It’s always great catching up with Gas Powered Games founder and CEO Chris Taylor. He’s hilarious, fun, smart, and interesting. Although he wasn’t able to talk about his upcoming games just yet, it was fascinating to get his take on mobile, social, and casual games. He seems truly excited by that segment of the gaming industry, comparing it to old-school PC game development.
Check out my chat with the excellent Chris Taylor and let me know what you think (please)!
Here’s a really fun and informative interview with Epic Games president Dr. Michael Capps. Not only is he an incredibly sharp man, but he’s also a super fun guy to hang out with. I’ve always been impressed with how nimbly Epic has evolved from PC to consoles to mobile. Capps addresses that issue, as well how Infinity Blade caused Apple execs to curse in excitement, Bulletstorm, his mother’s reaction to his shower scene in the “Bulletpoints” marketing campaign, Kotaku’s Brian Crescente looking like that guy from Deuce Bigalow/The Scorpion King, me punching Cliff Bleszinski in the face, and more!
Special thanks to RPadholic smartguy for his question about Bulletpoints!
For the last two years, actor Jay Mohr has told the attendees of DICE, “I will never be as good at what I do as you are at making games.” You can’t help but get that feeling at DICE. It’s crazy how many…
Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, the Cleveland Cavalier’s awesome winning streak, your favorite condiment for steak, or Manny Pacquiao’s Bieber hair, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
For the last two years, actor Jay Mohr has told the attendees of DICE, “I will never be as good at what I do as you are at making games.” You can’t help but get that feeling at DICE. It’s crazy how many talented developers attend the show. It’s impossible not to bump into someone that has helped create a beloved game or a franchise that has sold tens of millions. Being around some of the gaming industry’s top creators at DICE 2011 was inspiring and an excellent way to kick off the year.
DICE was a great reminder how incredible the gaming business is and how lucky I am to be writing verbally entertaining about it (especially after that downer of a column I wrote last week — ha!). Being surrounded by people that have entertained millions and millions of gamers was amazing. What’s even more amazing is that so many of them — Ted Price, Dr. Ray Muzyka, Dr. Greg Zeschuk, Mark Cerny, etc. — are wonderful people too. I know that what I do pales in comparison to what these guys do, but seeing these brilliant creators has me motivated to do better and be nicer.
So yeah! DICE 2011 was amazing and I hope you like the interviews N8R and I worked on. I’m feelin’ groovy and hope you are too. Thanks DICE!!!
DICE 2011 Thursday was capped off by the 14th annual Interactive Achievement Awards. Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption cleaned up, with the former getting game of the year. Legends Bill Budge and Bing Gordon were honored, winning the Pioneer and Lifetime Achievement awards, respectively. Gordon wrapped up his acceptance speech with a 10-minute poem full of excellent videogame references — it was entertaining and inspiring…but for some reason I kept thinking about Reverend Jesse Jackson reciting Green Eggs and Ham on Saturday Night Live.
My personal highlight was watching Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk get inducted into the AIAS hall of fame. I am such a fan of these two men on several levels. After playing through Baldur’s Gate for the 18th time, I kind of became a fan. Then I got to meet these guys and was immediately impressed with how sharp they were. As I’ve gotten to know them a bit over the years — and witnessed several of Dr. Greg’s…unfortunate hairstyles — I was floored by how nice they are. Not only was I fan of their games, I was a fan of them as human beings. They’re trained physicians, brilliant game creators, and two of the nicest people I’ve ever met in this business. Watching them receive this honor from their peers was fantastic.
After the after-party, I ended up with a bunch of old G4 production friends, a dear friend from Sony, an oceanographer’s son, and some cool developer from Mexico that brought tequila that was numbered by hand. The evening ended with Fatburger. Now onto day three!!!
Man, that was way too much alcohol last night. I’m finally starting to feel like a human being again. As expected, DICE 2011 is awesome. It’s fantastic chatting with incredible developers, catching up with friends, and watching RPadholic N8R. We just had a fun lunch with some major players in the videogame industry. I can’t wait for him to tell you his impressions of Michael Pachter. I’m positive you’ll be surprised.
I’ve said this several times over the last few years — DICE is my favorite videogame conference by far. It’s a relatively small show that’s attended by some of the most brilliant people in the business. It’s truly an honor to attend. To give you an idea of how intimate the setting is, the first person N8R and I bumped into at The Red Rock Hotel was BioWare’s Dr. Ray Muzyka. This morning we shared a cab with the amazing Mark Cerny. I respect and admire the hell out of both of these guys. I’m having my usual excellent time at this year’s show, but it’s fascinating watching N8R meet these people and imagining what he’s thinking.
As for me, it was cool catching up with former Nintendo of American VP Perrin Kaplan. She’s an awesome woman and she shared some great Nintendo stories during our interview. EEDAR’s Jesse Divnich — the number one analyst in the video game business IMHO — shared his thoughts on the upcoming Nintendo 3DS vs. Sony NGP.
I’ll update the comments section of this post throughout the day. Thank you guys for keeping the site active while I’m at the show!
John Carmack (id Software) posted an interesting tweet on the Sony NGP that said, “Low level APIs will allow the Sony NGP to perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs.” The tweet reminded me of several Twitter and AIM conversations I had with friends in Japan about the NGP. Contacts at Kojima Productions and Q Entertainment told me that their respective companies are psyched to work on the NGP. One of the reasons both contacts cited is that development will be easy and powerful. Both pointed out that working on the NGP will be much easier than working on the PS3.
Sure it’s early and developers are excited to finally be able to talk about NGP development, but there appears to be something here. A lot of developers struggled in the early days of the PlayStation 3. It took many developers a long time before they could harness the considerable power of the PS3. The early buzz on the NGP is that it will be easy to work with from the get-go. It will be interesting to see what the first generation of NGP games will look like as a whole.
