Ratbag Dead

Midway Games just shut down Ratbag, their recent aquisition in August, a game company that had been around since 1993 employing 70+ hard-working game developers and had been a shining star for aspiring game developers in Australia.

Sickening, especially at Christmastime. So many bad decisions have been made at Midway that I either see the end of the road for the entire company or mainly for the executive staff. Something's got to go, and soon.

My executive producer and I were talking about the ludicrous policy of providing a vertical slice of a game at an early stage - it's pure stupidity. Building a game is like building a house; you lay the foundation, work on the framework, then start plumbing, wiring, etc. before hanging drywall and getting the roof on. Requiring a game to have a little of everything (and polished) at an early stage is a recipe for disaster and a sure way to throw development money out the window because you're not developing a game properly anymore - you're jumping through hoops like a circus dog. But this is Midway's method of operation. LOLZ.

Unfortunately, the "redundant" staff at Ratbag is going to be much better off now than working for Midway. Sadly, they'll be doing it without their company they worked hard for and the people they loved working with.

Happy Birthday, Keen 4-6!

It's been 14 long years since our second Keen trilogy but these ended up being the best Keens of all. Unfortunately, we had a publishing deal that forced us to release one of the three Keens at retail thus breaking up the sacred trilogy of games which resulted in lower sales of this second trilogy.

The retail game was called Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter! (it was numbered Keen6) and stood on its own. Then the game duo we called Goodbye, Galaxy! had Keens 4 and 5 in it. Keen 4 took 3 months to develop, then we made Keen 6 in order to get it in the stores for Christmas and that took 2 months to make, and finally my favorite Keen, Keen 5, took us only ONE MONTH to develop. Apogee Software released the duo into shareware on December 15, 1991 while Keen 6 was in the stores.

KEEN TRIVIA:
You can see the second-oldest id Software logo on the Keen 6 box. The oldest id logo was in the help section of the original Keen 1-3 games. The "Lost Keen" came before the two Keen trilogies and was called Keen Dreams and was published by Softdisk in May 1991.


Anyone paying close attention to the Keen series will see some interesting parallels between the two trilogies. Both Keens 1 & 4 take place on friendly planets, Keens 2 & 5 take place docked onto an alien spaceship, and Keens 3 & 6 take place on hostile alien planets.

If you look closely at the Keen 5 title art you'll see Keen running away from a Robo Red but through the window of the space station you can see the secret level on the surface of the planet.

When we were developing Keens 4-6 we were living in Madison, Wisconsin in the freezing winter and worked constantly because it was so awful outside. Cops were frequently busting down the doors next door. It was such a bad neighborhood that we were basically developing our games out of a crackhouse!

Happy Birthday, Keen!

Today is the 15th birthday of the first trilogy of the classic Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons!

Our team was super small when we created these three games: John Carmack, Tom Hall and myself. Adrian Carmack came in near the end to do some art touch-up but the majority of the art was Tom Hall's. It took us three months of working at night after our day job (where we were making games all day) and December 14, 1990 it was uploaded to the Software Creations BBS and exploded all over the world overnight! After we received our first royalty check one month later we officially quit Softdisk and started id Software.

Blix Clouds That Kill Time

Here's a few really cool games to play this weekend.

CLOUD was made by students, paid for by an Electronic Arts grant. I'm still figuring out how to consume the clouds! Make sure you use the right & left mouse buttons and press F1 for scant help.

Kill Time is a crazy Japanese game where you have to keep your cursor from being captured by the little guy. Move it all over the place, just don't go off the screen or touch the blue walls on the side or your score restarts at zero!

BLIX comes courtesy of the talented Eric Zimmerman and his gameLab - it's very addictive!

You may have noticed some changes to the site, namely the coolass music player on the right side. The Game Music section also has the player so you can just listen to the music without downloading the songs. So now maybe it'll be easier for you to check out video game music and see what you've been missing. One of my fave remixers, Quinn Fox, just released some new original compositions on his site. Click on the green icon on the left side to get to them.

Happy Birthday, DOOM!

Yep, it's rolled around again - DOOM's birthday. Just turned 12 years old today and still going strong with Skulltag and ZDaemon and the wonderful DOOMWORLD.COM supporting everything DOOM.

