Yesterday was a crazy day…
- I’ve just been hired by Gamasutra to talk with various folks in the New York gaming community. First up, Eric Zimmerman which took place yesterday at the (newly renovated) gameLab HQ.
In a nutshell: the interview went fantastic. I won’t go into what was discussed… everyone will just have to read the final piece when it’s ready. 
- But I will say this… after the talk, while chit-chatting, Eric asked me if I was attending a game related lecture at the New School which I had totally forgotten about (the speaker is James Paul Gee and he’ll be talking about video games as a societal good). Eric even suggested that I take my class along as another field trip, which I was actually thinking of, but didn’t realize that it was the very next day (tonight) and asked where I could find info on it online (Eric and I knew about it from Greg Costikyan in one of his Gamoids mass emails). And with that, Eric chuckled and said (in reference to my upcoming role as NY IGDA web admin) “Well that would be your job actually!” Which is true… one of the main goals would be to list all the game related events in the city so everyone could better know about such things.
So I had to hurriedly track down the specific info (I still have the email, but on my eMac at home, and I was at SVA), and once that was done, pass it along to my students. I’m still not sure how they totally feel about a second field trip in a row, and a surprise one at that. But it should be good (many folks are pretty psyched about it… I know Raina Lee is pissed that she can’t attend due to class).
- Also, I had to talk with Barry, my editor on the book project I’ve been working on. I forget if I’ve mentioned what it’s about, but it’s basically an Anime and Manga encyclopedia. Basically, the proposal was finished recently and has been shopped around to various publishers ever since then. There’s a couple interested parties out there, so a deal is pretty imminent, so my editor and I are looking for contributors to the project. I made the call recently on the GAF, and not surprisingly, a bunch of Ziff Davis guys answered, which I was both expected and hoping. It would be nice to do something with at least one person from GMR that I never got the chance to directly work with.
- Plus I went to a PSP event being held at Grand Central in late afternoon before having dinner with friends. I went simply because I was expecting to see a huge PSP hanging in the center of the main terminal, sorta like this. But instead, they just took a train and decked it out all fancy like inside, with bulters serving cocktails and a PSP on every posh seat. Here’s a (blurry) picture from the inside…
… which was right before some teamster goon told me no pictures allowed. Actually, I got the okay from a Sony rep beforehand, but they seemed too scarred by their own hired thugs to say correct the guy. All of the Sony folks were pretty weird actually, like how one ultra perky PR woman (who was dressed sorta like Laura Croft) commented while I was playing Ape Escape, “Wow! Ape Escape sure is an awesome game, isn’t it? Hee-hee!” Ummm, okay.
- As for dinner, it was great, but since I hadn’t eat the whole day, the two beers I had upfront made me nauseous the rest of the evening (plus I didn’t even drink any water throughout the day, plus the burger I had was super greasy). So by the time MK came over my place last night, I wasn’t feel so hot.
I finally gave to her my birthday presents; I felt like such a dick that I didn’t get a chance to finish my drawing on the gift bag. Plus I was pissed that I didn’t get a chance to get her a Donut Pub t-shirt, but that really wasn’t my fault. For weeks I’ve tried getting one, but everytime I show up, I always seemed to miss the manager, and when he was in, the guy didn’t have want I wanted on hand. But thankfully, she really dug the Little Bee shirt, from a cute little French breakfast place in the city. And I got her the Ed Wood special edition DVD plus both Bill and Ted’s; watching Excellent Adventure did a great job settling my stomach and making me feel real good.
- Earlier in the day I got us both tickets to see The Cat Returns which is playing at the New York International Children’s Film Fest this Sunday. I actually wanted to catch Steamboy, the new Otomo flick, but it was sold out (and I think tickets went on sale that very morning). It just shows that I should really buy tickets to stuff I really want to see first, then wait to tell the whole world about it online afterwards.
Then again, since Steamboy’s premiere is being sponsored by New York-Tokyo, I might have known in advance, but I no longer have a head’s up since my valuable contact within the organization left recently. No big whoop since its opens later in the month, though it would have been sweet to attend the Q&A with Otomo. At least I got the chance with Miyazaki a whiles back.
- On the night before, New York-Tokyo is holding another Gamers Nite Groove, this one a Tekken 5 tournament that I was curious about, but MK isn’t too keen on spending her Saturday night in a room filled with screaming Tekken fanatics. Gee, I wonder why? Oh well… at least its nice to know such a thing’s going on, and hopefully there will be more in NYC in the future.
- Want to know about a weird thing about yesterday? Twice I saw Burnout 3 in the strangest of places. Okay, maybe seeing it at the gameLab office wasn’t so weird since they play all types of games there, but it seemed totally out of place, sticking out of some business guy’s jacket pocket. I dunno, I thought it was weird. At the very least, highly random.
- Also earlier in the day, I found out Simon, my editor at Gamasutra, used to do chiptune music. Whoa! Plus he passed along a really funny pic of Drx and Nullsleep taking each other’s pics with Game Boy Cameras from last week’s chiptune show…
… Christ I love the Game Boy Camera.
- Lastly, something I forgot to mention from before: I’ve just been drafted into “Team SVA” for the upcoming 24 Hour Game Jam competition. Teams will have exactly 24 hours to create a fully playable 2600 game. And the winning game will actually be sold to the public as part of an upcoming Atari Flashback console. Neat!
The specifics were revealed at last week’s IGDA and some folks from SVA, including Nelson, the guy who would be working on Spready Bear is I could find the time to get some level designs done, have asked me to join as the designated team designer. And once the Computer Art Department’s chair (and my boss), John McIntosh got wind of everything, it pretty much finalized everything, with this “Good luck. You WILL win us that competition.”
24 hours to create an old school Atari game. Sounds easy? Well it won’t be. That fucker is hard to program for. How do you think stuff like E.T. came to be?
