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Stake Land – Vampire Zombie Scramble

Feb27

Director/Stars: Connor Paolo (Actor), Nick Damici (Actor), Jim Mickle (Director)

Genre: Zombie Thriller

Watched: February 22, 2012

Summary: Impressive addition to the genre

Steak Land is a very ambitious film. On a diminutive budget, it attempts to paint a fairly complete vision of a post-apocalyptic America — and is successful enough to be impressive. There is nothing original in the set up. Some kind of virus has devastated the world turning much of the population into vampires/zombie hybrids. Those that didn’t suffer this worse-than-death fate had their necks torn out or their brains eaten. Our heroes are a teenage boy and a kick ass monster hunter known only as Mr. They travel across America seeking a monster free zone picking up various strays along the way. Meanwhile, the zombie-like “vamps” pop out of nowhere on a continuous basis. And even worse there are homicidal religious maniacs deal with.

None of these themes are new. And the film feels a bit of the mashup of The Road, the Book of Eli, I am legend, Zombieland, and 28 days later. It’s on the darker side, rarely comic, and closest to The Road. But without the completely unrelenting sense of dread and hopelessness of that film. Despite costing a fraction of the above, Steak Land manages to feel pretty authentic. And it’s ultimately more successful and watchable than The Road or the Book of Eli. the director spends time his characters, and in particular on post-apocalyptic America as well. By frequently lingering on the devastation, and on the multitude of corpses, he fairly effectively paints the bleak landscape. There some effort here to imagine different approaches to survival. Not only complete sense, but I give him an A for effort. The monsters a fairly interesting, combining the mindless qualities of zombies with some of the powers and weaknesses of vampires.

The same is true with the characterization. The writer-director wants to make these fleshed out characters. And some extent he succeeds. There are occasionally cheesy moments, but they are certainly forgivable given the budget. His religious nut job villain is quite enjoyable — although when he inevitably vamps out a little gratuitous. And the concluding events felt a little rushed, robbing them of proper emotional depth. Still, the film is a surprisingly impressive addition to the genre.

Interestingly, the film has many superficial similarities to Naughty Dog’s upcoming game The Last of Us.

For more Film reviews, click here.

By: agavin
Comments (6)

Posted in: Movies

Tagged as: Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, Book of Eli, Connor Paolo, Jim Mickle, Movie, Movies, Naughty Dog, Nick Damici, reviews, Road, Stake Land, The Book of Eli, Ti West, Vampire, vampires, zombie, Zombieland, zombies

Jak & Daxter Retrospective

Feb15

A video interview of myself and other Jak & Daxter team members talking about the game 10 years later.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT4Ppbg257g]

By: agavin
Comments (44)

Posted in: Games

Tagged as: interview, Jak & Daxter, Naughty Dog, retrospective video, video

Jak & Daxter Return

Feb06

A couple of weeks ago I went back to Naughty Dog to do some interviews for the Jak & Daxter Collection, which releases tomorrow (February 7). And of course you should go buy this right away, only one click AFTER you buy my novel, The Darkening Dream. But my thoughts about the visit have been logged on the Naughty Dog blog:

While I’m still good friends with many Naughty Dogs and frequently see them socially, it’s been a couple years since I was in the office itself – and this was my first time in the new gigantic Watergarden 2.0 space.

Wow! My baby is all grown up and popped out a helluva pack of rugrats. When I left, the office was 25,000 sq/feet and we had about 80 people – which at the time, seemed enormous enough – now it’s over twice that big with more than twice the folks. From the walls hang giant murals of Naughty Dog masterpieces. It’s enough to make you feel small…

You can find the full post here!

I also got the chance to catch up with all my friends, virtual and real.

Pack leaders old and new! Left to right Christophe, me, Jason, and Evan.

By: agavin
Comments (13)

Posted in: Games

Tagged as: Jak & Daxter, Jak & Daxter Collection, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Naughty Dog, Playstation 3, PlayStation Blog, Uncharted, Video game

Games, Novels, and Story

Feb03

This article was originally written by me for Gamesajare.com and was published there on January 22 in English and Spanish.

Storytelling, the old fashioned way

Modern man has a wide variety of “pure” storytelling mediums, like film, long form television, and novels. While these have some very significant differences they all share the same basic focus on plot and character. Typically at least, good stories introduce a character with problems, get you to like them, then chronicle the struggle as they are compelled to change and adapt to overcome these problems. In the end, they either do so, or are defeated to teach us a lesson (a variant we call tragedy).

These elements: character, plot, and transformational arc, are completely central to the normal story (I deliberately ignore weird experimental storytelling). Really, they are the core of what makes a good film or novel.

Roman mosaic showing comedy (right) and tragedy (left)

But with a game, this whole business is secondary. The primary focus of a game is fun. And fun through gameplay. Does Tetris have any character or plot? Did even Doom? No. But they were fun games. Really fun.

Games such as Naughty Dog’s Jak & Daxter or Uncharted strive to bridge these gaps by offering both. This is very difficult because they don’t really serve each other.

The gameplay in Uncharted 2, for example, has three primary modes: survival gunplay, platforming, and puzzle solving. The player must assess the layout of the level, learn it, and navigate it without getting killed. This involves anticipating the enemies and taking them out first. You use the weapons at your disposal, the mechanics, and the terrain provided to do so. With platforming you need to come to understand what the character can do physical, find your way, and successfully traverse the route.

Some games do focus on story

When these are done well, when the design is varied, the levels pretty, the enemies cool, and the challenges measured, challenging and above all, doable – it’s fun. Uncharted 2 is such a game.

It also has a pretty darn good story which is woven in with the design of the levels and the challenges. This adds to the whole thing. Watching the next segment of story becomes part of your reward for finishing a segment. There is a tremendous level of art that goes into getting both of these to work at the same time, but certainly each is constrained at times by the needs of the other.

Content in games is expensive and difficult to make. Therefore it needs to repeat. You really do need to shoot the same enemy hundreds of times. Otherwise the enemy isn’t providing enough mileage to justify the labor involved to create him. The player is also in control and therefore the consequences of his play affect success or failure.

My first novel

But in storytelling, success and failure are the carefully monitored heartbeat of any good story. You bring the protagonist up, dash him down, grind him into the ground, lift him up, slam him sideways. I knew this intuitively when writing my first novel, The Darkening Dream. I’ve read so many books and watched so many films and shows that it seemed “obvious.” But at the same time, it turned out to be far from easy. Writing a good story has less constraints than making a good game, but it’s still extremely difficult. You need to be constantly balancing the issues of character, motivation, the logic of the plot, and the need to seesaw the dramatic tension. In the end stylistic concerns sometimes overwhelm dramatic ones (to the reader’s detriment).