Will the NGP’s purported ease of development combined with Sony’s superior third-party relations give it a better and more diverse catalog than the 3DS? I’m excited to see how it all plays out!
Sorry for the late start today! I had a wacky dream about game developers. You see, I was at some fancy cocktail party (accompanied by my sidekick Zoe Flower, naturally). Some of the best developers in the world were there…
Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, why Taco Bell is delicious even though it’s fake Mexican food, the RPad.tv American Apparel sale, or why the hell anyone feels sorry for Carmelo Anthony, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
Sorry for the late start today! I had a wacky dream about game developers. You see, I was at some fancy cocktail party (accompanied by my sidekick Zoe Flower, naturally). Some of the best developers in the world were there. BioWare’s Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk were hanging around, being awesome. Double Fine’s Tim Schafer and Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor were cracking everyone up with their sharp jokes. It was a fantastic scene…until the incident.
As Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto was chatting it up with Konami’s Hideo Kojima, a waiter accidentally spilled a drink on Miyamoto-san. He tried to laugh it off, but the waiter kept trying to dry his face. All of the sudden, a bit of skin peeled off and it was clear to everyone that Miyamoto was actually a Terminator! The waiter screamed…and screamed even louder when all the game developers in the room peeled off their faces to reveal Terminator skulls. As the Terminator game developers proceeded to kill all the humans in the room, Zoe and I ran out a service tunnel.
So yeah! This nutty dream is why I started things late today. What do you think it means?!? Have you had any funky videogame dreams lately? Any chance that Miyamoto-san is actually a Terminator?
It was excellent waking up to the news that BioWare’s Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk will be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences hall of fame in 2011. BioWare is one of the best developers in the business and the AIAS is one of the most respected organizations in the industry. Ray and Greg are also two of the nicest, most incredible people I’ve met and the AIAS is my favorite professional groups in gaming.
The induction will take place during the Interactive Achievement Awards at DICE 2011. Here’s what AIAS president Martin Rae had to say:
The Doctors — Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk — have produced some of the most wildly successful and accomplished games, and these will resonate among gamers for a very long time. The range of their talents is endless, from game design and production to being accomplished in business and corporate leadership, and their original backgrounds as physicians. They truly embody what it means to be a Hall of Fame recipient and the AIAS is looking forward to including them into our esteemed list of inductees.
The docs are just talented, hard working, and shockingly nice people. If my right knee wasn’t damaged, I’d be jumping up and down over their pending induction. As some of you will recall, during DICE 2010 I actually asked Greg who he’d choose to induct him into the hall of fame. Epic Games president Dr. Mike “Busta” Capps will be handling the honors…but I really think they should let me do it. I’m going to go work on that now.
I have the utmost respect for game developers. I’m amazed by how hard many of them work and how much they put into their games. With that in mind, I hate when developers…
Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, the beauty of Buddha Bar, the Red Sox owning the MLB winter meetings, or why Winona Ryder isn’t bigger, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
I have the utmost respect for game developers. I’m amazed by how hard many of them work and how much they put into their games. With that in mind, I hate when developers accuse reviewers of “not getting it”? I understand that developers get attached to their products and it’s sometimes hard for them to take criticism, but it’s ridiculous when they think it’s some sort of disrespectful conspiracy.
Silicon Knights’ Dennis Dyack immediately comes to mind when thinking about this whole deal. More than any other developer, he has been extremely critical of game reviewers. (In some cases he’s absolutely right. In others, he sounds a little crazy.) When Too Human was met with mediocre to poor reviews, Dyack accused journalists of not getting it.
More recently, Warren Spector felt that game reviewers didn’t understand the camera in Epic Mickey. He told MTV:
This is a game that takes platforming elements and adventure game elements and role-playing elements and merges them. So we couldn’t tune the camera perfectly for platforming or for action adventure. It’s a very different camera style. What we did is try to find the best compromise in the moment and give the player as much manual control as we could. So we took the hardest problem in third-person gaming and made it harder by trying to accommodate two different playing styles.
And I will go to my grave, imperfect as it is, proud as hell of my camera team. If reviewers want to give us a hard time about it because they’re misunderstanding the game we made, it’s not for me to tell them that they’re wrong, absolutely not.
The thing is, I don’t think reviewers should give a damn that the camera tried to accommodate a variety of genres. They should give a damn that the camera takes away from the game’s fun and should convey that to their readers. At the end of the day, reviewers are gamers. They are responsible for telling their fellow gamers whether a game is enjoyable enough to purchase.
Anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the issue. Should reviewers care about the developers’ technical goals when judging a game? Do developers have a point when they say that reviewers don’t get it? Lastly, can you please take away my nasty hangover?
THQ has announced the opening of its Montreal Studio and the signing of Patrice Désilets, former Ubisoft director that was responsible for the Assassin’s Creed franchise and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Here’s a clip from the official press release:
Désilets previously served as creative director on the Assassin’s Creed franchise, as well as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. THQ has the exclusive option to have Désilets work from THQ’s new Montreal studio beginning summer 2011. When he joins the studio, Désilets will be charged with the hiring of a new team that will develop new intellectual properties for THQ.
This is a tremendous move by THQ. The company has been working hard to become more than just the publisher of WWE SmackDown vs. Raw and various Nickelodeon games. The company recently started the THQ Partners program and is publishing Double Fine’s Costume Quest, giving it some street cred as a “creative” publisher. Signing a highly-respected talent like Patrice Désilets increases that rep.
What do you think of THQ signing Désilets? He’s slated to work on a new franchise, but are there any existing THQ properties you think he could revamp?
