This is it, folks: the final Game Break blog item. During
the past few years, I've broken exclusive stories and given you exclusive
interviews with top Hollywood stars along with
top musicians. And VH1 has had unprecedented access to game developers to get
the inside scoop on the most innovative console games, along with casual games
and independent games.
My favorite interview, though, was with completely cool and
down-to-earth Rose McGowan who was starring in both Grindhouse films at the
time. Rose told you how her dog became jealous when she was playing the old
school game, House of the Dead 2 on the Sega Dreamcast. The dog became so
annoyed at the lack of attention that he peed on the system and fried it. It
all was a little sad since Rose never finished the game. But mainly, it was one
hilarious anecdote.
I’ve given my share of roses to top notch journalists and
game developers. And I’ve given my share of brickbats, too, with the Idiot of
the Week. No one was immune to idiocy, not game companies, game executives,
game analysts, game journalists and game publicists. It was never easy for me
to write Idiot. While Idiot always was a popular item at Game Break, I knew
that it had its effect, and that it angered and hurt those who received the
dubious award. Yet, it had to be done. Very few writers have the temerity to
call out the Idiots of our industry. So I popped a Prevacid and wrote away. I
still believe in the corny, old adage that the pen, er, the keyboard is
mightier then the sword.
If you’ve been a fan of Game Break, what do you do now? For
daily news with a bit of snark, there’s nothing like Kotaku. Brian Crecente,
Brian Ashcraft and the team there are changing the nature of gaming journalism.
They began with tons of fanboy-like news. But they’ve evolved into a site that
breaks news and does tough investigative journalism. Beyond Crecente, Noah
Robischon is near the top of the food chain at Gawker Media. If something ever
slips passed Crecente (which would be rare), Noah will be there to catch it.
You’re in good hands at Kotaku.
For longer pieces, gaming exclusives and in-depth
interviews, go to N’Gai Croal and the Level Up blog. Croal is a smart, agile,
cross-cultural writer who gets the best out of his interview subjects. He’s
been in the business as long as I have. With the power of Newsweek at his back,
he’s one of the few persons in the industry who refuses to take any crap. He’s
the one person in the industry that game companies go to regularly to break
news. You’re in good hands with Level Up.
On video and TV, you can’t go wrong with Geoff Keighley at
Game Trailers. Keighley has learned to make his interviews entertaining and
newsworthy, and that’s hard to do. When you watch Keighley, you’ll always glean
some fine nugget, whether it’s an anecdote or good, hard gaming news. In Canada, you can’t go wrong with
Electric Playground. Victor Lucas cares dearly about games. You can see how much he cares on the
segments that appear on G4’s web site. Also, look for Lucas’ cohost, Donna Mei-Ling Park, as one of the up
and comers in TV gaming journalism. She’s got the energy and the smarts to rise
to the top fast.
Where else? For MMOs, check out Action Trip, a Serbian site
that will never let you down. For casual games, check out Jay Is Games: Jay
loves casual games with all his heart. For adventure games done the old school way,
try Just Adventure.
For some of the best game writing on the web, check out
Crispy Gamer, a no b.s. zone that’s still in its infancy, just a few months old.
Former GameSpy editor in chief John Keefer runs the site, and every freelance
writer of note is participating in creating a site that is sure to be written
about and talked about more and more in the coming months.
As for me, you can see my words on these Web sites: American
Movie Classics, Crispy Gamer and Radar. As for magazines, you can read articles
in New York magazine, Boys’ Life and Radar. I plan to write some more travel articles for
the New York Times, too.
I want to give a shout out to legendary video game writer
turned novelist Steve Kent. Steve, whose words have graced this blog, is not
only a great writer. He’s a good, kind and giving friend who’s listened to me
gripe over the years about what bugs me about gaming writers. And he’s listened
to a lot of personal stuff as well. You couldn’t ask for a better pal then
Steve. If you haven’t already, check out his “Clone” scifi fiction series along
with his seminal history of the video game industry, “The Ultimate History of
Video Games.”
I want to thank the team at VH1 Games for letting me say
things my way for over two years. They even let me write from my house so I
rarely had to go to the big offices at in Times Square.
