Wed. December 9th, 2009 7pm – 2am San Francisco: DNA Lounge NYC, Denver, Austin, & Portland: TBA

The other cities haven’t reported in with an official date/venue yet, but they will happen. In the next few months we’ll have plenty of information about the event, but if you’re in the SF bay area, mark your calendars now!

I’m amazed at how good this is done. Nice to see some creative writing and simple-yet-effective Flash use. Not to mention how this sells the marketing firm’s services.

Sam & Max on the Wii
On April 3rd, Telltale Games announced that Sam & Max Season One will be a disc based Wii game, set for release sometime in the Fall. I was even featured on the blog post holding a Wii Remote:

We spent quite of bit of time cleaning up that room, especially all of our retail consoles. We didn’t want people to think that just because we had a PS2 in our media room, that we would release for the PS2 (which we are not doing). As you can see from the photo though, we forgot the PS2 controller right next to the TV. :/

I mention this because it’s a interesting history between Sam & Max on the Wii and me. Back in Aug 2006, a few of the various staff at Telltale were mentioning how point & click games, including Sam & Max, would be great for the Wii. No plans to do so, just that the idea of going to the platform would be nifty. Obviously this lead people to think Telltale was actively developing for the Wii. This rumor propagated. Emily decided to make a post about it to curb the rumor and set facts straight and state while it’s a desire, they need Nintendo’s support to make it happen. A link to Nintendo’s contact page was made. When I saw this post, I wrote up a form letter for people to use. About 3 hours later, Emily updated the post saying Nintendo contacted Telltale and to stop sending e-mails.

Between that time and now, Telltale created a Wii game… for CSI: Hard Evidence. The development of the Wii port was the entry way to working with WiiWare (read on) and the Sam & Max port. Now we’re public about the development of the Wii port and I’m apart of the team making it happen. Funny how these things come full-circle. While I certainly aimed to be working in the industry (or attending grad school at USC) by now, I wouldn’t dream that I’d be working on that port. Well, I did dream of it, but actually I wouldn’t think I’d be actually working on it for reals. Let along being pictured in the press release announcing the Wii port.

Life is nifty.

Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People (SBCG4AP)

Yup, working on the Strong Bad game! It will be for WiiWare and later Windows with five episodes. We had a big work push for two week running up to the announcement so we would have a strong showing and demo running for Nintendo’s media showing. Not a crunch time, but a lot of effort was put into making something showable for the press. Not much else I can add but for what’s already been said between the press releases and the website for the game. As thing progress on I’ll be sure to add my thoughts in.

Your Lappy Explode

The final, and most significant reason for not LJ posting is a very fundamental reason. My PowerBook G4 broke hard. Thu April 10th, just as the press was going apeshit about SBCG4AP, my lappy gave what I call a CLI Kernel Panic. “Normal” Kernel panics in OS X have a multi-language and clean message asking the user to restart the computer. The problems I were having were so bad, that it was showing up command line information, forgoing the ‘pretty’ message:

This photo was with my attempt to run Disk Utility on the lappy, which was my sign to give up a normal repair. Booked an appointment at my local Apple Store and spent the night attempting to back up my data since my last backup in late Jan. Lucky for me, my AppleCare is set to expire 2.5 months from now, so I see this as a final support pass for the computer.

Got the laptop back on Tuesday with a review of the damages and repairs (all for free). First, the hard drive was gone and replaced with a working one. Considering my laptop has been running almost non-stop for 2.8 years, I’m surprised the drive lasted this long. Second, they replaced the motherboard but didn’t state the problems why. Lastly, the tech said that my third-party RAM chip was broken and provided a new 512mb RAM stick. I did try the old stick again, and the resulting crash lead me to believe the tech told the truth. After ordering a new 1GB RAM from NewEgg, I was still getting a few problems. After doing a reinstall of the OS, things are back to normal. The whole situation caused me to loose a few iTunes songs, and all my saved RSS feeds. Otherwise I’m doing good with my laptop. Besides the shaky reinstall of Mac OS X, I’m very happy with the service from the AppleCare.