In a game, it’s even more complicated, and there is barely a chance of hitting all the right dramatic notes. The player has a lot to say about this natural up and down pacing, so the story-based game tries to separate how well you are really doing from the actual plot. Usually death or failure in the game causes the player to merely repeat some segment of the game (and hence the story), when they finish the level and get the next segment of storytelling, they’ll get it regardless of whether they died once or 100 times. The better player merely proceeds faster.

This is different, but even more problematic in a less linear game such as World of Warcraft. There, the mechanics of the game heavily distort the conceits of storytelling. The story is even broadly linked to the chronological evolution of the game in real time. For example, in December of 2009 Blizzard released the Icecrown Citadel patch of Wrath of the Lich King, making it possible for players to finally reach and confront the ultimate boss of the expansion (the titular Lich King). But the fact is, in order to properly maintain the reward mechanics of endgame raiding, each character was and often did, progress through this segment of the story once, or even twice a week.

The Lich King

Now, two years later, the Lich King has been defeated, the world of Azeroth has been broken, yet it’s still possible to go back to Icecrown and take on Arthas again. And again. Ditto for any of the several hundred even older bosses. Players accept that they have random access to a long and convoluted story. In fact, the need to generate so much gameplay in WOW has created a body of lore that gives the Silmarillion a run for its money. But the way in which it’s experienced mutes the emotional intensity.

What really provides the excitement in WOW (and many other games), isn’t the question of whether the dragon queen Onyxia lives or dies, but the – shall we dare say – drama of whether she does tonight, for us, the group fighting her. And more importantly, will she drop the Nemesis skullcap (arbitrary cool piece of loot) one has been trying to get for six months.

This article was originally written by me for Gamesajare.com and was published there on January 22 in English and Spanish.

If you liked this post, follow me at:

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By: agavin
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Posted in: Games, Writing

Tagged as: Andy Gavin, Arthas, Jak and Daxter, Lich King, Naughty Dog, Storytelling, Tetris, The Darkening Dream, Uncharted, Video game, World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Crash goes to Japan – part 1

Jan11

It’s probably hard for younger gamers to recognize the position in gaming that Japan occupied from the mid eighties to the late 90s. First of all, after video games rose like a phoenix from the “great crash of ’82” (in which the classic coin-op and Atari dominated home market imploded), all major video game machines were from Japan until the arrival of the Xbox. Things were dominated by Nintendo, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Nintendo, Sony… you get the picture.

And in the days before the home market eclipsed and destroyed the arcade, Japan completely crushed everyone else. Only the occasional US hit like Mortal Kombat even registered on the radar.

Miyamoto, creator of Mario, playing Crash 1. I’m standing behind him off frame

All of this, not to mention the cool samurai/anime culture and ridiculously yummy food (see my sushi index!), made us American video game creators pretty much all Miyamoto groupies.

But on the flip side, American games, if they even made it to the land of the rising sun at all, almost always flopped.

Japanese taste is different the wisdom went. Special. Foreign games even had a special name over there (which I have no idea how to spell). These “lesser” titles were stocked in a seedy back corner of your typical Japanese game store, near the oddball porn games.

So it was with great enthusiasm and limited expectations that we approached the mutual Naughty Dog, Mark Cerny, and Sony decision that we were going to take the Japanese market really seriously with Crash. Sony assigned two brilliant and dedicated producers to us: Shuhei Yoshida and his then assistant Shimizu (aka Tsurumi-0600). They sat in on every major planning meeting and we scheduled the whole fall for me to localize the game in exacting detail (while we were simultaneously beginning work on Crash 2!).

For the most part, Yoshida-san made things happen and Shimizu, who has literally played like every video game ever made and read like every manga, worked the details. I (with a bunch of help from the artists) had to put in the changes.

Yoshida-san front and center, Shimizu on the far left, Rio (joined the team during Crash 2) on the far right

Somehow Yoshida-san was able to maneuver the game into being not one of those funny foreign games, but an official bona fide release of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. the first party Japanese studio. And it was to be sold and marketed pretty much like it had been made in Japan! Wow!

So to pull off this cultural masquerade Jason and I decided that Shu (as Yoshida-san was affectionately known) and Shimizu got pretty much whatever they wanted. They after all, knew the mysterious Japanese market. Which turned out to be pretty darn true. And, besides, both are really really smart and crazy hard workers (Shimizu is famous for sleeping under his desk) and so we all got along famously.

The gameplay itself wasn’t really too much of an issue. Shimizu did help us smooth out some sections and make them easier (often by adding extra continue points − opposite of Europe). But there were a lot of other changes.

The Crash 1 main titles, in Japanese

First of all, we had to translate the text. Some of this wasn’t so bad. But the main logo was a 3D object and Jason had to painstakingly create a version of the paper design the Japanese provided us — which required lots of checking from Shimizu as he doesn’t speak Japanese.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4XzmZyiIXA

Above is the opening in Japanese.

And things got even harder (for me) with the in game text. The Playstation didn’t have a lot of video memory and we were using a medium resolution 512 pixel wide mode anyway. What little there was, we had pretty much consumed. But the Japanese language has four alphabets! One is Latin, two are similar but different looking phonetic alphabets, and the last is the giant Kanji pictographic database. Kanji would’ve been impossible, but we needed to cram the two extra phonetic sets in. Plus the characters are more intricate than the Latin alphabet and need more pixels. I can’t remember what I did to squeeze them in, but I do remember it was painful. One part I do recall was implementing the sets of letters that vary only by an extra dot or ” mark by drawing them with two sprites (hence saving video ram).

Once the font was installed we had to input the crazy looking “shift JIS” text. One of the problems in those days was that the text editors all 8-bit, unlike today were 16-bit typesets dominate. And with a European language you can usually tell if a line of text had gotten swapped or mangled, but in Japanese… and even worse, in shift JIS it just looks like a bunch of garbage characters.

So again, Shimizu had to check everything. A lot.

Our opening and closing cut scene dialog was recorded in Japanese using very high profile Japanese actors (so they told me). We replaced those audio files (using one of my automated systems of course!). There were also a good number of cases throughout the game where we had placed text in textures. The configuration screens, loading screens, load/save screens and all sorts of other ones. These all needed new versions. We collected all of these textures, shipped them out to Japan and got back Shimizu certified versions in exactly the same sizes with the Japanese text. I used and upgraded the system that I had built for the European version so that any file (texture, audio, etc) in the game could be “replaced” by a file of the same name in the same directory with a .J on the end (or a .S, .E, .F, .G, .I for various European permutations). The level packaging tool would automatically suck up the most appropriate version and shove it in the J versions of the levels. I’m not sure we left ANYTHING untranslated. Even Japanese games usually had more Engrish. Achem, English. I so remember a Castlevania with “Dlacura’s grave.”