The team let me put on great contests like our Wii and PS3 giveaways. And they
didn’t shy away from Idiot of the Week, even when I chastised the top gaming
companies, probably top advertisers as well.
Finally, I want to thank you, the readers of Game Break.
Especially during contests, your comments were wise, humorous, touching and
even deep. I’ll definitely miss you guys. Thanks for stopping by.
So what to say now? I guess I’ll leave you by paraphrasing a
quote from the underappreciated actor Peter Lorre from Stephen D. Youngkin’s
biography, “The Lost One. ”Video game journalism is a ridiculous
profession…unless it is part of your very soul.” Enjoy the Human Tetris video from YouTube that's below. And most of all, Game
on.
During the past few days, you've been privy to the
fascinating, decades-ling history of Trip Hawkins from the man himself. During
these interview sessions, I found that Hawkins, a pioneer and innovator since
the early days of gaming, is someone you just want to believe. Said one major
developer, “If I was looking at a red building across the street, and Trip said
it was blue, he’d be able to make me believe it was blue.” Now, Hawkins is
excited about games and social experiences on mobile phones. He’s trying to
innovate once again with Digital Chocolate. But the question remains, Can
mobile gaming experiences be accepted by mass audiences around the world? Hawkins
thinks it can happen, and he’s putting his heart and soul into making that bet
happen each and every day.
HG: We’ve talked about how casual cell phone games can be
made more creative and compelling by adding social elements to the experience.
That’s fine. But when are mobile games going to take off?
TH: You know, that is a really interesting question. The
mobile market has evolved historically at a pace that conforms to what the
carriers are willing and able to do. I think that pace is accelerating now, and
there are other independent accelerators including things like WiFi, the Federal
auction for a broader spectrum band, and the iPhone. Those are catalysts that
will open up more opportunities for growth. But that’s the future.
HG: So what are you doing for us right now?
TH: What we’re trying to do with the Café series within the
existing mobile infrastructure is to bring those Web 2.0 features over to the
phones. We enable the viral spread by allowing the sending of SMS messages and
emails and allowing there to be free trials of games. We also allow for
cross-promoting of one game to another. We actually are starting to have some
very strong evidence that that works. As an illustration, one of the first operators
that launched was 3 in Italy.
They did an MMS marketing campaign. So the users got, via MMS, to see some
screenshots of Café. They were offered a link they could click to get a free
trial: 50 percent of them did so, which is a very high trial rate. Then, of
those who tried it, more than 50 percent bought it.
HG: That makes sense because one of the problems with mobile
phone games is that the games are utterly difficult to find on the phone.
TH: It’s a much better model than just waiting for the
public to show up at the carrier deck and deciding to purchase something after
reading one line of text. The idea of the carrier deck was, OK, we’re going to
put up all these ring tones and games on these listings for the handset. And
we’re just going to wait for the public to figure it out. Clearly, the public
is still waiting. The Café series is bringing a next generation of thinking to
the mobile phone, including that all-important viral spread and community
features. We continue to have major carriers feature the Café games and we’ll
have sweepstakes promotions as well.
HG: Is the new Nokia N-Gage platform important to that mix?
TH: They’re a little bit of a next generation story
themselves. We all know what happened the first time around with the N-Gage.
And there were many valuable lessons that were learned.
HG: What did you think of the original N-Gage, the infamous
taco-shaped phone?
TH: It had higher performance technology than the typical
mobile phone. But the problem was it was an expensive phone. When you look at
the price of it and you compare it at the time with other game systems in the
same price range, it was not a good enough game system, either. Then, of
course, there were usability issues, including the fact that the games were
really big. So they couldn’t be downloaded over the air. The typical N-Gage
game was 32 megabytes and the networks were all too slow at that time.
But they learned a lot, and put that knowledge to work on
the new platform with many mobile phones. If you look at where they are today,
they’re selling at a clip of 50 million smart phones a year. And that number
keeps going up. Smart phones and smart phone capability as a function of Moore’s Law will continue
to shrink into a feature phone form factor which will make them less bulky and
cheaper. So you’ll find more of the public willing to carry one around. With
the new N-Gage and the iPhone as well, there’s a certain sex appeal that helps
to educate the market. So more people start figuring out that it’s there and
say, I want to do that, too. Hopefully, that will occur with games on the
N-Gage as well.
