Level-5 or Capcom or Nintendo themselves launched, completely eclipsing any smaller releases.

I’ve been tracing. Sometime late in high school I decided not to copy other artist’s work. It wasn’t any sort of moral stance. I didn’t feel like I owed Erik Larsen an apology for redrawing one of his spiderman panels. I wasn’t selling them, or claiming that I came up with the drawing. I certainly didn’t come up with the character. Like a lot of kids, I was reproducing other people’s work as a way to understand it. I thought that if I could decode how Ron Lim put together a splash page of silver surfer fighting Mephisto, I could someday learn to draw like him.

Best Games – Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath Games that try to do too many things are usually failures. It’s the kitchen sink approach. The developers try to put a little of everything into the game and the whole thing collapses under the weight. Of course, there are times when that approach succeeds spectacularly. Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath is a third person action platformer, a first person shooter, a stealth action game, and a character adventure game. That is a list of way too many things. There is no way this game should work. Each of those elements are handled well, but not polished to the level of a game dedicated to any single one of those genres. If you put that list before a room of game designers, they would unconsciously start crossing off items before they realized what their hands were doing. Putting all of those requirements together in one place is a terrible idea. Still, Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath is on my list as one of the best games. Imagine that there was a much loved animated series from your childhood. It combined a western backdrop with a Jim Henson-esque attitude to weirdness and subtle humour. Some years later, a game studio got hold of that license, and set out to make an homage to all the things you loved about that old series. All the characters, all the locations, all the inside jokes. Not only did they make that game, they did right by the material, and they did right by your nostalgia. Nothing less than a kitchen sink approach to game design would have worked. There was just too much material to cover. Of course that show never existed. The stranger isn’t an old beloved character. He exists only in the context of this one game, but he, and the world he occupies, feels like it springs straight from your fond memories. There were other Oddworld games before Stranger’s Wrath, and while they are all beautifully designed, and equally eccentric, they don’t share they same sense of being part of a much larger world. Stranger’s Wrath feels like a story started and finished during the second act of a much longer series. Stranger’s Wrath was first released on the original XBOX. Some of the textures and models are showing signs of age. I would say, that in terms of design, it still ranks up there as one of the more visually amazing games to ever be released. There isn’t a density of detail on display, in fact some areas are so desolate and barren, that the feeling of loneliness is suffocating. As you play through the game, you realize that the loneliness is intentional. It is as much a choice as the lush and vibrant setting you eventually pass through. The environment is an equal participant in this story. Just like it was in the source material. You remember that old show. You know, from when you were growing up. Yeah that one, with the magical creatures, and the old west, and the dark undertones. The one that is an allegory for growing up and the search for personal identity, while still being a solid adventure story full of silly humour and asides to the audience. Yeah, that one. Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, one of the best games.

This past Thursday I put together a presentation for the local game developers group. I said a couple months ago that I would do something based around animation. I had done a simple rundown of 3D graphics terms about two years ago and it seemed like it was high time that I did another one, but this time focused around animation. My goal with these is always to demystify 3D graphics.

I want to talk about fear. None of us is fearless. Fear is a great driver of human nature. Fear caused us to congregate in groups and tribes to ward off large predators. Fear moved us to harness fire, and to invent weapons and tools. It can cripple or it can motivate. Even when we lack a direct threat, we have evolved minds that can conjure new fears to propel us. We all feel it and we all use it. It seems fair to say, in that way, all people are equal. In fear, we are all the same.

Games used to be different. I tend to dislike “used to be” stories. You know the ones. The world used to be like this, or people used to act like that. Even when they are partially factual, they fall to close to “back in my day” stories. They reference a time that probably didn’t exist and tend to gloss over all sorts of terrible stuff in favour of some half remembered reverie.

Best Games - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy There was never any chance that text adventures would last. Not in any real way. There are a lot of people who still dabble in the genre, and a few techno hipsters that would swear up and down that text based games are more pure than games with graphics, or some such nonsense.

What you are really designing against is boredom. Somewhere along the path to writing that book or composing that song or staging that production, they have all had that thought. It might have been a twinging type of thought, ephemeral, just barely there and then gone. A thought not fully considered. Never rolled around the mind and tasted like rich liquor. The foremost design challenge is boredom.

I think pro wrestling is awesome. I try to stay current with the personalities and performers. I have read no fewer than four books by wrestlers about wrestling. At least the book jackets said that they were written by those wrestlers. I actively seek out news about the current state of wrestling every few months. I find the whole business fascinating. Now I haven’t actually watched a whole pro wrestling show in at least a decade. I have watched a few isolated matches, some great japanese and mexican stuff, a couple of smaller american promotions. I started out this paragraph by stating that I think pro wrestling is awesome. As a concept, I do, but I also think that, as presented, it is pretty terrible most of the time.