Then the Japanese came up with this idea of having Aku Aku explain various gameplay mechanics to you when you break his boxes, much like the raspberry boxes in Super Mario World. This was a great idea, except it meant that the game was suddenly filled with about 200 extra paragraphs of text. Undecipherable text. I had to squeeze that into the levels too. More problematic was the seemingly simple fact that when a big block of text comes up on the screen the game effectively needs to pause so the player can read it. You can’t just “hit pause” but need a separate state. This simple feature caused a lot of bugs. A lot. But we stomped them out eventually.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WojXNCbHOmY&feature=related

Above you can see a walk through of the first level. A lot of the PITA localization work was in the save screens (big fun: character entry screen in three Japanese alphabets) and the various statistic screens at the end of the level. I think the Japanese allowed us to do away with the horrible password system and use memory card only.

The Japanese box and CD with its very strange Crash and Eve painting — it was nice and colorful

The Japanese also had some famous actor record a whole collection of really zany sounding grunts and noises that Crash was to make. Shimizu lovingly crafted long lists of extremely specific places in the game where exactly such and such exclamation was to be uttered. He was never one to spare either of us from a great deal of work 🙂 But his willingness to tackle any task himself, no matter how tedious, made him hard to refuse. I also had to squeeze all these extra samples into the extremely tight sound memory, mostly by downgrading the bit-rate on other sounds. This caused Mike Gollom, our awesome sound design contractor to groan and moan. “3.5k is pure butchery” he’d complain. I found this SGI tool that used a really advanced new algorithm to downgrade the sounds, they sounded twice as good at any given bit-rate than the Sony tool.

Anyway the really funny bit about these Crash sounds was the subjective feel they left us Americans with. Strange! They made Crash sound like a constipated old man. But the Japanese insisted they were perfect. I guess they were right because the game sold like crazy over there.

Another weird audio difference was that five of the songs were swapped out for new ones. Josh Mancell the composer put it this way:

An 11th hour decision made by the Sony people in Japan. They felt that the boss rounds needed to sound more ‘video game-like’. The only reference they gave was music from the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland. I only had a day or so to write all those themes. My favorite comment was about the original Tawna bonus round music. It roughly translated into ‘the sound of the guitar mixed with the tree imagery is too nostalgic-sounding’. I’m still scratching my head on that one.

You can find the different tracks here.

There were also a host of minor but strange modifications we needed to make. One was that a few characters originally had four fingers, which is typical of most American cartoon characters. Apparently the Japanese have a more than usual dislike of disfigured humanoids. Fingers were added (to make them the normal five). There were a whole bunch of little visual, audio, and gameplay changes Shimizu had us make to the game. Most of these I felt were neutral, different but not really better or worse, so I just trusted him and put them in. Occasionally if they were a really pain I pushed back.

Eventually, right around Thanksgiving, just in time for Jason and I to head to Japan to promote it, the Japanese version was ready!

Coming soon, I plan on a part 2 covering Japanese marketing and promotions!

If you didn’t catch it, I have a similar detailed post in the European localization of Crash.

If you liked this post, follow me at:

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Cover of the hint guide in Japan

By: agavin
Comments (142)

Posted in: Games

Tagged as: Atari, Crash Bandicoot, Japan, Japanese Localization, Mark Cerny, Mortal Kombat, Naughty Dog, Nintendo, pt_crash_history, Sega, Shimizu, Shuhei Yoshida, Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment, Super Mario World, Video game, Xbox

Parlez vous Crash

Jan06

In the mid to late 90s, Playstation games had three SKUs: SCUS, SCEE, and SCEJ, being respectively the US NTSC version, the European PAL version, and the Japanese NTSC version.

The American version shipped in early September 1996. We finished it in early August (manufacture took a month). From my perspective — and it’s worth noting that during the Crash period I personally did most of the localization work — the European version was finished at the same time. I’d killed myself getting it ready during July. But Europe itself liked to drag matters out with a leisurely testing schedule. I wanted it done, because until it was, I couldn’t do much else.

At Naughty Dog, we pioneered the idea of simultaneous international release. By Crash 2 and Crash 3 the same exact code, conditionalized very slightly, ran all three versions. Jak & Daxter was one of the first games where the American version included the European languages. By Jak II you could switch languages on the fly in the menu anytime. We wanted one code base, one art base, one thing to debug. We wanted it for sale simultaneously world wide. I wanted one gold master.

This goal and the tools to do it began on Crash 1, and were fairly well in place by Crash 2. The international groups weren’t quite as on board and year after year dragged out the European and Japanese editions for extra testing. As best I can tell this resulted mostly from a “this is the way it’s always been done” kind of mentality. Jason and I have never been big on that type of reasoning. Still, that personal caveat aside, even from Crash 1, Sony’s international teams did an awesome job, putting in a tremendous effort to ensure the product was really polished for each territory.

The front of the original PAL edition

Anyway, each territory had its own quirks. With the European version, they stemmed from PAL, the old European video standard. PAL actually has a slightly higher resolution and better color fidelity than NTSC (the US standard). But the kicker is that it runs at 50 hertz instead of 60. For Crash this meant that the frame rate would be 25 frames per second instead of 30.

The resolution itself wasn’t much of a problem. Crash was mostly a 3D game and it wasn’t hard to adjust the projection matrix in the engine to render the game to a different resolution. But the aspect ratio of PAL pixels is also a little different and Crash did have a certain amount of bitmap graphics like the powerups and font. The PAL frame buffers were larger and the machine had the same video RAM so increasing the resolution of the sprites was rarely an option. Generally, we just had to live with a slight aspect shift or stretch them to fit. I developed notation in the original data so that different kinds of sprites could go either way in a fairly uniform manner.

The real kicker was the frame rate. One of the reasons why the animation in Crash is so so much better than most of its contemporaries is that we stored every vertex for every frame — then compressed the living crap out of it. This meant that each segment of animation was sampled from Alias PowerAnimator at 30 fps. I modified the tools to support making a second copy of every animation where the step rate was adjusted to 25fps. The pal version used these files instead of the originals. This worked about 80% of the time. Sometimes it became necessary to notate a particular animation segment as having a strange or custom step for PAL, or even hand code certain frames. I added special constructs to my custom language (GOOL) which made this stuff as automatic as I could.

It often came in these enlarged boxes to fit all those languages!

But the physics and collision systems also needed to adjust to the different frame rate. I had done PAL conversions for Rings of Power and Way of the Warriorand having every great programmer’s hatred for tedium had developed the notion when starting Crash that I would notate all “time and space based” units not in the traditional game programmer manner of “moves X pixels per frame” but in a kind of neutral space. Hence everything in Crash was measured in meters, seconds, and the like. I built into GOOL constructs like (meters 5) or (meters-per-second 2.5). The compiler or the runtime (depended) would convert these on the fly into the appropriate pixel per frame units.

This had a number of big advantages. First of all, even without the PAL issue, it allowed the physics (and the enemies) to move in a fairly frame rate independent way. Special functions were used to deal with velocity and acceleration which took into account the current frame’s estimated real time (based usually on how long it took the previous frame to compute and render). This meant that the code which propelled Crash in a parabolic arc as he jumped would move him further per frame if the frame rate slipped to 20 or 15 (which, unfortunately, it sometimes did). This wasn’t a perfect solution, 15 fps still played worse than 30, but it helped.

And it really paid off with the PAL conversion. The hard work — and it was incredibly tedious — really only took me about five days. After running all the automatic convertors and debugging those I had to go through the entire game and check every single level, every creature, every behavior of every creature or object and make sure it stilled played and looked okay in PAL. If it didn’t I had to play with the numbers, or in the worst case add some special “if PAL do it a little differently” clauses to the GOOL code.

But this was in a world where most American games just played 16% more sluggishly in Europe and most European games 16% fast in America.

Crash played great in both — and looked great in both. The Euro version actually even looked a little better (higher resolution and better color) although the feel at 25hz was slightly inferior. But we didn’t invent the TV standard.

The final tricky bit with localization was the language(s). Crash 1 didn’t really have any voice (which was to become a huge deal in later games). But it did have some text.

This is Crash 2, which is the only picture I could find, but Crash 1 was similar, just with the C1 title page

In typical programmer fashion, I invented another system for this. All of the text was generated by literal strings in the GOOL code, and since I controlled the compiler, I added a feature where a mapping file could be created for each language specifying the English text and the equivalent phrases in each of our five languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian). I changed the way strings were handled to index into a table and to have five files on disk for the string buffer. This is typical now, but was very unusual then. Even on Crash 1 you could change the language on the fly. But Europe made me put the toggle only at the main menu because they didn’t want to have to test for weird bugs that came up when you switched languages in the middle of a level.

I systemized all of this stuff by having the tools and the game itself both have separate notions of: video rate (NTSC, PAL), territory (which country’s disc it actually was), and language. This separated the concept of language from territory, opening up the possibility of foreign languages in the American versions (which didn’t happen until Jak 1 for logistical and legal reasons).

As requests came in from Europe to do peculiar and territory specific things like “make the game harder because European gamers like a challenge” (after Crash 1 we refused to acknowledge this “truism”) I modified the tools to allow territory specific overrides in the files that controlled the game data. For example, CONTINUE_POINT_64_32 in the jungle level, “hide in europe.” While I’m not sure the frustrated Euro gamer appreciated it, the system did make serving the producer’s requests easier.

In any case, the Euro version of Crash was lavished with the same attention to detail with which we did everything, and Sony Europe did the same. This was one (if not the) first product for which the whole international organization was behind and where they controlled the worldwide rights. Each Sony territory really pulled out all the stops in supporting and promoting the game as “made here.” It was highly localized, not just the game itself but each little country in Europe doing its own advertising and marketing campaign. Even the Irish filmed their own ads with Irish accented actors. Traditionally game players were highly “nationalistic” with, for example, French games selling better in France. The attention paid by both us and at all levels of the Sony infrastructure to selling a worldwide product aimed specifically at each and every consumer group really paid off.

The game sold like wildfire everywhere. Although we had certain champion territories like France and Australia (Crash’s virtual birthplace) who really poured on the love.

The story continues with Crash goes to Japan!

If you liked this post, follow me at:

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Yes, Crash really took to the old country.

By: agavin
Comments (51)

Posted in: Games

Tagged as: Crash Bandicoot, Europe, Games, Localization, Naughty Dog, NTSC, PAL, PAL region, pt_crash_history, SCEE, Sony Computer Entertainment, United States

Announcing the Naughty Dark Contest

Jan02

This is the kickoff post for my new experimental — and hopefully permanent — giveaway program. Via this contest you, dear reader, will have the opportunity to win signed copies of Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter games as well as my books and cool toys. All you have to do is participate in my gleefully elaborate scheme to help sell and promote my new novel, The Darkening Dream.

A detailed list of prizes and rules can be found here!

Or by clicking anytime on the big contest icon in the sidebar.

So if signed copies of any of the following look up your alley, read the rules and participate! And even if you aren’t a collector they apparently have significant dollar value because a set of four signed Crashs sold on Ebay recently for over $453!

By: agavin
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Posted in: Contests, Darkening Dream, Games

Tagged as: Andy Gavin, Contest, Crash Bandicoot, free, Giveaways, Jak & Daxter, Naughty Dog, Prizes, The Darkening Dream

Kotaku Dreams

Dec30

Gaming site Kotaku has run a quick little feature on The Darkening Dream today.

What do you do after founding and retiring from one of video games’ most successful development houses? If you’re Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin, you write books.

The first of said books is The Darkening Dream, a shadowy fantasy novel about a young girl caught up in a battle that pits ancient supernatural forces like vampires and Egyptian gods against each other.

You can check out the full post here.

Thank you guys! And I’ve already seen a big sales jump. I hope all the fans of my old stuff love my new stuff too.

Discover more about my novel, The Darkening Dream, here.

By: agavin
Comments (5)

Posted in: Darkening Dream

Tagged as: Andy Gavin, Arts, Darkening Dream, Egyptian pantheon, Fiction, Kotaku, Naughty Dog, press, The Darkening Dream, Video game

11 reasons you should buy The Darkening Dream

Dec26

1. It’s a great book.

2. It’s only $2.99 — but the price might go up soon.

3. You loved Crash Bandicoot.

4. You loved Jak & Daxter.

5. I was a great boss, friend, or co-worker.

6. My vampires don’t sparkle.

7. There are several beheadings.

8. Decrepit ancient Egyptian gods are cool.

9. The girl on the cover is really cute.

10. I handed you a glass of $100 wine at some point.

11. The book includes a “cesarian by vampire scene.”

And 4 refutations to your protests:

1. I’m poor – but it’s only $2.99.

2. I don’t have a Kindle – you can read Kindle books on a smartphone, iPad, or the web.

3. I’m too lazy to click twice – bad excuse.

4. I don’t read – do you really want to admit that?

Buy it now!