HG: Are they really thinking about games in the right way
this time?
TH: They’re thinking of the phones as a software platform.
And they’ll continue to work this into their handset roadmap, so you’ll get to
a point where most of the handset will have the capabilities to include great
games. More and more customers will be moving up the food chain to get to that
level of performance.
HG: Do you think enhanced graphics are important to mobile
gamers?
TH: Certain genres need more graphics than others. What
we’ve learned about the casual gamer is that simplicity and convenience are
more important than the graphics. One example of that is, if you’re running
something in your browser, it may not be as powerful as if you downloaded a
big, C++ coded file and installed it. But a lot of people don’t want to go
through the hassle of an installation. So clearly, if you have this larger and
different audience of people that are looking for casual and social
entertainment, they’re not as focused on whether they have the immersive
graphics of Madden Football, Grand Theft Auto, Second Life or World of
Warcraft.
HG: It seems as though there will always be a nasty divide
between hardcore and casual gamers.
TH: Without any disrespect to those major brands and the
audiences they can attract, they are tiny audiences compared to the mass
audiences who want something more casual. So you have all these women playing
casual games and chatting, making the experience almost the modern equivalent
of a sewing bee. It’s like guys doing fantasy sports on the Web. It’s far
bigger than Madden, and it’s simpler, more accessible and more social. That’s
been our direction from the beginning. The Café series is sort of the first,
full-grown expression of that, and the fact that Nokia is on board is great.
HG: The Café series is happening right now. What are you
doing beyond that?
TH: From there, we’re moving to more directly social
services like AvaPeeps. You can make your own avatar, go on dates with other
avatars and then have others get stories about what happened. So you can build
the social life of your avatar. So it’s like a Tomagotchi. We think that could
be the next big thing.
When 3DO bit the dust, Trip Hawkins took a little time to take
stock of where he wanted to go in the area of games. He didn’t wait long at all
to create Digital Chocolate, which has a new way of looking at and making cell
phone games. While cell phone games haven’t been embraced by users in the mass
way that has been predicted, Hawkins is trying to buck the trend and change
things by adding a distinct social element to his offerings. As usual, he’s
doing things his way.
HG: How did it become clear that the next big step for you
was in mobile games?
TH: In the summer of 2003, when it’s clear that 3DO is
selling off its assets, I bought the DNA [atents because they had to do with
social games. During that summer, I kind of had some time to come up for air
and try new things. Mobile caught my eye. As I looked at mobile, I realized the mobile phone was turning
into a social computer.
HG: Not to be general or pessimistic, but games on mobile
phones haven’t been all that.
TH: It obviously had platform constraints that forced the
gameplay design to either be like a retro classic arcade game or something far
more casual. Yet I started to see the potential to marry casual games with
social applications. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was a
great premise.
HG: How do you mean?
TH: See, everybody used to live in a small village. And they
had a perfect social life. You know, you’d see the same intimate friends every
day. You’d spend the whole day with your family members. That model of human
existence had great social value. That evolved over time and no one’s really
all that conscious of that evolution.
HG: Hanging with friends is different now, though, with our
fast-paced lives.
TH: Right. Over the last 100 years, we’ve managed to
obliterate it somewhat unconsciously, the same way we’re causing global warming
somewhat unconsciously. This has been chronicled somewhat recently in books like
Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. Before I read his work, I kind of felt it in my
bones. You see it in modern life, particularly in urban life: people don’t know
their neighbors. When they go out in public, they’re surrounded by strangers.
They spend too much time in their cars commuting by themselves or watching
television by themselves. You can see that people are not as socially nourished
as they need to be.
HG: So what does this have to do with mobile phone games?
TH: First of all, we’re an increasingly mobile society.
We’re now moving toward the time when there’ll be three billion people using
mobile phones. And every one of those mobile phones is now a computer that’s on
a network -- all these people have this amazing technology and people use it as
their mission-critical, go-to device. They’re getting more and more powerful
all the time just as the networks are.
If people do have these social needs, and if there are ways
to help social capital and social value in a casual way, then it’s a perfect
fit for the mobile phone. Why? It’s a platform you always have with you. So
take instant messaging. It was invented on the PC, but it makes more sense for
a mobile device because with your mobile device, you’re always there to get the
message. That’s not always the case with your PC.
