Todd puts in an appearance on the Nightfall Unlimited test show with fan favorite Ray Marek, but not before an extended rant about positivity.
Okay, Todd here, this is a short show and then I’m headed out of the country for a little getaway with my wife–sorry, not sorry. I thought about skipping this week’s Thursday show completely or cooking up some kind of “best of” episode, but instead I thought it would be fun to pull back the curtain a bit and share a little segment I did for our friend Ray as he works on the return of the Nightfall Unlimited podcast. This was a Google Hangouts call I connected to, so my end of the conversation sounds a lot different from their end. I did run through it in Audacity to tighten things up a bit. There will still be a Monday show and next Thursday’s show is a good solid maybe, but things will definitely be on autopilot until I get back in town.
Yeah, I ranted a bit on this one. I think it was for a good cause. I think we have a certain responsibility to look at what folks in the community do around us. It reflects on all of us, and it’s usually pretty basic right and wrong. In any case, show Ray & company some love and I’ll be back before you know it.
LucasArts Employee #3 himself, David Fox joins to talk about his fantastic career contributing to some of the most iconic graphic adventure games of our time, chasing the technology to create location-based interactive experiences, and his philosophy on positive change through design. Topics include VR, interpersonal issues in the modern game industry, politics, electric cars, and more.
David was so kind to agree to this show, we were both fighting illness at the time of recording (I had to really work hard on my end of the discussion in post to make it listenable, apologies for any unusual tone quality) but I could not have been more pleased with the discussion itself. David has contributed to so many games we all know and love, Zak McKracken, Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Thimbleweed Park, and more. It was such a pleasure to spend some time learning about the rest of his awesome work and capture more details about the things he’s done. Please keep an open mind; David’s time at LucasArts has been discussed in super deep detail in a variety of interviews and I’d encourage you to check them out. I wanted to do more for this show to really get a sense of David’s contributions to technology and interactive experiences on a broader scale. Nonetheless there’s plenty of great material here to dig into about design, VR, and the game development community. Check it out and reach out to David on Twitter!
Our friend Ted drops by to talk about the history of martinis, what to look for at a Porta Potty in the woods, and the best way to combine Peeps, cola, and obstacle courses. We discuss game development here and there where it comes up.
You have to meet Ted to understand him. He’s the kind of teammate who divides his time between yelling at the other team, yelling at you, and then yelling at himself. In a fun way. Ted contributes to the OHCPlay channel on YouTube which we’ve discussed before, but also has a personal account, TrojanManSCP, full of just as many assorted gems as you might suspect from our chat in this episode. He’s an authority on all matters Overwatch and he can drill down pretty deep into anything that has his attention.
Anyway, here’s Ted taking the bug salt shotgun to the face:
How many software developer characters in popular culture can you think of, past and present? How many game designers? How many female game designers under 18? If you have anyone left in mind at all (and the headline didn’t ruin it for you), you probably caught Clarissa Explains It All in the 90s.
If Clarissa did not explain it all to you, you can get up to speed quickly at Wikipedia or even catch a few episodes on Hulu.
Update: Not so much on Hulu anymore, sorry.
Throughout the show’s five-season run, Clarissa created
weird, wonderful games and prototypes she used to explain her world to the people
closest to her. This article celebrates the highlights (and lowlights) of her
run in game design.
FERGUS-IDE
Clarissa reveals the intensity of the Darling sibling
rivalry with a revenge simulator in the show’s pilot. In this anti-endless
runner (if you like), Clarissa attempts to catch her brother, Ferguson—who is
running down the street in a straitjacket—with large helium balloons tied to a
hook. If she succeeds, he floats upward off screen, meeting the game’s win
condition.
While the player tries to catch Ferguson, a helium meter
slowly decreases at the bottom of the screen. It’s clear that this is the
amount of time before the player’s game is over. If you think about it, there’s
only one way for a kid flying away on a decreasing helium supply to end. This
is the first of many times Clarissa will casually explore the idea of maybe killing
her brother.
Nightmare on Shadow Lane
To scare away her eccentric aunt Mafalda, Clarissa concocts a plan to “haunt” her own house, which she explains to her best friend, Sam, with a Maniac Mansion-inspired graphical adventure game.
Nightmare on Shadow
Lane features such horrors as “The Devil’s Dust Bunnies,” an alligator suspended
from the ceiling (likely her tiny pet alligator, Elvis), and a murderous giant
turkey known as The Poultrygeist. Nightmare
was a big missed opportunity for LucasArts.
Baby Bomber
Clarissa and Ferguson come together for one of their rare
concerted efforts when they suspect their parents are considering a third
child.