Then after you do, retweet, share, like, or otherwise spam this post or a link to the book on all of your social media! 🙂

By: agavin
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Posted in: Darkening Dream

Tagged as: Amazon Kindle, Andy Gavin, Crash Bandicoot, E-book, IPad, Jak & Daxter, Kindle, Naughty Dog, The Darkening Dream

Naughty Dog – 25 Years!

Dec23

www.vg247.com has written a very nice piece on Naughty Dog’s 25th anniversary.

There’s been a few anniversaries in the gaming world this past year: Ubisoft’s 25th, Blizzard’s 20th. But it seems there may have been one that slipped under the radar, which is a big surprise considering this studio is now perhaps one of the most widely-recognised on the triple-A scene.

Naughty Dog is 25 years old this year.

But all things have an origin.

Jamming, man

In 1986, high school students Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin joined forces to found what was then known as Jam Software. The pair had been experimenting with computer programming, tooling around with C++, before combining their talents.

But it was in 1989 that the first seeds of the company as we know it today were sown. Making a new beginning, Jam Software was renamed Naughty Dog, with EA-published RPG Keel The Thief for Apple IIGS, Amiga and PC the first release under the new moniker. Its next effort, Rings of Power for the Genesis or Mega Drive, arrived in 1991 – another RPG published by EA.

And in 1994, Naughty Dog developed a 3DO fighting title for the now defunct Universal Interactive Studios (better known in recent years as Vivendi Games) called Way of the Warrior, with both single-play and multiplayer.

Based on Way of the Warrior’s success, Mark Cerny, then head of Universal Interactive Studios, agreed to back the company’s next games. What came afterwards signaled the beginning of Naughty Dog’s true success.

“Whoa!”

In 1996, with a distribution deal secured, Naughty Dog released a unique platformer called Crash Bandicoot. It was published by the fresh-faced Sony Computer Entertainment, which had released its debut console, the PlayStation, over 1994 and 1995.

Despite a few errors (our first game was actually published in 1985) this is a nice article with lots of good stuff and some fun videos from the different eras. Check out the full text here.

And if you are interested in what I’m doing now, here.

By: agavin
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Tagged as: Andy Gavin, Apple IIGS, Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter, Jason Rubin, Mark Cerny, Naughty Dog, Playstation, Video Games, Vivendi Games

Diablo 3 Opening Cinematic

Dec11

Today is a double nerdgasm day. Not only did Naughty Dog announce it’s new game, The Last of Us. But–

the Diablo 3 opening cinematic was released. The game itself should be coming in Q1 2012. Ah, so many games, so little time. I haven’t even had the moment(s) to pop in Skyrim. Been too busy packaging The Darkening Dream and editing Untimed.

By: agavin
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Tagged as: Blizzard Entertainment, Darkening Dream, Diablo 3, Diablo III, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Games, Naughty Dog, Untimed, Video game

New Naughty Dog Franchise – The Last of Us

Dec11

Naughty Dog, the company I founded, has just released the trailer for their new game — and new franchise! This is the first new series since Uncharted launched in 2007. I have to say the new one looks totally awesome because it’s well — post apocalyptic zombie (which I love) — and in true Naughty Dog fashion totally gorgeous. Plus I love spunky heroines. This one, seemingly, but not actually voiced by actress Ellen Page of Juno fame* is totally cute, in a kind of jailbait sort of way.

I can totally see how the kind of intimate hand to hand and gunplay mechanics that Naughty Dog has been perfecting with Nathan Drake would adapt perfectly to this sort of The Road meets Juno world.

So I’m even more excited than I was for Uncharted 3, which is saying a lot!

*NOTE: According to this website, the leads are Miss Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker, as given by tweet from someone at Naughty Dog. And @Neil_Druckmann, my friend and the lead designer confirmed via twitter too, so it’s accurate.

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Tagged as: Ellen Page, Miss Ashley Johnson, Nathan Drake, Naughty Dog, Playstation 3, The Last of Us, Troy Baker, Uncharted, Uncharted 3, Uncharted 3 Drakes Deception, Video game

Naughty Dog – A Pedigree Breed

Dec08

Computer and Video Games recently ran a piece on the Naughty Dog as a company and its pedigree of great games.

Founded by aspiring game developers Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin back in 1986, the pair knocked together a number of little-known titles on the Apple II and Amiga before changing their company’s name to Naughty Dog. …a four-game deal with Universal Interactive Studios, starting with Way of the Warrior – a Mortal Kombat-style fighting game for 3DO created using footage crudely filmed in an apartment [led to] none other than Crash Bandicoot on PSone.

…

The original Crash Bandicoot was one of the most important games on the original PlayStation. Not only did it give the then faceless platform a much-needed mascot – and one with bags of charm – but it also really showed what this powerful new CD-based console from Sony could do.

…

Naughty Dog, it seems, is as good at dreaming up new blockbuster adventure franchises as Sony is at making consoles. Fast forward to the present era, and although both of its founders have moved on to new ventures, Naughty Dog remains the name on the box of one of the PS3’s biggest exclusive franchises. Uncharted’s unrivaled cinematics and truly breathtaking set-pieces demonstrate a fantastic developer working at the absolute peak of its creative ability.

Click here for the full article

Or here for more on my video game career.

By: agavin
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Tagged as: Andy Gavin, Jason Rubin, Naughty Dog, Video game, Way of the Warrior

Jak & Daxter Collection

Nov22

I’m happy to announce that Jak & Daxter will make its PS3 debut this February with the launch of the Jak and Daxter Collection. This is an awesome way for a new generation of gamers to experience (or re-experience) three of Naughty Dog‘s PS2 masterpieces.

The Jak and Daxter Collection features three classic Jak and Daxter titles – Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Jak II, and Jak 3 – all three of which I lead programmed and co-directed, were written in my awesome GOAL programming language, and totally kicked ass. They were remastered by Mass Media, working closely with the team at Naughty Dog. With the launch of Jak and Daxter Collection, you’ll be able to experience the adventures of Jak and his Daxter in 720p high definition with crisper visuals, smoother gameplay animation, and in full stereoscopic 3D. And, I’m sure all of you hardcore collectors will be happy to hear that each game in the trilogy features full PS3 trophy support!