HG: Everywhere you look these days, someone is coming up
with a new casual game. Sometimes I think there are too many clones of games.
But what’s clear is that casual is changing the very landscape of games.
TH: Over the last five years or so, we’ve seen this
revolution in casual games. This is another case where I’ve been ahead of my
time. While I’ve had some product failures, when I look at a game like
M.U.L.E., it’s still one of my all time favorites. It was an Atari 800 game
initially, a four-player game that we started building back in 1982. I have
these multiple cases where I was in market with a game that had social
capabilities and casual capabilities before the market for casual gamers was
really developed. So clearly it’s a passion of mine and it’s been a passion of
mine for quite a long time. So it’s been exciting to see the blossoming of
casual games on the Web and even on the iPhd, and we have the more recently
example of the Wii outselling the PlayStation 3.
HG: Why do you think the Wii hit so big so quickly?
TH: Take a look at the theory of Disruptive Products in a
book by Clayton Christensen called Innovator’s Dilemma. His central thesis is,
you have an established market in which there’s a primary performance requirement.
Something comes along that proves to be disruptive and the way it’s disruptive
is that it reaches an entirely different audience. It doesn’t care about the
normal performance requirement, and instead, it’s adopting this new product,
even though it’s underpowered. People adopt it for reasons of simplicity and
convenience.
This pattern repeats itself again and again, even as it
relates to the Wii. It’s less powerful
than the PlayStation 3, but it’s a more social machine. It’s equally true, I think, about mobile
phones and mobile phone games in particular. This is the first time in history
where, if you look at the hardware in the retail stores, where, if you look at
the six platforms that are selling at retail, they’re selling in the inverse
order of 3D graphics power. It starts with the Nintendo DS, because what’s
simpler and more portable than the DS? And the one that’s at the bottom is the
PS3.
HG: The change to casual has had its victims. And it’s had
traditional companies scrambling to get with the program.
TH: Ken Kutargi (the top executive from Sony) got fired. And
there’s been a CEO change at Electronic Arts where EA created a whole new
division called Casual Games. Companies like Activision missed the boat, so
they said, Oops, we’re going to do more products for the Nintendo Wii. So it’s
a big change toward social and casual.
HG: So you created Digital Chocolate to be a social games
provider within the mobile phone space.
TH: One of the things we’ve done that’s really big and
profound is the Café Series. The big idea there is doing something that fits
into the existing infrastructure of mobile. That means you can go to the
carrier deck that’s on your handset and find Café Solitaire, purchase it and
play. But what’s so special about it is that it has a whole lot of Web 2.0 going
on. One aspect of that is the themed community where you can create your own
café that brings the look and feel of something like Habbo Hotel to your phone.
It gives you not just a buddy list, but a themed environment
for your buddy list. Then, there are gameplay elements that you can share and
user generated content that you can share along with personalization and other
community features. Plus, there are the benefits of viral spread. On the Web,
you don’t alway have to do marketing in order to have the public discover a new
product. You have viral discovery and free trial. So you find out about, say,
YouTube, because one of your friends sent you a link. That hasn’t happened in
mobile. It’s a wide open frontier where new things can and should be tried. You
can’t just take existing games and shoehorn them onto a mobile phone. That’s
why I believe in this social aspect and the Café Series.
Exclusive: Electronic Arts Founder Trip Hawkins, Part IV
By Harold Goldberg
It was time. Making games for the Sega Genesis led Trip
Hawkins and his team to take Electronic Arts public in September of 1989. The
first releases of Sega Genesis games occurred in June of 1990. But how would the
burgeoning video game company do in the future? Would Hawkins’ bet pay off?
Part of the reason Hawkins chose to take the company public
was because Sega might sue, despite its licensing deal with EA regarding
Genesis console games. So Hawkins wanted to have a healthy war chest in the
event the worst case scenario actually occurred. But EA was about set sail for
treasure of mammoth proportions. Yet there was danger in the high seas as well,
danger would lead to the end for Trip Hawkins as the chairman of the board of
Electronic Arts. The sign on the horizon didn’t read “END,” however. It read
“3DO.”