To illustrate how difficult a new baby makes life, Clarissa
creates Baby Bomber, a stork-flying,
baby-dropping physics game. As the player drops baby Fergusons and Clarissas
into the family (shoe-shaped) home, their parents are pushed further and
further until they’re finally driven out of the home completely. Needless to
say, Baby Bomber affects absolutely
nothing in the show’s real world.
Blaze-O-Rama
With school picture day fast approaching, Clarissa creates
this burning building sim to demonstrate the importance of her fashion freedom
to her mother, Janet.
To win Blaze-O-Rama (shout-out to all the O-Ramas of
yesteryear), Janet must navigate a fire ladder to the window with the right
version of Clarissa in it. The correct one, naturally, is the one wearing the
funky outfit. The other Clarissas turn out to be green aliens, apparently
undeserving of rescue.
“That was very manipulative,” Janet exclaims afterward.
10/10.
Brain Food
After taking an IQ test in school, Ferguson learns he’s near
the top of his age group in intelligence. He devises a plan to compete on a
trivia show in hopes of becoming rich and powerful. Clarissa schemes to
sabotage his efforts, just to be safe.
To convince Ferguson to use a nonsensical study plan, Clarissa
shows him a falling objects game in which he swallows books whole to devour
their knowledge. Don’t struggle too hard to make sense of that last bit; this
is almost certainly the shakiest game usage in the entire series. To muddle the
concept further, Ferguson tells Clarissa he can feel himself getting smarter,
and plays the game a second time.
Untitled Home Defense Game
When troubled young Sam needs to stay with the Darling
family while his father leaves town—a story we’ll hear again about troubled
young Shawn Hunter
in just a few short years—Clarissa and Ferguson are dismayed at the attention
their parents show him (sitcom friends are just the worst).
Clarissa creates a game to help them choose cartoon-style
traps they can set to keep Sam out of the house. The player can cut the
electricity, trip a coiled spring welcome mat, and dump buckets of water to get
the pesky disadvantaged boy to leave. The Home
Alone videogame had been released less than six months prior, and the
similarities are not subtle.
The Darlings never have to use any of these traps, as Sam
walks into Clarissa’s room while they’re playing the game. Great work, kids.
Get to Know Me
When mother Janet takes an interest in spending quality time,
Clarissa explains maybe not being the best person by creating a no-lose trivia
game, hoping her mom will decide she knows her daughter plenty well and leave
her alone.
Clarissa’s game backfires on her once again when Janet gets
credit for the last question and wins the game before she’s had time to choose
an answer.
Poem Maker
As Clarissa’s interest in writing begins to take center
stage, an episode is devoted to a poetry assignment, in which she develops a software
application capable of doing her work. It wows students and faculty alike with
the following verse:
“Gray cube, rectangular light, cantilevered rainbows sunshine open close open close glass square sunset outside outside outside sunset inside daffodils.”
Instead of celebrating what would still be an impressive feat of linguistic programming, Clarissa
wrestles with the ethical dilemma of taking credit for her application’s work.
She eventually acknowledges the program at a banquet, and has her computer
deliver a reading.
Blind Date Bash-O-Rama
As Clarissa gets older, the topics of her games shift from
primarily harming her brother to more mature issues, like dating and driving.
She readily tackles the challenges facing older teens, while keeping her
youthful sense of mischief alive in her games. This is the most apparent in Blind Date Bash-O-Rama.
In this fighting game you may as well call “Date Fighter
II’: Champion Edition,” Clarissa takes on various monsters that show up hoping
for a date and leave with a good ass-kicking. Obvious influences aside, BDB-O-R looks like actual, legitimate
fun. If they’d released it in stores, it would have been on my 1993 Christmas
list.
Untitled Racer
Clarissa’s final game of the show’s five-season run is a
loosely Mario Kart-style racer
developed mostly to convince everyone that her plans to start riding a
motorcycle are safe and totally reasonable. She is surprised at her own
inability to complete a race without wiping out.
Although this is another good-looking game, I think Blind Date Bash-O-Rama should be
remembered as the spiritual conclusion to the Darling games series.
As Clarissa became a young adult, game development
eventually gave way to her fledgling writing career, disappearing for good
early in the final season. Though game dev was not always crucial to the plot, its
presence in the show served to introduce young viewers to a practice much less
common and much less accessible at the time. In addition, Clarissa’s use of
design to explore difficult issues and explain her perspective to those around
her demonstrated initiative toward aspirations the real-world game industry still grapples with today.
Where are all the modern game creators in pop culture? Gaming
is here to stay and all aspects of the game industry are now widely accepted as
legitimate—if tumultuous—career paths. It’s surprising that game development still
hasn’t been done this well on TV since Clarissa left for college.
Indie developer and author (and podcaster!) Mat Bradley-Tschirgi discusses his beginnings in journalism and indie development, his upcoming book, The Films of Uwe Boll Vol. 1: The Video Game Movies, and makes a surprising revelation about an upcoming video game to which both he and Boll are attached.