The Jak and Daxter franchise set a benchmark for the platformer genre with its amazing storytelling, huge environments, no loading, and gaming freedom. In fact, it holds seven world records in the Guinness World Records: Gamer’s Edition 2008 including the First Seamless 3D World in a Console Game. If you can believe it, the Jak and Daxter franchise will be celebrating its 10th anniversary this year on December 4th! An amazing amount of effort and talent from the entire Naughty Dog team, went into these babies over six long years, and they can all be yours on one little blu-ray!

[ NOTE: the content of this post is partially — ahem, largely — purloined from the Playstation blog. ]

More more posts on video games or find out what I’m up to now.

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Tagged as: Daxter, Daxter Collection, Jak, Jak & Daxter, Jak II, List of Jak and Daxter characters, Mass Media, Naughty Dog, Playstation

Way of the Warrior – The Lost Interview

Nov02

A Twitter friend of mine dug up this ancient and forgotten interview that I gave from my Cambridge Mass apartment in 1994, during the development of our 3DO fighting game, Way of the Warrior. The original post can be found here, but he gave me permission to repost the whole thing here. It’s certainly one of my older interviews on record. I did a number in the 80s but those are pre-web and certainly long lost (unless I comb through my parent’s basement for old copies of EGM and the like!).

Back in May I had a chance to interview Andy Gavin, one half of the team that makes up Naughty Dog Software. The other half consist of Jason Rubin who’s a graphic arts specialist. These guys are based in Cambridge, MA., where I happen to be from, and have created what may be the best fighting game for the 300. I played Way of the Warrior and it definitely blows the first Mortal Kombat away easily. The game is similar to Mortal Kombat in many ways. The digitized characters, fatalities, combos, blood galore, hidden characters, and special attacks are all here. What Way of the Warrior does is take if a step further with an amazing AI(Artificial Intelligence), characters that shrink and grow, over 50 attack moves for each character, 100% 3D scrolling, hidden weapons, interactive backgrounds, bonus items, and so much more. Let’s have a talk with Andy and see what he has to say about Way of the Warrior.

VGT: When did you first start programming video games?
Andy: About 1 0-12 years ago, the first game we made was Ski Crazed on the Apple II, which came out in 1986. It sold a couple thousand copies. Dream Zone was our next game that sold about 15000 copies. Keef the Thief, from Electronic Arts, did much better and sold about 50,000 copies on various machines. We then did Rings of Power, which was our only Genesis cartridge. It’s was very complex and sophisticated and took about 2 1/2 years to produce.
VGT: When was Naughty Dog founded?
Andy: Well , Naughty consists of mainly Jason Rubin and myself . Naughty got its names from a cartoon character that Jason drew. (Andy showed me a picture of an old Naughty Dog logo). Their new logo is on their flyers. The character was created about 8 years ago.
VGT: Is there any downside when programming on the 300 with their CO’s? Does access time and RAM space affect your games?
Andy: Well, first of all the 3DO has 3 megabytes, not mega bits of RAM, which is bigger then the largest SNES cartridge. The CD itself is 660 megabytes . There are technical issues that need to be addressed when programming on the 3DO. One has to use clever designs to reduce and eliminate load times. In Way of the Warrior the entire program was designed in what we call, Asynchronous. The loading is done while you play, by anticipating what needs to be loaded’ in advance with a hardware process called DMA (Direct Memory Access) . There ‘s a short pause going into a fight, but once the action has begun, there is no pause. Players can perform all their moves, with fatalities, 3D scrolling and the stereo music blaring, but with no load time.
VGT: So even though we’re playing continuously, there’s no slow down what’s so ever.
Andy: Yes, the 3DO is capable of loading stuff without any slow down. However, many previous CD games, including the 3DO, have had notable slow delays.

VGT: Like the Sega CD for instance?
Andy: Yes, this is due to sloppy, programming and not being aware of how to program on CD’s. It’s a difficult issue when writing programs that can actually play and load at the same time. It’s a technical challenge. With good program design the load time can be minimized. In turn, the quality of the sound effect, music, FMV, and game play surpass any cartridge game. Cartridge games only have a limited amount of memory in which you can program. CD’s only cost a dollar to manufacture, while cartridges can cost anywhere from 20-30 dollars. CD’s have enormously superior cost to storage ratio.
VGT: Can the access time for the Sega CD be reduced with technical design programming?
Andy: They can definitely reduce the access time. I don’t know that much about the Sega CD though. I don’t think their DMA is better than the 3DO. The 3DO has 4-5 times more memory. It also has a CD drive that’s twice as fast. It has decompression hardware that effectively doubles the speed. It has a unique and extremely powerful custom DMA architecture that can move graphics from disk to memory to screen and back without effecting game play.
VGT: What makes Way of the Warrior different from all the other fighting games?
Andy: As I mentioned before, I have an Artificial Intelligence Graduate degree from MIT. The computer players in WOTW are much more sophisticated then in other fighting games. Whereas they often resorted to patterns to beat the human players, there are no patterns programmed in for WOTW. It uses research grade AI that learns the best way to beat you. It’s extremely cunning and different and actually looks like a real player fighting by adapting to the situation and using all it’s moves.
VGT: Is it always learning consistently more and more each time you play it?
Andy: Yes.
VGT: What about the characters? What makes them so special.
Andy: The characters have around 50 normal moves and about 15-20 special moves. These moves reflect their styles and personalities. There are many secrets that use the background area and hidden characters can also be found.
VGT: So is each character equal in sense or are some stronger then others?
Andy: All the normal human characters are designed to be equal even though they’re different.
VGT: Well, I remember the first Street Fighter II game had very uneven characters. Some had a major advantage over others.
Andy: It’s tough to get the characters exactly even. We tried to get them as close as possible. People also developed different strategies for beaten the other characters. There are a lot of unique techniques and abilities for each character. Like Konotori, which means “stork” in Japanese, can flap and stay in the air longer. Major Gaines has special steroids’ implants that can change his size and therefore the amount of damage he receives become minimal. Nikki Chan is a Chinese Kung Fu artist who can do flips with special moves. She’s very fast and agile. Crimson Glory has close in grabs and special multi-missles that can be fired. Some character has special weapons. Nabu Naga has a sword and throwing stars. Shaky Jake has a staff.
VGT: There seems to be a little bit of everything from all the other fighting games in this game.
Andy: The other fighting games are very narrow. Most of them are to much alike. What we tried to do was take everything good from all the other fighting games and combine them all into WOTW. We’ve added unique features with better graphics, sounds, 3D backgrounds, special magic and potions, panning and zooming, background interaction, and larger more detailed characters.