HG: When 1990 came along, how much farther forward were you
thinking?
TH: When I made the deal with Sega, I pretty much knew I had
set the company up to have a spectacular four year run with tons of growth and
tons of profit improvement. So I immediately began to think, What’s the next
frontier beyond those four years?
HG: You were thinking big, very big.
TH: I’m thinking, The hardware providers are either
completely clueless about the entertainment needs of the market and they’re
uninterested in it. And I’m thinking, there are guys like Nintendo and Sega which
have these very Draconian licenses, and once Sega figures out what a good deal
I have, they’re going to want to punish me the next time around (with the next
generation console). And Nintendo’s going to catch on. All these guys are going
to conspire to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. I’m sitting
there thinking the company’s in great shape through the mid-90s. But what’s
going to happen after that? After taking a survey of the landscape, I concluded
there wasn’t enough going on in hardware, and I’m in a position where I can
instigate the transition of the market to the next generation of hardware, and
also, maybe promote that as a standard, and also promote a more enlightened
model about licensing relationships between software companies and hardware
companies. So that was the inspiration for 3DO. http://youtube.com/watch?v=G4TW_Zkm-NM
HG: I can see that it made some sense to think in those
terms. But ultimately, it was a something of a disaster.
TH: The short story is that it worked brilliantly out that
way. But it worked out that way for Sony. Sony came in a couple of years after
3DO with the PlayStation. Some of the Sony executives candidly admitted to me
that they had copied much of the 3DO licensing program. What Sony did is they
built a great machine. They did their homework and did the details effectively.
By coming in later, they were able to take advantage of dramatically lower
memory costs and component costs of the disk drive. So the 3DO player was
unfortunately a little bit ahead of its time and came out too early for the costs
to be as reasonable. Plus, I didn’t have a gigantic corporate partner who was
willing to put $2 billion dollars into the business the way Sony did.
HG: Would the influx of money really have made a difference?
TH: Oh, no question. Because we really did have a lead. But
we did recognize that when Sony showed up, their machine was going to trump our
machine. We were already working on an even better architecture. With the right
levels of support, that little arms race that you see going on today between
Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony – that would have gone on for a while and we would
have been a surviving player. We would have had a share.
HG: So where did you trip up, so to speak?
TH: Where I miscalculated is I was thinking that OK, this
could work as a kind of separate company that’s set up like Dolby Labs and, in
fact, it’s a much more complicated thing to do that Dolby Labs. Something like
Dolby Labs of even Flash – if it’s innocuous enough and cheap enough, then
everybody supports it and you can get your platform standard installed on a lot
of devices and machines.
HG: But launching a gaming console proved to be much more
difficult for you.
TH: You’ve got to convince everyone that you’re going to be
able to sell enough of a critical mass of machines for the economics to work
out for everybody. You really need that 900-pound gorilla company to take most
of the risk out of it so that everybody else can freely jump in. So 3DO was
more of a federation of little guys. It didn’t have a lot of strong financial
resources of its own. As soon as Sega, Nintendo and Sony said they were going
to bring out next generation machines, the developers who were all just
thrilled with us and happily supporting us, said they were also going to
support all those other guys.
The other guys all charged higher license fees than we did.
So the other companies could recharge their financial batteries, but we
couldn’t. 3DO ? It was noble. It was bold. And it was obviously too idealistic.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5VdDhwBR2_Q
HG: So as things began to fall apart, what was happening
inside of Electronic Arts?
TH: There was a lot of tension in the company. Essentially,
what I was doing was saying, Should EA move into the platform business? Great
companies from Apple to Nintendo have achieved some synergy by developed
content but also in platforms. But there was a lot of pressure from the board
to push it out as a separate, sister company. At the time, I thought, OK,
they’re just two companies. What I didn’t realize it was going to be a little
like me being put into a lifeboat the way Captain Bligh was.
HG: But unlike Mutiny on the Bounty, you weren’t able to
sail magically for 3,600 mile to reach the Dutch colony of Timor.