You read that right: a game project from the mind of notorious (former?) filmmaker Uwe Boll is forthcoming, and this is a chat with the man making it happen. Let the intrigue and concern wash over you.
YouTuber Matt Hill joins to talk about running the OHCPlay channel, highs and lows in the gaming community, and we give the public their first glimpse of a list of spectacular gamer tags over 7 years in the making. I hope listeners enjoy this show half as much as I did.
This is the first installment of our second weekly show. Each week we’ll feature a content creator who will share their perspective on process, community issues, and hopefully have some fun in the process. Have a community member in mind you’d love to hear from? Shout them out.
Jordan Lemos is a WGA award-nominated scriptwriter working at Ubisoft in Québec, with writing credit on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and the words of Socrates himself. He’s been a Twitter pal for a while now, and for some reason, we have the conversational energy of the cousins you have to separate at Thanksgiving dinner.
Jordan’s path into the industry was far from easy. Pay close attention as he describes the roles and responsibilities piled on him while working with previous employers and the type of thanks he got when typical industry issues came along. It’s no coincidence that he has such specific ideas on how the industry could improve life for the writers that help make games so compelling, and its relationships with them as career professionals.
This show was a ton of fun to record, and I appreciate Jordan’s time. Call us, Beat Saber team!
If you don’t think you’ve read or at least seen any of David L. Craddock’s phenomenal books on the game industry and game development, check again, you probably have. Some of the greatest stories of the development space have been captured in David’s phenomenal pages, including Blizzard’s early history with Diablo, tales from the days of NetHack and other early Roguelikes, and more recently, Yacht Club Games’ action-packed development of Shovel Knight for Boss Fight Books. He kindly agreed to Skype in as Humble Bundle closes out its Boss Fight book bundle promotion (you still have about two days!) and his insight was every bit as interesting as I expected.
This is a must-listen for writers of any kind, and I’d also put it on the required show list for anyone running or connected with an indie studio. David has explored and documented not only the development of many games we know and love, but the culture, the energy, and the trials of the people creating them–and his knack for framing captivating tales from their accounts is second to none.
I first interacted with Reyan Ali over Twitter just about a year ago. I’d just partnered with Microsoft to do a series of podcasts at GDC which was a total blast, but it caused me to miss the Classic Game Postmortem on the legendary NBA Jam. I tweeted out the presentation with great entusiasm once it hit YouTube, and Reyan and I became fast friends, vowing to do a podcast segment together before the launch of his book. Since that time, I’ve followed with great interest as we inch ever closer to the release of his definitive telling of the game’s incredible story, which will be published by Boss Fight Books.
Reyan’s promotional Twitter account (linked below) is full of incredible memorabilia and history, and that’s no coincidence–in the process of writing NBA Jam, he’s amassed nearly 70 interviews with the developers, motion capture actors, celebrities appearing in the game, and a woman with a less-than-timely (though damn respectable) tattoo. If you grew up playing NBA Jam, Reyan Ali and his book are the closest things you have to a time machine.
Reyan’s career has included fantastic writing and interviews across a wide variety of topics, and you can read his coverage in many great publications. The history of one of the greatest video games of all time is in highly capable hands.
Update: We’ve had a slow start on giveaway entries, so we’re opening it up to everyone!
Man, we’ve had some great guests lately, and you won’t believe some of the folks we’re going to be talking to in the coming months! With all this action, it was nice to get back on Skype with John for a night, check in, talk a little news, and hang out. We’re also dialing in some new recording equipment in the studio, and although my mic was a little hot for this one, the overall show quality is moving steadily in a positive direction.
If you haven’t checked out the GDC State of the Game Industry survey results for the year, we’ve got you covered. It’s made up of some surprising insights, as well as others that were more interesting in their presentation. If you want to follow along as we discuss the report, you can register to download it for free at gdconf.com.
I’m also telling the tale of the rarest, most mysterious piece of gaming memorabilia I’ve come across in my life. It was a blast getting to the bottom of this thing, and I think the story is pretty good. I’m including one of the official photos here, and you can expect a more in-depth write-up with photos of my scope here on the site soon.
Finally, we’re doing our first podcast giveaway, thanks to bestselling author, Morgan Ramsay! Morgan has very generously signed and mailed us a copy of his recent book, Online Game Pioneers at Work, and we’re passing it on to a listener! We’re not explicitly mentioning this on Twitter because we want a real show listener to get it! For a chance to win, simply retweet one of the tweets linking to this week’s show (It will either come from @CodeWritePlay or @Mechatodzilla), then reply to the original tweet telling us which founder you’re most excited to read about. Here’s a list of the great interviews in the book for your convenience!
Pioneers featured in Online Game Pioneers at Work:
