DigiPen and I
No, I never did go to the DigiPen Institute of Technology, but I had considered it. I remember reading an article about the school back in the mid 1990s, not long after it opened, in either Nintendo Power or EGM. It was mind-blowing for me at the time: I can do post-secondary education at a school specifically doing game design on Nintendo hardware? Best of all, the school was located in Canada? Sign me up.
I had thought about trying to break into the games industry in those youthful days, but up to that point it was this weird, nebulous goal that I had no idea how to get to. After reading that article, though, it felt tangible and close. I was a junior in high school and for the first time I was considering what to do after graduation.
It was around this time when I started fiddling around with my family’s old Tandy 286, an old shitbox that was already obsolete by about four years. The technology didn’t matter. My interests weren’t with the advanced PC games of the day, Doom or Quake but were focused on QBasic. I spent a summer hacking the language (my first) with only its built in documentation and two examples, Gorillas and Nibbles, as reference.
It was a slow and tedious process but within a few months I managed to make a sort of text-only adventure game (I had never played interactive fiction at the time; I was mostly emulating Shadowgate and Deja Vu.) It wasn’t very good but it was a start. A short while later I learned how to do graphics — all of it via code, there were no external editors — and made a, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Metroidvania“-esque side-scrolling platformer (the “Metroidvania” label was still years away from being penned.) They weren’t very good but they were the first videogames I ever made and they hold a nostalgic place in my heart. I just wish I still had the floppies holding them (and a floppy drive to access them.) sigh.
As I approached my final year in high school I sent for an information package from Digipen and that’s when I learned the disappointing news: Digipen had, that same year, relocated from Vancouver to Redmond, Washington. They were now international and, because they weren’t accredited at the time, they weren’t accepting international students. I might not have been able to afford it either way, but not having the option at all gutted me. The next year I went to the University of Toronto for Computer Science, got bored of the “discrete math” and the theoretical shit, and eventually, in my second year, quit. It’s been a long and convoluted road since then.
Anyway, I realized that I have a ton of old EGMs and Nintendo Powers stashed around here so I made an attempt to find this one article. I found a lot of great content from those days — ads, news, previews, reviews: the mid-90s were weird as it had reviews for SNES and Genesis games right next to 3DO, CD-i, and Amiga CD32 titles. Man, I completely forgot about that one — but not the article in question. Google seems to suggest that it might be in Nintendo Power #75, but I can only find Virtual Boy related scans from that issue.
Further searches yielded a couple of extra interesting tid-bits: a Wired article from December 1995, and a copy of the 1995 DigiPen Applied Computer Graphics School Student Handbook, focusing on The Art and Science of 2D and 3D Video Game Programming, A Super Nintendo Entertainment System® Game Programming Course
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I think about “what could have been”, but then I realize I’m still in my twenties and all those dreams continue to exist as “what can be.”
My Year in Photos: The Second Half
Also known as: “The more photogenic half.” (Part One here.)
Big pictures follow:
My Year in Photos: The First Half
One of the best weblogs to emerge this year was kokogiak’s The Big Picture. I was pleased to see it get the go ahead from legal because it was a risky venture for a major publication (if you don’t believe me, risk your sanity venturing into the comments of any post.) The large scale photos brought a new perspective to world events and brightly highlighted others that were not always reported. Alan Taylor’s curatorial duties have been excellent and as impartial as possible (though douchebags in the comments always disagree.)
The appropriately named The Big Picture proved that we don’t always need to consider users with: VGA displays, 640×480 resolutions, web safe colours, and modems. This isn’t the 1990s anymore. You can now provide photos larger than thumbnails that make the most of today’s display technology (millions of colours! *gasp*) Bigger is better. So with that in mind, here’s my own personal year in review.
I bought a new camera in April, a few months after giving my old one to my sister for Christmas. I bought it, in part, because by then I had decided what I was going to do with the rest of the year and wanted something good to document it.
Big pictures follow:
My Year In Videogames
Cities
This has very much been a year of cities for me, so it’s fitting that my numerous explorations of urban streets were bookended by my visits to Liberty City and Paradise City. These two locations have seen enough carnage and destruction to fill a war, but they continue to stand, undisturbed, ready for more. As far as games go, I’ve had more fun in those places than any other virtual environment.
It is one of the emerging threads in videogames: “the city as character.” Cities, from Shadowrun’s Seattle 2050 to Midgar to Yokosuka, have been settings for a long time, but new technology has allowed them to be fleshed out more than ever. These new cities don’t exist as backdrops with a few main roads and alleyways that you are tunneled through but, rather, as living, breathing places. There are landmarks and neighbourhoods, all are naturally connected to each other, and activity throughout.
Sure, these cities consist of mostly superficial facades and randomly generated cars and pedestrians, which aren’t often noticed when barreling past at a hundred miles per hour, but when each road is different and each view distinct it extends the life of a game. Unnecessary travel times are forgivable when every city block yields new sights and new things to do; and when every side-road contains surprises, exploration is rewarding rather than tedious.
The problem, of course, is that cities of this scope require a massive creative undertaking to realize. These resources are only within reach of a handful of well-off game developers which is why this year’s best game cities were within already established million-selling series: Grand Theft Auto and Burnout. But the future is promising. Advances in procedural generation might make full scale cities possible for even the smallest of developers.
Downloadable Games
This year is notable for the simple fact that I purchased more downloadable games than retail games. Whether it was on the XBox 360, Playstation 3, the PC, and even the Wii, there was wealth of quality releases throughout the year. With a day left in 2008, I might not even be done: sales on Good Old Games (Fallout 1+2 for $10) and Steam (I’ve already purchased four games this week) are tempting me. A few weeks ago, Impulse’s sale netted me two new games. After having complained about the dearth of sales by online retailers, I am happily eating my words. I hope more of this continues into 2009.
Flashbang
Flashbang Studios’ Blurst website is the best thing to happen to free, in-browser games this year. Jetpack Brontosaurus and Minotaur China Shop are games worth paying for, offered free of charge. The amazing mix of good production, strong attention to detail, considered game design (especially in Minotaur China Shop,) and complete off-the-wall goofiness is unlike anything else produced this year. And it’s all free.
Now if only they could finish Blurst.
Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2
I got in on this about four months after the fact. By then, my friends’ leaderboards were well entrenched, with the usual suspects taking up the 1,2, and 3 spots. The weeks I spent chipping away at the scores was an ego-crazed adrenaline rush. Claiming number one on Deadline mode was a zen-like experience. I was one with the controller, merged with the pixels on the screen, reacting with a kind of precision I didn’t think possible when I first played this game. That one game was the most gratuitously intense three minutes of gaming this year.
There’s a strong push for more accessible and friendlier games, focusing on experience rather than challenge, and I’m all for that. But it’s not an either/or question. Being accessible does not necessarily mean that you can’t encourage that strong competitive urge. Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2, with its tight integration of leaderboards, perfectly channeled that energy. There’s nothing wrong with a little friendly competition: I challenge anyone to beat my 20 million in deadline.
Internet
A few great sites have emerged to claim spots in my feed reader left open after some old standbys went stale (and/or intolerable): Offworld, Fidgit, the renewed Idle Thumbs, and Gamasutra’s expanded network of weblogs. Future potential: 1UP’s retro gaming blog and Sore Thumbs.
Yur-Gaming
As I mentioned in my two reports (part one, part two), Essen Spiel had more than just boardgames and LARP gear: it had some videogame content too. These came in the form of retailers selling their games or the occasional licensed products based on boardgames. There was one exception: an entire, new videogame console! The Yuraku Yur-Gaming V-MAX32.
There’s not much to say about products like this. Like the ePhone, these kinds of clones exist not to compete against the products they are mimicking, but to confuse befuddled consumers who don’t know any better.
I even took a (crappy) video of it in action. WATCH! As a clueless mom gets the sales pitch. SEE! Players haplessly swing their arms as if expecting their motions to be properly captured by the device. They aren’t. I tried to make sense of it and I think it has an accelerometer, maybe, but I couldn’t really get it do what I wanted so I don’t know. It was registering something, but it wasn’t mapping my movements spatially like the Wii does.
Click for largerThere isn’t much to say about this system except to acknowledge that when you’re being so blatantly (and poorly) copied, like the above mentioned ePhone, then you must be doing well. The Wii is doing well.
Dubmood Live at Kafe44 Stockholm
Here’s something for your ears. Get yourself a blender and throw in: French electro dancefloor sensibilities; a dash of The Prodigy, The Knife, Daft Punk; a barrage of GameBoys. Mix together for 93 minutes. Serve with a free download (direct link to 110MB zip file.)
Dubmood’s stellar chiptune-infused dance mix can be found on Data Airlines’ site (just search for a post from October 25th 2008. I’d link to the individual entry but, well, you see.) It’s high-energy music perfectly suited for dancefloors — unlike me — full of chiptune nerds — like me. And because it’s mixed together with a lot of techno and electronica, it never sounds overtly nerdy. Well, when it’s not pounding out the lyrics “wake up, skip school, turn on the Atari. With my console, I’m in control.”
Dubmood - Live at Kafe 44 Stockholm, 110MB .zip.
To give you a sense of what to expect, here’s a video of his performance at this year’s Blip Festival which, yes, I did not attend. There’s always next year.
Writing About Games is Easy; Writing About Music is Hard
The topics that I write about tend to be, more often than not, game centric. There was no overt decision to focus on this topic on this here weblog[1], it is simply what I know best. Hell, when I started this by creating an account on Blogger I wasn’t even that much of a gamer. Back then, fresh out of high school and in my first (and only complete) year of university, I was a mere dabbler. I had no time or money for games, save for the occasional moments on my then-already outdated PC and the rare bout on my even more dated Playstation.
That was during the start of a new generation. The ill fated SEGA Dreamcast was already three months old and the Playstation 2 loomed over the horizon, four months away. Those were exciting times for videogamers, but I was having none of it. My interests were focused on school and, more so, the internet[2], this whole new “weblog” thing, Napster, design, HTML, Flash 4, and the development and slow acceptance of the many standards that are now common on the web. These were heady one-point-oh days, full of homepages, no syndicated feeds, and teenagers younger than I getting millions of dollars to prop up internet businesses without any business.
It was the most doomed of all these ventures, Napster, that opened my eyes and ears to new things. My relationship with music throughout the 90s, in those pre-filesharing days, was a distant one. I became aware of things going on in the music world around 92 when I was watching Saturday Night Live and its live performances, when grunge was taking over the world. The confluence of these two things, in one set-destroying performance, is one of my earliest musical memories. I watched a lot of TV in those days and my limited contact with the music world came from that; I wasn’t an active music listener. It was around, for sure, but back then I was more intrigued by the sounds of F-Zero and Final Fantasy II and Actraiser.
High school was when I started to listen to the radio and watch MuchMusic, back when they still played music videos. It might be nostalgia, but those post-grunge years produced a massive amount of great music. It was hard not to get into something. While my listening was restricted to what was on the radio, and almost exclusively the mainstream and semi-mainstream new rock content of 102.1 The Edge, I’d occasionally get glimpses of material outside of that insular world. I remember the rare moments when MuchMusic would play Download’s Glassblower, Orbital’s The Box, and I recall absolutely loving and being amazed by FSOL’s My Kingdom.
Those three examples filtered through to me because they were relatively popular for their time, but anything beyond the fringes remained invisible to me. If it didn’t have a single and a music video, it didn’t exist. I owned a handful of CDs, but most of my money went into games. That was something I was informed about, reading front to back every month’s issue of EGM, the Official Playstation Magazine, and, sometimes, Next Generation. I felt comfortable, as a consumer, that I would make the right decisions with my money. I knew what I liked. I rented games, I bought games, I played games, and I listened to games. Music, in contrast, was a risky venture. It’s funny, then, to consider that my biggest encounter with the electronic music of the day came from a game, WipeOut XL. I remember really digging Fluke’s Atom Bomb video at the time, for obvious reasons.
That’s why Napster (and, partly, the streaming online radio of the time) was so important. It allowed me to explore those weird, underground segments of music on my own terms. That made me into a massive consumer of music and instilled in me a fresh passion for it. This has grown over the decade through to today. During my four months in London and Paris earlier in the year, music was often the only company I had and, in that time, I filled my suitcase with a thirty new CDs. 2008 was a breakthrough. This is the first time that I feel genuinely qualified to rant and rave, in thorough detail, about the albums of the year.
Yet, I find it more difficult than ever to express that. As my tastes get more eccentric and I become aware of more history and lineage, I realize how much I have missed and how much catching up I have left to do.
Unlike music, games had a prominent role in my life — bonding with friends, leading me on my career path — since I was six. That little pre-millennial break during my late teens was a mere footnote in my personal gaming history. A two year hiatus in a twenty-three year story. It didn’t last: I bought a Playstation 2 several months after its 2001 launch, after I had my first steady income, further adding to the Dreamcast’s demise. In the years that followed I acquired a further twenty game machines, including all the current systems, a post-death Dreamcast, the Genesis I never had, the SEGA CD I never wanted except for Snatcher, Snatcher, and a pair of Neo Geo Pockets (nice little systems, those.) This is beyond prominent now. It’s a lifestyle.
When it comes to writing about media, five years of passion, and only one of a fervent nature, can not compare to a lifetime’s worth. I might not be the best writer — I’m still learning — but my twenty-five year gaming life gives me enough perspective and cultural history to, I hope, give me a unique voice. It might take me another ten years before I feel as comfortable expressing my opinion about music as I do about games.
So, basically, I just wanted to say that my album of the year is:
- I actually get a little miffed when I get labeled a “games blog,” but I’m used to it.
- We were some of the lucky few to have cable internet at the time and I was making the most of it.