VGT: Was the process of digitizing the characters the same as Mortal Kombat.
Andy: There are similarities. We’ve never seen them actually doing it. We have seen photos in magazines. They are actually a little more regimented then ours. Their fighting engine is much less sophisticated then WOFW. It requires that every characters moves line up to the exact same position. When each character does a high punch in Mortal Kombat, they high punch at the exact same point. So when they digitize their characters they have to line up perfectly. In WOTW, every character has its own information so not all characters need to have a high punch. Some of the characters punch high, some low, while others are tall, short, big and small. There’s no requirement that the character be the same size. We built the character the same way the actor would appear, rather then force them to convert to our pre-requirements.
VGT: With the 300 having such a small user base at this point, do you think it can increase sales and become successful?
Andy: We think it has a good chance. All game systems start off with a small user base. People forget the Genesis came out in August of 1989 and 2 years later when the Super Nintendo was released it only had 700,000 machines out there and only 23 games after the first year. 300 already has more then that. The 300 is the first of the 32/64bit machines and the difference is academic. Sony, Sega, and Nintendo have all announce 32/64bit systems that won’t be available until 1995. The 300 will be the only significant 32bit machine when Christmas comes. It will have a year of development by then and the price will probably drop some more. So I think it’s in good shape. We hope WOTW with help sell systems.
VGT: Are there any other projects being worked on for the 300?
Andy: We have 2 other projects we’re working on, but we can’t comment on them at this point.
VGT: Do you think that CD’s are the way to go for our future programmers?
Andy: I think this year is the year of the CD’s. It already has the PC market. It offers so many advantages in cost and amount of storage . The access time disadvantage can be overcome with well-designed machines and good programming techniques.

VGT: Are there any other types of games that Naughty Dog will be working on besides fighting?Andy: We signed a deal to put WOTW in the arcades.
VGT: If WOTW does come to the arcade, will it be different then the 3DO version.
Andy: It would be a bit different. The basis of it would be the same. There are different constraints for the arcade version. The 3DO is capable of producing arcade quality games.
VGT: What’s the most outstanding achievement you’ve seen in video games today? What games really blow your mind?
Andy: I have favorites over the years. I tried Ridge Racer which was very impressive looking, but had mediocre game play. In the PC world, “DOOM!” was very good looking. It shows us that 3D games are here and can be produced very well, even on PC’s.
VGT: Well, that’s about it for the questions. Thank you very much for taking the time to be interviewed by VGT. We all hope that Way of the Warrior is very successful and we look forward to reviewing it and any other games that are produced by Naughty Dog.
Andy: Your welcome. Thank you for choosing Naughty Dog as your first interview. We look forward to reading VGT when it’s released.

This is back to 2011 Andy. It’s so worth watching the totally hilarious video from our 1994 masterpiece (LOL). As you can see, we went for over the top.

For more info on my video game career, click here.

For what I’m up to now, click here.

By: agavin
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Tagged as: 3D0, Andy Gavin, Compact Disc, Direct Memory Access, Fatality, Fighting game, Jason Rubin, Naughty Dog, Sega, Video game, Way of the Warrior

Uncharted 3 Reviews Live

Oct27

Reviews have started pouring in for Naughty Dog’s latest masterpiece, Uncharted 3. Given that this is the sequel to Uncharted 2, the multiple game of the year hit of 2009, one might’ve worried that there was nowhere to go but down. But not so for the unstoppable team at Naughty Dog. Check out the scores below pouring! IGN’s reviewer even goes so far as to call it his “new favorite game of all time!” Now, I can take no credit for any of the hard work the amazing team has put into the entire series, but I will stake a small claim to having brought the company up with an attitude of quality, quality, quality = consumer first = fun! Congratulations guys for keeping the torch burning brighter and brighter.

Edge – 9
Playmania (Spain) – 9.9
OPM Spain – 9.8
Power Unlimited – 94
PS Mania – 4/5
Level Magazine – 10 (Second opinion: 8/10)
IGN Germany – 9.5
JeuxVideo – 9
XGN – 9.4
GamePro – 5/5
TheSixthAxis – 10
Eurogamer.pt – 9
CVG – 9.5
Eurogamer – 8
IGN – 10
Giantbomb – 5/5
Joystiq – 4.5/5
GameReactor Sweden – 10
PlayStation Lifestyle – 10
1UP – A
The Telegraph – 4.5/5
Videogamer – 9
Paste Magazine – 9.1
OPM UK – 10
NowGamer – 9.7
GameTrailers – 9.5
Metro – 9
Everyeye.it – 9.5
GamersGlobe (Denmark) – 8
Eurogamer.cz – 10
4Gamers (Belgium) – 9.4
Playfront.de – 10
Kotaku – “Yes”
GamesRadar – 9
Gamersyde – N/A
Shack – N/A
IncGamers – 10
Play3.de – 9.5
GameReactor Norway – 9
VaDeJuegos.com (Spain) – 9.4
Eurogamer Benelux – 9
SPOnG – 89%
Vandal (Spain) – 9.6
Game Informer – 9.50

For more info on my video game career, click here.

For what I’m up to now, click here.

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Tagged as: Giant Bomb, Nathan Drake, Naughty Dog, Uncharted, Uncharted 3, Uncharted 3 Drakes Deception

Crash for Charity

Oct26

PlayStation Museum has organized a charity auction of all four Naughty Dog Crash Bandicoot games, signed by yours truly and Jason Rubin. The auction link can be found here. All proceeds go to the American Cancer Society. Go bid!

For more info on my video game career, click here.

For what I’m up to now, click here.

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Tagged as: American Cancer Society, Charity, charity auction, Crash Bandicoot, Naughty Dog

Crash Launch Commercials

Sep15

In honor of the recent 15th Anniversary of my baby Crash Bandicoot, I present collected together the original suite of American TV Ads which premiered in September of 1996. It’s the suit that helped make the Bandicoot what he was.

Thanks to Playstation Museum for collecting and uploading these. You’re hurting my elbow!

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Crash Memories

Sep09

In honor of Crash’s 15th Anniversary I wanted to make a post whose primary purpose is to serve as a repository for comments from you — the fans — about your first and favorite Crash Bandicoot impressions. Please make them in the comments. This is the place to tell that story of how you got your Playstation and Crash Bandicoot for Christmas when you were five, etc. etc. So to that effect, I’ll start it off with a brief tale that begins the night Crash Bandicoot launched.

In September 1996 all of Naughty Dog flew to New York for the combined Crash Bandicoot / Playstation 1 year anniversary party. It was on a big rooftop deck in the meat packing (hehe Beavis, you said meat packing) district. All of us got pretty drunk. There was a loud band. Very loud. Simultaneously, Ken Kutaragi (father of the Playstation!) decided to engage me in a highly technical discussion — against the 120 decibel background — using his rather broken English and my exactly zero command of Japanese. But in any case I didn’t sleep — we saw dawn in some New York greasy spoon.