I would be hugely surprised to see people still playing DOOM in 8 years...that would be unprecedented. Anyone playing any games from 1985 frequently? I didn't think so. Geez, is anyone playing other games from 1993 or earlier? I occasionally run Wolf3D but DOOM is really the only one from that time that I still play.

LONG LIVE DOOM!

Dio

So I'm in my car and listening to XM41, the metal channel, and an oldie by Rainbow is playing and Dio's singing. Hmm...song sounds familiar.

Oh, that's because Dio really likes about 20 different words. And i've heard them over and over and over through the years and i think it's just time to STOP. Put down the rainbow in the dark and back away. Lock up your FOOLS and EVIL and WITCHES in the DARK and let them be.

I truly love Dio's work, but fella, there's a limit to the number of times you can talk about LIGHT and DREAMS and GYPSIES. Good NIGHT!

By the way, if you haven't heard the song "When A Woman Cries" off Dream Evil, check it out! It r0x0rs!

Exidy

So I had a really cool visit to the local Bank of America yesterday. I was talking to a personal banker there and we finally got around to talking about the game industry and she said that her husband is the guy who founded Exidy!

Super cool. She was there with him every step of the way, too, from 1975 to 1994 when they finally shut 'er down. I told her the mobile market is just sitting there ready to have their games licensed for platforms like BREW, Symbian and J2ME but her husband hasn't done anything in this area.

There are many compilations of classic games emulated on newer hardware but Exidy's games haven't been seen outside of the arcade cabinet! This is a prime opportunity for some of you biz guys out there to score a classic game compilation - just contact me and i'll get you in touch with her.

Any of you remember Venture? I loved it (in fact, I have a mention of it with my game Crazy Dunjun). The game Chiller was totally boycotted by arcade operators as being too bloody so most people never saw it - in classic game circles it's very rare. Death Race, Mouse Trap, Targ, Cheyenne, Circus, etc. are all great, classic fun. Exidy even released a home computer called the Exidy Sorcerer.

UPDATE: A mobile publisher has struck a deal with Exidy! This blog actually has some use!

Ambrosia

I'm talking about the 80's group, you silly, not the hidden area in Ultima III that you access through a whirlpool!

I have all of their albums and they're just great stuff; the style is early 80's with lots of 70's influences. Some of their top songs are "How Much I Feel", "You're The Only Woman", "Holding On To Yesterday" and "Biggest Part Of Me".

More overlooked songs, which are excellent, are "Lover Arrive", "Art Beware", "Heart To Heart", "Nice, Nice, Very Nice", "Not As You Were", "Life Beyond L.A.", "Angola", "If Heaven Could Find Me", and "Livin' On My Own".

I used Napster for a little bit but had problems with their stupid licensing scheme so I switched to Virgin Digital and they're much looser with their DRM handling and their client is really great. And only $8 a month.

So get on Virgin Digital, hop into the Red Pass section and check out Ambrosia.

Gamedev-wise, today was spent reading resumes, writing recruiters, talking to an interviewee after he had 2 hours with my co-founders and then having to work on getting our file server OS reinstalled. That was kinda frustrating but i won't go into it because it's way too much tech crap.

First Post!

I've wanted, for a while, to convert my front page to a blog format, so here it is! My main concern was keeping the icon links to the different sections of the site so i figured it out and got everything laid out nicely. Now the only problem is that i'll be posting more often!

I also added a link to the WIKI that's been growing behind the scenes; it's time to reveal its little self to the world.

The reason i wanted to convert to a blog format was because i didn't want to always hop into dreamweaver every time i wanted to post something. And if i'm at work and want to post something, forget it - it's too much of a hassle. But with a blog it's nice and simple.

Rhaluka and i spent some time in San Francisco today walking along Embarcadero and eating at Houston's (*amazing*). It was a great time and we'll be getting back to the city to visit more places as often as we can!

We also went to a Christmas party that my boys had at their house on Saturday. They had a really fun White Elephant Gift exchange game where everyone had to bring a gift, get assigned a number, then from the last to the first number someone would either pick a gift from under the tree or steal one of the gifts that someone else already got. It was pretty fun and when my turn came around I stole a Jackie the Jokeman joke-telling toy.

Unfortunately it was a kid version. GRRRRWWWWOOOOOAAAAAA! :)