TH: When it became clear that EA was not 3DO’s first party
software, it became clear that 3DO had to make its own. EA had chosen
essentially to abandon the platform. But EA management started to get really
mad that 3DO was going to make its own games. So even though 3DO was only going to make software for the 3DO, some of
the executives at EA said, you’re going into competition with us; that’s not
fair. But I felt, what choice have you
given me? That was during the time period where I said, I can’t have one foot
in EA and one foot in 3DO.
EA was a little bit like a rebellious teenager but well on
its way to adulthood and 3DO was like an infant that was in open heart surgery.
I felt an obligation to 3DO and felt I had to go to attend to it. Then, legal
counsel said I shouldn’t stay on the EA board because it was a conflict of
interest. In July of 1994, I stepped off the EA board as chairman.
HG: Did you divest yourself of stock at that point?
TH: For a long time, I was the only person who never sold
any stock in any of these companies. Like with 3DO, I never sold a share. I put
a lot into it, and I lost every penny of it. With EA frequently when other
executives wanted to sell shares, I would buy them myself to keep them off the
market. When 3DO needed money, I started to sell more EA stock to put money into
3DO.
HG: Ultimately, 3DO just cost too much at $700. But as a
software maker, you had some success with High Heat Baseball and Army Men, both
franchises, and one of the first massively multiplayer role playing games,
Meridien 59.
TH: Yes, 3DO decided to sell the hardware business to become
a pure software company and did that for seven or eight years before hanging it
up.
HG: At the end, you paid about $400,000 for the rights to
some of the games and the Internet patent portfolio. All of that must have been
a quite a personal blow. But you still weren’t done. You still wanted to make
games.
TH: That’s when I started Digital Chocolate.
Hawkins’ venture into
mobile gaming will be detailed tomorrow on Game Break
Electronic Arts had Madden in the 1980s. And that game was
supremely successful. But the company was on a mission to become a worldwide
leader. In this portion of our multi-part interview with Trip Hawkins, the EA
founder is extremely candid about the oft-stressful goings on inside of the
company at the time. Sometimes, what was going on inside wasn’t pretty.
Sometimes, fisticuffs flew. And often, Hawkins played hardball, much to the
dismay of some of his staff. For example, Hawkins’ deal with Sega about making
games for the Genesis could have blown up in his face. Worry was rampant
throughout EA at the time. Read on to see what happened during these turbulent
moments in video game history.
HG: I’m told there was the occasional wildness inside
Electronic Arts during the early days?
TH: We were all a little wild back then. When we were
working on Madden, Tony Hillerman was the producer of the game. And we had this
conference room where we would discuss the progress of the game. At one point,
Rich and Bing Gordon were in there and they got into some kind of argument. I
don’t even know what it was about. But Bing ended up throwing Rich into the
wall, doing kind of a hockey check. The two of them, by the way, were both
hockey players and as far as I know, they’re both still playing in hockey
leagues. So Bing checks Rich and it left this big indentation in the wall that
was about three feet high and about a foot and a half wide. It just caved the
whole wall in. And Bing wrote a note on it, commemorating the occasion. It’s
just a hilarious example of what it was like back in those days.
If you want to talk about the concept of a hostile work
environment, that’s what you talk about in today’s world. But in those days,
none of us was afraid to bang heads and fight for what we believed in.
Literally.
Kotaku just found a Japanese site which features screenshots
for Namco Bandai’s upcoming Mr. Driller Online for the Xbox Live Arcade. The
upshot? Mr. Driller is a thriller. Also released are screenshots of directions,
which look very easy to understand. That’s often been a problem with online
casual games for consoles: the instructions have sucked big time in everything
from Pinball FX for the Xbox 360 to PixelJunk Monsters for the PS3. Here, you not only get basic rules; you’ll
get to know all the power ups and treasure you can collect. So nothing will
stymie you as you drill to victory and collect air capsules so you won’t die of
suffocation. Great instructions, great game. Can’t wait.
Perfect World, the hot Chinese makers of MMOs, has started
its final beta test of Hot Dance Party, its casual MMO that might take the
world by storm when it’s released in the next month or so.
Says Perfect World’s press release, “The online dancing
game's contemporary background, elaborate design, and fashion & style,
along with the introduction of new and innovative features, are expected to
provide online game players an experience that they have never had before.