About four hours later, Jason and I were on a plane to London. I didn’t sleep — why waste good reading time.

We arrived in London for ECTS and various Crash launch promotional meetings. We were immediately conducted to small hot smoky cubicles and interviewed by a variety of game journalists in numerous European languages for about eight hours — also against about 100 decibels of trade show. We then went to the bar (scotch). Then to dinner (wine). Then to a night club (more booze). Then a cigar bar (more scotch). Then to our hotel room (with about 15 or so European marketing and sales folk). There we consumed every single item in our minibar. We called down to the desk (4 in the morning) and had them bring us a NEW minibar. Yes, a complete refill of all items at 4 in the morning. We consumed that. Except for two miscellaneous tiny liquor bottles I can’t remember. The cost of just one minibar was 800 pounds sterling. We ate/drank two.

We didn’t sleep.

But we did spend another eight hours giving interviews. Then we went out again. That night I think we got 2-3 hours of sleep. But interviews again starting at 8am.

Somewhere in there I visited Westminster Abbey.

By day three we discovered that a number of our new friends (English) had never left the Island of Great Britain. So we all boarded the Chunnel and went to Paris (from Waterloo to Napoleon stations specifically, which is amusing). In Paris we started drinking at 10am. We kept drinking (many bars). We ate dinner (more wine). We went to someone’s apartment (more drinks). There was no sleep involved. After staying out all night (drinking) after the day of (drinking) we boarded the Chunnel back to London. I might have dozed. We went straight from there to the airport and got on a flight back to LAX.

Ah, first class. There were scones with clotted cream. And perhaps an hour or three of sleep. But we landed in LA at 7am. I was on the beach jogging by 8:30am. In the office at 10am. Back to work on the Japanese version of Crash. I went home early that day. Midnight.

Making video games builds stamina.

Don’t forget to put your own Crash memories in the comments section!

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So you want to be a video game programmer? – part 1 – Why

Aug29

This post is a sequel of sorts to my How do I get a job designing video games. The good new is — if you’re a programmer — that nearly all video game companies are hiring programmers at all times. Demand is never satisfied. And the salaries are very very competitive.

The bad news is that it takes a hell of a lot of work to both be and become a great game programmer. Or maybe that isn’t such bad news, because you absolutely love programming, computers, and video games, right? If not, stop and do not goto 20.

I’m breaking this topic into a number of sub-posts. Although this is the intro, it was posted a day after the second, number 2, on types of game programmers, but I’m backing up and inserting this new number 1 (I’m a programmer, I know how to insert). Other posts will follow on topics like “how to get started” and “the interview.”

So why would you want to be a video game programmer?

Let’s start with why you might want to be a programmer:

1. Sorcery. First and foremost, being a programmer is like being a wizard. I always wanted to be a wizard. Given that magic (as in the D&D variety) doesn’t seem to be real (damn!) programming is the next best thing. Computers are everywhere. They’re big, complex, and all sorts of cool everyday devices (like iPhones, set-top boxes, cars, and microwaves) are really basically computers — or at least the brains of them are. 99.9% of people have no idea how this technology works. As the late great Author C. Clarke said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Yay computers! If you actually know the arcane rituals, incantations, and spells to controls these dark powers then you are… drum roll please… a wizard.

2. Career security. Computers are the foundation of the 21st century economy. Nearly every new business is based on them. Knowing the above incantations is secret sauce. All the growth is in high tech (product possibility frontier and all that). Hiring is supply and demand too. The demand is for programmers and other high tech specialists.

3. Even more career security. Programming is hard. It requires a big New Cortex style brain. This means lots of people can’t do it. It takes years of study and practice. I’ve been programming for 30 years and there is still an infinite amount for me to learn. Awesome!

4. It’s a rush. Creating stuff is a rush. Making the infernal machine bend to your warlocky will is a huge thrill. It never gets boring and there is always more to learn (related to #3).

5. It pays really well. This is related to #2 and #3. People need programmers and they can’t get enough, so they have to pay competitively for them. Even in the late 90s early 00s at Naughty Dog it was very rare for us to start ANY programmer at less than $100,000, even ones right out of school. Good ones made a lot more. And if you’re a total kick-ass grand master wizard (nerd) like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg you can even start your own company and make billions. Take that you muscle bound warriors!

6. Solo contributions. You like spending time with machines and find all day dealing with illogical humans at least partially tedious. Sorry to say it, but even though most professional programming is done in teams a lot of time is spent at the keyboard. For some of us, this ain’t a bad thing.

7. Socialization. You need an excuse to hang out with others. On the flip side, because of this team thing you’ll be forced to socialize on and off between coding. This socialization will have certain structural support. This is convenient for the would-be wizard, master of demons but terrifying forces, but afraid of starting conversations.

So why would you want to be a video game programmer specifically?

8. Video game programming is really hard. Probably the hardest of the hard. It combines cutting edge graphics, effects, the latest hardware, artistic constraints, tons of competition, very little memory, and all sorts of difficult goodies. The really serious wizards apply here.

9. Other types. Video game teams have artists, musicians, and designers on them too. Lots of tech jobs don’t (although they sometimes have those pesky marking folks). Artists etc are cool. They know how to draw or compose cool stuff which makes your code look and sound much cooler.

10. Consumer driven. If you make it to work on a professional game they often sell lots of copies and people will have heard of what you do. This is much much cooler than saying “I worked on the backend payment scheme of the Bank of America ATM.” It’s so cool that it might even get you laid — which is an important concern for bookish wizards of both genders.

11. It’s visual. Seeing your creations move about the screen and spatter into bloody bits is way more exciting than that green text on the bank ATM. Talented artists and sound designers will come to you with said bloody bits and all sorts of squishy sounds which will make your coding look 1000x more cool than it would by itself. If you aren’t into bloody bits than you can work on a game where enemies explode into little cartoon rings. It’s all cool.

12. It’s creative. For me, I have to create worlds and characters. I’ve been doing so my whole life. Right now I’m not even programming but I’m writing novels, which is also about creating. Programming in general is pretty creative, but game programming is probably the most so.

13. Love. You love video games so much that working on them 100+ hours a week seems like far less of a chore than any other job you can think of!

I’m sure there are more reasons, but the above seem pretty damn compelling.

CONTINUED HERE with Part 2: “The Specs”

Parts of this series are: [Why, The Specs, Getting Started, School, Method]

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