I actually plan on getting a new Apple laptop so I can ride the Intel Apple bandwagon. My plans are to give my current Powerbook to my father when I’m done with it, so it’s kinda a good thing that this computer went through an Apple support pass. It’s a good computer, but I want to work on iPhone apps and be able to do work stuff using Windows-only tools. Defiantly a MacBook Pro 15″ as I need a real graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT @ 512mb). Anyone willing to offer a good deal on a new one?

Closing Thoughts

I decided to try something a bit more personal with this post than sticking only to deep subjects. Not to diminish the topics, but an effort to put a bit more personality to this blog. Thoughts?

As for the show in general, there is a void of reporting when it comes to interactive media under the realm of games. Taking a look at OTM’s mission statement:

On the Media explores how the media “sausage” is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad.

In my view, not covering video/computer games is a huge piece of sausage they are missing. So, it’s concerned audience member time:

Dear On The Media:As a long time listener to the podcast version of the show, I turn to your program as a way to keep abreast with media topics across all forms of media from journalism to entertainment of a wide wash of forms. But for the years I’ve listened to the program, I simply can not recall when electronic gaming was mentioned besides this weekend’s (Jan 11 2008) broadcast with a passing reference to the Playstation 3 as a Blu-ray player by one of your guests.

I simply don’t understand the silence over the video game industry of any facet.

OTM offers a unique perspective on the topics you cover. Sometimes they are stories I’m already informed of, but you always manage to provide a perspective that other outlets simply don’t provide. What I am asking is to provide OTM’s perspective on the video game industry, console or personal computer. Not so much for me, but to further enrich the audience of OTM.

I understand this comment is a bit aimless as far as piece suggestions. My point is to ask that the staff of OTM take a look at the electronic games industry as part of your media coverage. I am free to offer a dialogue of topics to cover, but to help you folks learn how to fish when covering this sector.

Some disclosure. I work for an independent game studio in the San Francisco area, Telltale Games, but I’m speaking only for myself.

As always, thanks for making a quality program every week. My grievance is to help expand coverage of the media “sausage” to the huge chuck you’ve managed to miss over the years.

As I was writing this letter, I asked a friend of mine if she listens to OTM and her thoughts on the subject. Then she pointed me to this piece from NPR’s All Things Considered (and not related to OTM at all):

“Best-Selling Book Shows ‘Halo’ Game’s Wide Appeal”

In short, the report Chana Joffe-Walt filed was enforcing a stereotype that video games consist of Halo players who don’t read unless it’s a book about a video game. It’s… a frustrating piece to listen to. Rather than cursing NPR and moving on, I wrote another concerned audience letter to All Things Considered (I added the links for your reference):

Dear ATC:

On Jan 8th 2008, Chana Joffe-Walt filed a report entitled “Best-Selling Book Shows ‘Halo’ Game’s Wide Appeal” which covered Joseph Staten’s novel based off the Halo series. What I am bringing issue to the piece was the passive and sometimes direct implication that a certain population of individuals who play one specific title implies all audiences who play games are illiterate. As a game developer, writer, and recipient of a Bachelor of Fine Arts in New Media, this is a false stereotype.

As an NPR listener, I’ve listened to a few pieces from ATC that were solid reporting. Of particular note, Heather Chaplin’s report “Video Games Get Dash of Indie-Bred Maturity” is a prime example of reporting I come to expect from NPR and proves that NPR can report on the industry I work for in a fair and insightful way for the entire NPR audience.

At the end of the day, I would like for Channa and the editing staff to listen to Heather’s report. Particularly at the end where she notes the early impressions of Film were a technological toy and later found how to express the tool as a form of art. I an my fellow colleagues are working very hard to keep pushing this technology further into art. Chana’s report snuffed our efforts by emphasizing the stereotype that games are simply toys for children, even when attempting to cover a novel.

We’ll see how that goes. Maybe this will add one or two more radio mentions of me [the first one on PRI's The World: Video game rating systems worldwide (5:00)]. What I do hope is that this will help motivate both of these programs to learn how to fish for good stories in the game industry.

Required Reading