"Hot Dance Party includes a number of new and unique
features. One is the Make-up System, which allows players to practice real-life
make-up skills to customize their online look. Additionally, the game's
creators recruited professional fashion designers to incorporate hip new style
to the game.
Me, I don’t care about any stinkin’ makeup. But I know a
bunch of folks who do. Perfect World’s been successful in the past with Legend
of Martial Arts and Chi Bi, all of which are free to play. But you must buy
upgrades to pimp out your character: that’s how they make their money. For
those of you who like to dance casually and play dress up online, Hot Dance
Party could be a winner. And just look at those round eyes on the characters
below. Round eyes make you wanna play.
When Bully was released for the PlayStation 2, it became one
of my games of the year at the Village Voice. It was a staggeringly giant game
and I loved it not only because of the go-anywhere gameplay, but because of the
wit within the story. Yeh, there was fighting. But there were touching moments
full of the angst of childhood, private school style.
To make a literary analogy, it was more John Cheever than
John Updike. Here’s what I mean. Cheever could write about the upper middle
class and a lower middle class shlump like me (raised by a loving single mom
who was a waitress) could relate. Updike on the other hand always made me feel
aware of the difference in classes – in a bad way. The kids in Bully are
well-off kids, but the way they react, the way they’re written to react and
communicate, makes me feel part of the story. These developers ain’t no Columbia University
snoots (apologies to my pals who went to Columbia
who don’t have sticks up their asses). Even though the school in Bully is a
private school, this like was me in a public school, too.
Bully:Scolarship Edition for the Wii is a video game time machine
that whisks me back to that trying experience of test-taking and girl-yearning
and bullyness of cruel cliques of my teenage years. Yes, there are new levels,
and that’s important. But what you get here is beyond virtual reality. It’s
visceral reality. Like Wii Boxing in Wii Sports, you (as Jimmy Hopkins) can
punch at your foes now, where as with the PS2, you simply pressed buttons. You
really have to box here: timing is important, and you just can’t flail or
you’ll lose. So this panty-stealing, fat girl-kissing, sling-shot-shooting, drunk-teacher-loving
misfit is more like you and me that he’s ever been.
One of the top games on Kongregate these days is
Punk-o-matic which even includes a Flash animated, R-rated comic with penguins
called “Dude!” (Seriously, the words in the game are punky and raw: you’ve been
warned). Basically, you can choose drum, bass and guitar sounds to make your
own punk rock tune, not just as the spittin’ leader of the band, but as the
player of all three instruments. Save your tracks, share them or delete them:
it’s up to you. The main thing about Punk-O-Matic is its
who-cares-I’ll-do-what-I-want attitude. Yeh, it’s an app more than a game. But
I’ll bet you have more fun playing this than with, say, a badly made clone of
Diner Dash.
As Game Break continues its look at the history of
Electronic Arts through the eyes of founder Trip Hawkins, I talked with the
thoughtful, loquacious personality about the one game that really made Electronic
Arts a huge deal: Madden Football. Some of the story has been told before in a
way that’s been more outlined than truly detailed. This time, Hawkins tells
everything about the way Madden Football, known inside EA as Trip’s Folly
before it was released, was made. (Note:
Read the interview carefully and you’ll really get to know John Madden in a way
you haven’t before.)
HG: Can you tell me about your theory about making sports
games?
TH: Electronic Arts ended up controlling the value chain of
sports games in the video game business. That brand value was built right under
the noses of preexisting sports brands like CBS Sports, ESPN, the NFL and the
like. I think the only reason that things worked out the way they did is that I
thought, we cannot expect these guys to be reasonable partners if I go to them
when I’m weak and they’re strong. Instead, I said, I don’t really need them. Let’s just go and make some
really good games, unbranded games like World Tour Golf.
HG: Can you explain that more specifically? How did the
making of the games begin, for example?
TH: If you take Madden as an example, my first idea there
was to take a guy who had been the quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings, and he
was then the coach of the Cal football team. I approached him and said, I’ll pay you some money to be a
consultant to give me some pointers on how to make this an authentic game. We got together and then he decided, I think
I want my name on the game, I want a royalty and I want this and I want that. I
said, If it’s going to go that way, then I’m going to pick the brand name that
I want. I thought, I’ll just go to the front of the parade and I’ll take
Madden.
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